Indonesia, Iran and Oman

Indonesia is an archipelago — a large group of islands: several big ones and over 17,000 smaller ones! Its links with India go back more than 2,000 years, including ties between India's ancient university of Nālandā and Indonesia's Muara Jambi temple complex. Later, Islam too travelled to Indonesia from India's shores.

The traces are everywhere. Indonesia's money, the rupiah, carries the national symbol Garuḍa, the vāhana (vehicle) of Viṣhṇu, and Indonesian actors still perform scenes from the Rāmāyaṇa.

The Borobudur Stūpa, built in stone in the 8th–9th centuries CE, is the world's largest Buddhist monument: a huge stepped pyramid of five great platforms with over 500 statues of the Buddha and many small stūpas. Its geometric plan copies a mandala — a sacred geometric pattern in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions, usually standing for the whole universe.

Indonesia lies in a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanoes. On 26 December 2004, a huge undersea earthquake near Indonesia set off a massive tsunami. About 15,000 people died in India alone, especially in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and more than 200,000 across the whole region.

The disaster showed the need for better early warning. India joined Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and other Indian Ocean countries to set up a network of sensors, satellites and communication links. The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre in Hyderabad now warns neighbouring countries as well as India. A shared danger, met with a shared system.

India and Iran have been linked since the Bronze Age; their routes later became part of the Silk Route. The Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism, has parallels with India's Ṛigveda. The Mahābhārata calls the Persians Pārasīka, and Persian (a language of the same family as Sanskrit) was the court language of the Mughals. India's Parsi community is a living link with ancient Persian culture. India is also helping build Iran's Chabahar Port, which gives India better access to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Oman, on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, shares a sea boundary with India and is strategically important. Contact goes back over 5,000 years, to Harappan times: Oman is rich in copper, and Harappan traders are thought to have brought back copper ingots (blocks of metal shaped for easy transport) to coppersmiths in the Indus-Sarasvatī cities.

Over 10 per cent of Oman's people are of Indian origin. The Hindu community was allowed to build a Śhiva temple, the Motishwar Mandir in Muscat, in the early 20th century. Oman is also India's closest defence partner in the Gulf — the first country in the region where India holds joint exercises with all three of its armed forces.