Look East Policy

New Delhi is carefully following developments in the South China Sea as part of her “Looking East” policy and helping Vietnam exploit offshore oil and build her maritime capacities. However, Indian policy is cautious and aptly described as “multialigned”, rather than bent on building a coalition to resist China.

India’s ‘Act East Policy’, initiated in the early 1990s as ‘Look East’ policy by the Government of India (GoI), is now an important component of India’s foreign policy (IFP). Since the launching of this policy, India’s relationship with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) becomes ‘a key feature of our foreign policy’. Six months after taking office in May 2014, India's newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserts that India’s ‘Look East' policy has been transformed into ‘Act East Policy'. The Prime Minister also reviewed the current status of the India-ASEAN Strategic Partnership and placed ASEAN at the “core” of India’s ‘Act East Policy’ calling for strengthening of relations in all sectors. This paper tries to analyse the historical background, its economic dimensions, strategic and diplomatic aims, the place of Northeast and Manipur, challenges and opportunities for Northeast, and finally ends with a concluding remark.

The disruption of old trade routes by colonial rulers, the Partition of 1947 and India’s import substitution economy deprived northeast India of its natural markets. Of late, there has been much talk about the potentials of India’s Look East policy in transforming the region. The inclusion of the northeastern region as an important component of this policy in 2003 is dubbed as the new paradigm of development in the Northeast. The policy envisages the region not as the periphery of India, but as the centre of a thriving and integrated economic space. Thus, many people see it as an excellent opportunity to integrate not only with mainland Indian economy but also with its neighbouring countries in the east and even beyond. In contrast, others view this policy as an extension of India’s imperialism in a new form in that the Northeast will only provide a bridge between the rest of India and East and Southeast Asia. The main argument of such critics is that India is more concerned with the eastern neighbours and not its northeast. The article, while recognizing ‘borders’ as crucial in attempting to address the problems of the Northeast, assesses the prospects of ‘Looking East’ through this region and the challenges posed to it by post-colonial territoriality and other domestic problems. The integration of the Northeast economy with the neighbouring countries is basically implemented through the security-centric border management, wherein the opening of borders is limited to border trade points and fencing the rest of the erstwhile open borders. This increasing restrictive regulation and bureaucratic formalities on movement of people and goods across borders distort the traditional crossborder economic dependence and erode social ties with ethnic kins on the other side of the border. The article also explores the possible community–geography trade-offs in such borderlands.

This paper will look at India's role in Southeast Asia and beyond under the 'Act East' Policy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It first will outline the historical basis of India's 'Look East' Policy and the objectives of the previous governments. Second, it analyses the shift from 'Look East' to 'Act East' and its implications for Southeast Asia. Finally, it will also look at the various future possibilities for India under the 'Act East' policy under the evolving Asian geopolitics. This paper examines the motivations for launching the Act East Policy and what it has accomplished so far. It also describes the imperatives of the future, if the policy is to deliver the desired results in promoting India's interests in the strategic, security, economic and cultural spheres, in the region and beyond.

The paper explores the security issues in India's foreign policy drive towards engaging Mayanmar, as part of 'neighbourhood first policy' and 'Act East Policy', with a specific focus on internal security in Northeast India, maritime security, and China's assertive push towards Southeast Asia in General and Myanmar in Particular.

In 2002 Bangladesh took 'Look East' policy to strengthen its' relations with South-East Asian and North-East Asian countries. It was a step to reduce Bangladesh's dependency on its immediate  big neighbor India. This paper tries to evaluate the problems and prospects to implement the policy.

Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) was supposed to be a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures. Cine lovers know it did not; rather it became a new template to view the eternally intriguing story of crime, spaces, mistaken identities, accidents in life, incognito runs, bare wide fields, attacks by insidious agencies of life, therefore what else but an attack on the hero by a crop duster plane, and a narrative that could end only as consummation in a tunnel. The film became a commentary on flight and fantasy, discrete spaces and links, which could be bridged only by a narrative. The spatial invocations in India's Look East and Act East Policy, the links of these two policies (perhaps the same with minor variation in emphasis), their implications for the Northeast, the supposed changes in the map of resources and infrastructure there as consequence of India's looking eastward – all these at one level are, or at least seem to be, connected logically. But a closer examination suggests two complications: first, these different parts of the Look East policy may be argued as disparate, held tenuously only by a geopolitical logic but in their life-worlds existing separately; second, as the geopolitical logic connects these discrete parts, these spaces make sense only when bridged. When bridged however we have a new game of spaces: Is the Northeast then the Rear East, or is it a case of East by Northeast? What are those unknown insidious agencies of material life that link spaces in their destinies? What then is the larger story that produces these shifting spaces, gazes, identities, and perceptions? This paper argues that it is in the larger story of extraction of resources, logistical vision, and infrastructural (material and social) programmes under postcolonial capitalism and its interface with the neoliberal mode of governance that we shall find clue to how spaces are bridged and in the process acquire new identities. This is where spatial identities will be made, and any illusion of sovereign spatial identity will be quickly cut down by the cold sword of capital. Spaces will be identified by the bridge. Yet and as consequence of this, as this paper seeks to suggest, there will be areas and hence spaces excluded from this bridging operation waiting for future logistical operation. That is how capitalism proceeded in the past, and will proceed now. Over the last decade there have been multiple conferences and consultancies on Look East policy accompanied with literatures on the different facets of Look East Policy. This paper seeks to keep those literatures in retrospect and unravel what Look East means for Northeast India by bringing out the different contours of reactions among the people of the region attested to the changing governance patterns and social equations. The paper follows the following trajectory – the first section explores pattern of resource extraction in the region and the associated contestations. The next section maps the logistical development taking place or planned in Northeast India through roadways and railways along with the multiple challenges poised to the same. By detailing the financial infrastructure in the region, the section on banking sector interrogates the nature of capital in Northeast India through the prism of neo-Keynesian framework. The section on border trade points to the ongoing development of border trading centres and the different kinds of impediments associated with it. The final section probes into the new regime of social governance emerging in Northeast India with an overall attempt to shift from security centric governance to trade centric governance by riding on liberalisation involving intensified flows of goods, people, and capital. Migration, gender, health and education have been elaborated in this section to compliment the understanding of governance in Northeast India.

This paper tries to analyse how Kolkata, the capital of the state of West Bengal, emerges as a logistical hub in the vision of India's Look East Policy. The vision of Kolkata as a logistical hub rests on its locational advantage, history of infrastructural accumulation and increasing potential as a transnational nodal point in the new Silk Route. But how far does this logistical vision take account, make use and replicate the colonial political economy of infrastructural networks? In our understanding, this question is important in order to locate the specific modes of accumulation of built-in capital and political will that contribute to the emergence of Asia as the new leader of post-financial-crisis globalisation. What
are those forces, ideologies and negotiations that signify this shift of focus from trans-Atlantic to
trans-Asian trade and political networks? How did this imagination come into being and how does it
acquire new meanings in public discourses and gather resounding endorsement from individual nation states and private investors? As we shall see in the course of this paper, Kolkata, and more specifically its port, often depicted as a hopeless reminder of (post)colonial decadence, transmits useful signals for navigating the murky waters of logistical visions and revisions in South Asia.

This paper, published in The Diplomat in February 2015, argues that an effective Act East Policy for India must target an overhaul of the political economy of development in the Indian state of Manipur. It draws upon field research in Imphal conducted in January 2015.

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Malaysia had looked to Japan to search for a sustainable and efficient
development model under the Look East Policy (LEP) initiative launched in 1982 by former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. At the time, this ideal formula, intended for the betterment of the Malaysian economy, was designed to incorporate the Japanese attitude to work, their moral values, progressive norms, and work ethics. Since then, more than 15,000 Malaysians expatriated to Japan due to this very purpose, and bilateral relations between them have blossomed. In this paper,
the LEP is revisited, and Japan-Malaysia relations will be analysed to understand the change and continuity aspects of this policy in the past 35 years. Furthermore, this paper will also seek to forecast the challenges Japanese and Malaysian institutions may face in establishing cooperation under the second phase of this policy after
35 years of success. Besides, exploring a new paradigm for Japan and Malaysia’s relations as proposed by the former Prime Minister, Mohd Najib Tun Abdul Razak.

Under the Look East Policy (LEP)/Act East Policy (AEP), connectivity constructions, development of transport routes, and related industrial and trade infrastructures have sought to rescue the Indian North Eastern Region from the trap of a security paradox that was said to have limited availability of developmental opportunities in Northeast India. Adoption of the LEP came in the foreground of economic reforms in India in the early 1990s. The LEP identified Northeast India as throughway for trade expansion and joint economic growth in India-Southeast Asia region. For facilitating the objectives of expansion and growth, the LEP/AEP has sought to build a network of infrastructure for the sake of connectivity in the region. Due to this focus on infrastructure constructions, the LEP/AEP has advanced an economic development model that prioritizes creating physical infrastructures over social development. This article looks at the chartering of this development model and the contestations it faces from people in the region. For different social groups, the LEP/AEP has come to be seen as a developmental imposition that risks making the Northeast region a mere regional trade and logistics transit hub

After a brief discussion of the academic literature that has dealt with the rise of the rivalry since the early 1990s, this paper will explore the most visible expressions of this Sino-Indian contest in Burma. The energy and military sectors, tensions in border areas and the quest for a strategic access to the Indian Ocean are the most crucial factors, but it will be postulated hereafter that each has its own limits. Given internal divisions, hesitations, misreadings or misperceptions in New Delhi and Beijing, as well as the nationalist stance of the Burmese military regime, this article will claim that the Sino-Indian competition over Burma must not be overestimated. Indeed, the Burmese field
itself offers considerable resistance to the further thrust of India and China in the region, limiting the phenomenon to a mere “quiet rivalry.”

The Look East policy has emerged as an important foreign policy initiative of India in the post-Cold War period. The essential philosophy of the Look East policy is that India must find its destiny by linking itself more and more with its Asian partners and the rest of the world, and that India’s future and economic interests are best served by greater integration with East and Southeast Asia. Thence, the Look East policy is an attempt to forge closer and deeper economic integration with its eastern neighbours as a part of the new realpolitik in evidence in India’s foreign policy, and the engagement with Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the recognition on the part of India’s elite of the strategic and economic importance of the region to the country’s national interests. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, the Look East policy is “not merely an external economic policy; it is also a strategic shift in India’s vision of the world and India’s place in the evolving global economy.”

This article discusses the historical development of Japanese investment in Malaysia between the years 1981 and 1990. When Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad took over the administration, Japanese investment in the country has been growing rapidly as Japan emerged as the largest trading partner of Malaysia. The consequence of crisis with the British government witness by 1982 Japan’s position in Malaysia has further strengthened through the implementation of the Look East Policy. Through this policy, the Japanese management system and work ethic has been widely publicized to continue the pro-Japanese orientation. Although researcher found too many previous studies on Japanese investment in Malaysia, this study will complement previous studies by the data collected from different sources from previous researchers. The different data will also provide new insight to the reader about the history of Japanese investments in this period. The main focus of the Japanese investments directed at the investment date, the parties involved, the amount of capital, total employees, location and sector expertise.

Look East Policy has its genesis in the year
1991 when India opened up for liberalisation.
The policy was aimed to configure land locked
northeast region of India for international
relations with its neighbour and to gain a
foothold in South East Asia. The 1990s was a
period conspicuous of rapid economic
development and growth of Asian countries,
especially in South East Asia. South East Asia
came to be recognized as a region with vast
economic potential, and in close tandem the
Indian sub-continent was fast emerging as an
economic and political force to be reckoned
with. This is when the Indian leadership came
up with the concept of “Look East”. Look East
policy encapsulates this outlook in presenting
India an important player to consolidate the
whole South East Asia for trade and
international cooperation. The thrust from here
placed India to create and expand regional
markets for trade, investments and industrial
development.

... And then one day a wall in Berlin came down. Bipolar world became multi polar, calling for greater regional integration. Foreign policy choices were reoriented and India was no exception. It had begun to look east and northeastern states became a factor. But has the new policy succeeded in achieving what it strove for? Have the northeastern states benefitted from being the gateway of India to look east, or does New Delhi still suffer from myopia? In this incisive analysis of the Look East policy, the book unravels the past and future of this policy with a critical gaze on its present.

The paper looks at the connection between networks of finance capital and infrastructure-led development in the context of India’s Look East Policy (renamed as the Act East Policy in 2014) whose main thrust has been to forge sustainable political and economic relationships with its
neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia so that it can compete with China as a regional power, especially in the context of Asia’s emergence as the leader of globalization following the economic meltdown in the West. It strives to explore this connection in the background of the idea of ‘seamless Asia’ (often mentioned in documents of regional conglomerates like ASEAN and financial institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank as an ideal state of an interconnected continent through transport facilities and specially designated trade routes, border policies and economic liberalisation) and the many infrastructural requirements for its realisation in connection with the emerging networks of finance capital in the region. The concept of finance capital is often reduced to discussions around the figure of the solitary, speculative economic agent and her speculative decision-making abilities. This study, however, will try to bring the concept of infrastructure development at the core of its conceptualisation and will look at the institutional paradigms of regional conglomerates and their conversations with the expansive networks of finance capital.

Since the 1990s, India has faced heavy criticism for its realist approach to Burmese affairs. Geopolitical imperatives indeed drove Delhi towards a closer partnership with its military-ruled neighbour. India, however, claims it plays a key role in fostering development in Burma; therefore, consolidating long-term democratization prospects there. This article aims to challenge this view. Using the literature on development and democracy, as well as interviews with Indian policy-makers, it will explore India's recent engagement with the Burmese socioeconomic landscape, and assess its democratizing impact. It argues that, despite an evident discourse shift since cyclone Nargis in 2008, India's development and infrastructure projects remain low-key and peripheral, its education and health assistance marginal and its transnational connections with the emerging Burmese civil society absent. India's own dilemmatic approach combined with Burmese traditional resistance impedes a broader Indian leverage. Unless a more diverse socioeconomic involvement is offered by Delhi in Burma and more knowledge about its evolving polity is nurtured at home, India will neither pave the way for pluralism to grow there nor alleviate its deep-rooted image deficit there.

Since 1990s, with the adoption of India " s Look East Policy, the bilateral trade between India and Myanmar has been increasing and the North Eastern Region of India (NER) has become the bridge between India and Myanmar. Many empirical studies show the benefits of such trade expansion, but, the basic question is that whether the NER is getting benefits or not. If we think that the region gets benefits, at what extent? The study is an exploration of finding the answer of these basis questions. The study not only reviews the performance of India " s trade with Myanmar from 2000 to 2009 but also identifies the commodities traded between the two countries and also finds out the share of NER in India " s trade with Myanmar. The findings of the study show that India has been experiencing deficit in BOT with Myanmar; though there is expansion of border trade, the NER has not benefited much from India-Myanmar trade.

Even after more than two decades of the launching of Look East policy, now rechristened Act East Policy one feels concerned as to the continued neglect of the region and lack of any visible economic development in the area, more particularly when this policy had raised high hopes of fast economic development and alleviation of poverty amongst the people. In the context of the challenges in case of the Northeast, it is important that this policy is critically analyzed to explore the various means as to make this policy effective enough to confront these challenges and realize the available opportunities of creating an environment congenial for infrastructure development and investments to enable the region to be a fast growing economic region.

I this paper, I have critically analyzed the policy and explored the available means,for suitable reorientation of this policy, for the better interest of the region.

If there’s one country to our East, which could facilitate India’s greater integration in the region, its Singapore. Singapore could, therefore, be lynchpin for India’s Act East policy. And this is what Sh Pranab Mukherjee, the then Foreign Minister in 2006 and later the President of India said, and I quote, ““Singapore is the hub of India’s political, economic and security strategy in the whole of East Asia” Unquote.

India enjoys huge surplus of soft power in the entire Southeast Asia. And so is the case in Singapore. There are more than 350 thousand people of ethnic Indian origin who are Singaporeans and are contributing immensely in nation building. In addition, more than 21% of foreign workers in Singapore are Indian citizens. India, therefore, has sizeable stakes in well being of Singapore.

On the other hand, with growing Chinese assertiveness, Singapore looks at the US and India for counter balancing China’s influence in the region for regional peace, security and well being.

The optimism generated by proponents of India's "Look East" policy and tentative peace talks between armed opposition groups and the state would suggest that there has been a radical change in the government of India's north-east policy. However, militarisation and ethnic confrontations continue to define the paramleters of public policy in India's north-east. Ethnic violence is accentuated by the existence of parallel political and
administrative structures that undermine the rule of law. This article argues that the challenge in India's north-east is contingent upon the government's motivation to encourage transparency in governance and administration and to consciously move away from its existing reliance on archaic military solutions.

Current Indian foreign policy is informed by a realization that a combination of economic reforms and the end of the Cold War has steered India into a position of some influence in the post-9/11 world. This is influence of a kind that India did not have in the years following Independence. What India had then was a moral standing which it could make little use of, boxed in as it was by the contingencies of a Cold War division of the world. This division allowed very little leeway for the Indian policy of non-alignment, which ended up being not so much an alternative as a means of holding the line, until India could find itself in a more favourable geopolitical situation. Further, unlike in the post-Independence phase, India today often appears reluctant to exercise what influence it has outside South Asia and sometimes even within the region, keenly aware of the several continuing limits on its capabilities and having suffered from blowback on the few occasions it did. Even as some old problems continue to keep India off-balance in international affairs, the world has also not stood still and new problems – both traditional and non-traditional – have emerged that have required India to step up and take a position on. And all this, even as the Indian foreign policy establishment remains woefully ill-equipped and understaffed to meet these challenges. What then are the patterns of Indian foreign policy behavior in the new century?

India’s relationship with its eastern neighbours has evolved from pan-Asian romanticism and assertive leadership in the late 1940s and 1950s, to isolation and neglect following its defeat in the 1962 war with China, and finally to a more pragmatic resolve since the early 1990s to seek integration with the region and to benefit from its economic dynamism. But while the economic dimension of India’s ‘look east’ policy remains far from realizing its full potential, a strategic dimension has emerged, namely India’s role as a useful political and diplomatic counterweight to Chinese influence in the Asian security architecture. Another dimension of India’s ‘look east’ policy, its participation in Asian regionalism, has New Delhi pursuing a somewhat passive role under ASEAN’s leadership. The ‘look east’ policy faces new challenges as India must reconcile its role as an emerging power, with its traditional tendency to isolate itself from external economic and geopolitical currents.

Under the Look East Policy (LEP)/Act East Policy (AEP), connectivity constructions, development of transport routes, and related industrial and trade infrastructures have sought to rescue the Indian North Eastern Region from the trap of a security paradox that was said to have limited availability of developmental opportunities in Northeast India. Adoption of the LEP came in the foreground of economic reforms in India in the early 1990s. The LEP identified Northeast India as throughway for trade expansion and joint economic growth in India–Southeast Asia region. For facilitating the objectives of expansion and growth, the LEP/AEP has sought to build a network of infrastructure for the sake of connectivity in the region. Due to this focus on infrastructure constructions, the LEP/AEP has advanced an economic development model that prioritizes creating physical infrastructures over social development. This article looks at the chartering of this development model and the contestations ...

With the end of the Cold war the nature of world’s economy has changed accordingly and was resulted into a changed international system and also given birth to the regional economic organizations. This changed situation also resulted into a shift towards India’s economic preferences to the eastern partners. Earlier, India has economic ties with the United State of Soviet Russia (USSR), but after its collapse, India’s preference to the economic partner changed accordingly. The overwhelming expansion of the China in the South Asian region has become a security challenge for India, which compels the Indian state to initiate “Looking East” agenda for the eastern neighbor.
Whatever the ambition, at its earlier stage the Look East Policy (LEP) did not aimed to make geographical proximity between the North East with the Eastern neighbors; it is only when the Myanmar got the full membership status in the ASEAN the importance of the region suddenly grows. Although the LEP provides an ample economic space for the Indian state but the share of it to the North East still remain insignificant. Although the LEP has now crossed long 18 years, fruits of it still have to show their lives. The Present paper hence looked at Prospect of the Look East Policy in bringing possibilities for the region Northeast.