Heading East: Security, Trade, and Environment Between India and Southeast Asia

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THE END OF THE COLD WAR AND ECONOMIC liberalization in India marked a new turn in Indian diplomacy. The 'Look East' policy promulgated in the early 1990s entailed several strategic and economic initiatives aimed at deepening India's ties with Southeast Asia, which had been neglected earlier. Despite the launch of the programme a decade and a half ago, India's involvement with the region proved to be fitful. With the 'Act East' initiative, which was launched in 2014, there appears to be a renewed emphasis on forging working relationships with various states in the region.

This volume, part of the Oxford International Relations in South Asia series, presents an overarching assessment of the contents, successes, and failures of India's Southeast Asia policy, with important pointers to how this relationship could be steered in the future. The contributors to the volume dwell on three critical areas-trade, security, and environment and outline the existing ties of India's northeast with Southeast Asia and the prospects of their expansion.

Karen Stoll Farrell is Head of the Area Studies Department and Librarian for South Asian and Southeast Asian Studies at Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, USA.

Sumit Ganguly is Professor of Political Science, holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations, and directs the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

DURING MUCH OF THE COLD WAR India's policymakers chose to ignore the bulk of the states of Southeast Asia. The reasons for this neglect were relatively straightforward. Prime Minister Nehru's initial hopes of Asian solidarity in the wake of the collapse of European colonialism failed to materialize after the famous Bandung Conference of 1955, around when the Cold War entered the region as a consequence of the US-Pakistan military alliance of 1954. The vast majority of the states of Southeast Asia who feared Communist penetration chose to cast their lot with the United States.

The US promotion of various military alliances, most notably the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (which its implacable adversary Pakistan joined), further alienated India from the region.

India, which under Nehru's tutelage had self-consciously chosen to pursue a foreign policy based on the principle of nonalignment, thereby failed to make common cause with the US-aligned states. Not surprisingly, diplomatic relations with most of these states remained largely perfunctory.

Apart from the adoption of nonalignment, India's foreign economic policies also isolated it from Southeast Asia. It embraced an autarchic economic development strategy based upon import-substituting industrialization and thereby cut itself off from the global market.

Finally, the US involvement in the Vietnam War and India's staunch opposition to the conflict placed it even further at odds with the bulk of the states of Southeast Asia.