“Political interests will stretch gradually beyond the Indian Ocean region”.

India has “culturally dominated” China through the sea route for over 2,000 years, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said on Friday at the Maritime Summit here.

Mr. Singh also described the Gangetic plains as the cradle of all civilisational thoughts.

When the Chinese revolution was on, the then Peking University vice-chancellor Hu Shih, who also represented China at the U.N., wrote that “India has dominated and culturally controlled China for more than 2,000 years without sending a single soldier,” the Minister said.

Indian influence



“The message has truly gone to China as well that Indian culture has influenced it and it might have gone only through the sea route,” Mr. Singh said.

He also quoted the French philosopher Voltaire as saying that “I am fully convinced that everything has come from the banks of the Ganges.”

Mr. Singh said that as India was growing economically, militarily and technologically, its “national security imperatives and political interests will stretch gradually beyond the Indian Ocean Region.”

Contribution of the shipping and maritime sector to the GDP would grow by nearly three times over the next five years, the Minister said, and added that it would continue to play an important role in the economic expansion.