India airlifts military hospital to Tajikistan to strengthen geo-strategic footprint in Central Asia

NEW DELHI: India has quietly airlifted a military hospital, with doctors, paramedics and equipment, to Tajikistan as part of the deepening "strategic partnership" with the energy-rich central Asian country that shares borders with Afghanistan, China, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

India already has over 100 Indian military personnel stationed at the Ayni airbase in Tajikistan, a country that also shares close proximity to Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), as a kind of a "military outpost". The new hospital will serve to further strengthen India's geo-strategic footprint in the crucial Central Asian region.

Defence ministry sources say two of the newly-acquired C-130J "Super Hercules" aircraft of the IAF airlifted medical stores, equipment and 55 personnel over the last month to establish the "India-Tajik Friendship Hospital" in southern Tajikistan.

"The 50-bed hospital will treat both military as well as civilian people," said a source. The setting up of the hospital comes at a time when vice-president Hamid Ansari is on a visit to the landlocked country to further cement the bilateral strategic partnership and well as expand its "Connect Central Asia Policy" to build stronger linkages with the five Central Asian countries.

This is not the first time that India has established a hospital in Tajikistan, which shares a 1,400-km with Afghanistan. In the 1990s, India had run a famous field hospital at Farkor on the Tajik-Afghan border to treat wounded fighters from the then Northern Alliance that was battling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

It was at the very same hospital that the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood was pronounced dead after being assassinated just two days before the 9/11 terror strikes in 2001. But around a decade ago, India had inexplicably shut down the hospital.

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon's visit to India last August, during which the long-standing bilateral partnership was elevated to a strategic partnership, had then laid the groundwork for the new hospital.

With a broad convergence of views on security matters and cross-border terrorism, the close equation with Tajikistan becomes even more important for India now in the backdrop of the drawdown of US-led international forces from Afghanistan by 2014.

The Indian "military outpost" at the Ayni airbase, around 15 km from Tajik capital Dushanbe, also helps New Delhi keep tabs on its economic and strategic interests in Central Asia as well as "any anti-Indian activity" in the terrorism-infested Af-Pak region.

Indian Army, IAF and Border Roads Organisation personnel had worked hard to upgrade the airbase, which includes extension of the runway and construction of three aircraft hangars, an air-control tower and perimeter fencing around the base, at a cost of over Rs 100 crore.