From Look East to Act East

India’s turn eastward is the one strand of post-Cold-War Indian foreign policy that almost every commentator, domestic and foreign, calls a success. It began as an emergency response to a balance-of-payments crisis and the loss of a superpower patron, and it has grown into the organising frame for India’s presence in the Indo-Pacific. Yet the closer one looks at what the policy has actually delivered — in trade balance, in connectivity, and in the North-Eastern region it claims to be transforming — the wider the gap between declaration and delivery becomes.

The 1991 conjuncture: why India turned east

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The policy was not the product of a strategic doctrine written in advance. It was the improvised response of a government that had run out of foreign exchange, lost its principal international partner, and found its own neighbourhood offering nothing it could use.

• Four drivers converged in a single year, and the policy is unintelligible if any one of them is left out.
  • The balance-of-payments crisis of 1991 and the liberalisation programme of Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh required export markets and foreign capital, and Southeast Asia had both in a way the Soviet bloc never had.
  • The collapse of the USSR removed India’s principal arms supplier, diplomatic protector and rupee-trade partner at a stroke, and made strategic diversification an urgent necessity rather than a preference.
  • The immediate neighbourhood offered no growth: South Asia was, and remains, among the least economically integrated regions in the world, so extra-regional markets were the only realistic route to scale.
  • China’s rise in Southeast Asia — economic before it was military — made presence in the region a hedge, and Indian planners understood early that absence would be read as acquiescence.
  • Later shocks reinforced rather than reversed the turn: the attacks of September 2001 made counter-terrorism a shared agenda with states that had their own Islamist insurgencies, giving the relationship a security subject it had lacked.
• The turn belongs to a wider recasting of Indian foreign policy that S. Jaishankar has described as its fourth phase, running from 1991 to 2001.
  • The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar world forced a radical rethink across the whole range of Indian policy, of which the eastward turn was the most visible expression.
  • Opening the economy produced new diplomatic priorities, and Look East is the shorthand for the changed approach — alongside the parallel normalisation with Israel in 1992 and more intensive engagement with the United States.
  • The point of the framing is that the eastward turn was not a regional initiative but a systemic adjustment, which is why it has survived every change of government since.
• A civilisational connection was recovered, not invented. The maritime, religious and commercial traffic between the subcontinent and Southeast Asia long predates the colonial partition of Asia into separate imperial spheres.
  • Buddhism and Hinduism spread eastward without conquest or coerced conversion, leaving Angkor, Borobudur, Prambanan and My Son, and the Ramayana traditions of Thailand, Indonesia and Laos.
  • A large Indian-origin diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar gave the reconnection a living constituency, not merely an archaeological one.
  • India also has a decolonisation credit in the region — Nehru’s convening of the Asian Relations Conference (1947) and the Conference on Indonesia (1949), and Indian support for Vietnamese and Indonesian independence.

The Cold War estrangement was mutual and it had real causes

The received account that India simply “neglected” Southeast Asia flatters both parties. The estrangement was structural, and each side had grounds for suspicion of the other.

• ASEAN’s origins were read in Delhi as an anti-communist alignment.
  • The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was formed at Bangkok in 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam War, by five states with close Western security ties.
  • To Indian planners it looked like a successor to the collapsed SEATO, and India believed the United States had encouraged its creation to contain communism.
• India’s own tilt cut the other way. The Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation of August 1971 placed India, in ASEAN eyes, inside the Soviet camp at the precise moment ASEAN was defining itself against it.
• The Cambodia rupture was decisive. India’s recognition of the Heng Samrin government in 1980 — the administration installed by Vietnam’s invasion — put it directly against the ASEAN position, which backed the Khmer Rouge-led coalition’s UN seat.
  • India was the only major non-communist state to extend recognition, and it cost the relationship a decade.
• The Zone of Peace convergence went unused. Both sides supported the Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality in principle, but neither built anything on the overlap.
• The economic gap made political distance cheap. A closed, licence-permit Indian economy had almost nothing to trade with export-oriented Southeast Asia, so there was no commercial lobby pressing for repair.
• Security perceptions ran in both directions. Some Southeast Asian analysts saw India’s naval expansion and the 1971 dismemberment of Pakistan as evidence of a regional hegemon in the making, and the 1988 intervention in the Maldives and the IPKF in Sri Lanka did nothing to dispel it.

Rao’s Singapore Lecture: the policy’s intellectual statement

• The Look East Policy has no founding document, no legislation and no white paper — its nearest equivalent to a charter is a lecture.
• Narasimha Rao delivered the 13th Singapore Lecture on 8 September 1994, the first Indian leader to do so, and was received by Lee Kuan Yew, who had lobbied longer than anyone for India’s inclusion in the region’s calculations.
  • Its title — India and the Asia-Pacific: Forging a New Relationship — is itself the argument: India was claiming membership of a region from which it had been written out.
  • Rao grounded the claim in history rather than in commerce, arguing that the connections between India and East and Southeast Asia are older than the records available to reconstruct them.

“The ties that bind India and Southeast and East Asia are so old that they are still being fully traced by historians.”

P.V. Narasimha Rao, Singapore Lecture, 1994

• Rao never used the phrase “Look East” in the lecture — the label was applied afterwards by officials and commentators, which is itself evidence of how loosely the policy was defined at birth.
• What the lecture did establish was the frame every later formulation has worked inside.
  • India belongs to the Asia-Pacific as a matter of geography and history, not as a supplicant seeking admission.
  • Economic reintegration comes first, and political and security cooperation follows from it rather than preceding it.
  • ASEAN is the point of entry to the wider region, which is why the institutional ladder was climbed with ASEAN rather than with individual states.

The three phases of the policy

The standard periodisation is not a filing convenience. Each phase changed the policy’s geographical scope, its substantive content, and the instruments it relied on, and each was triggered by a specific external shock.

Look East I, 1991–2003: the economic phase

• The first phase was almost purely commercial, and its ambition was modest: to attach a newly opened Indian economy to the fastest-growing markets within reach.
  • India became an ASEAN sectoral dialogue partner in 1992, covering trade, investment and tourism — the same status Pakistan received that year, which is a useful measure of how little it then meant.
  • Full dialogue partner status came in 1995, and membership of the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1996, giving India its first seat at an Asia-Pacific political and security table in half a century.
  • The first India–ASEAN Summit at Phnom Penh in November 2002 made India a summit-level partner, and the meeting became annual.
• Trade volumes vindicated the choice. India–ASEAN trade stood at roughly US$2 billion in 1991; it had passed US$70 billion by 2017–18 and reached US$128 billion in 2025–26, about 11% of India’s global trade.
• The phase had two structural weaknesses that later phases inherited rather than solved.
  • It was almost entirely economic, with no security content and no political convergence to fall back on when trade disappointed.
  • It was almost entirely mainland-blind: the policy ran by sea and air and left the land route through Myanmar and the North-East untouched.
• The 1997 Asian financial crisis was the first shock, and it cut both ways — it slowed ASEAN’s growth and thereby India’s prospective gains, but it also punctured the mystique of the “Asian miracle” India had hoped to replicate.

Look East II, 2003–2014: widening the arc

• The second phase widened the map from Southeast Asia to the Asia-Pacific and added a strategic register the first phase had lacked.
• The trade architecture was built in this phase.
  • The Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Cooperation was signed at Bali on 8 October 2003, with Vajpayee proposing an FTA within a decade.
    • Vajpayee also announced unilateral tariff concessions for Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, the bloc’s least developed members, which is the origin of India’s separate CLMV track.
  • The ASEAN–India Trade in Goods Agreement (AITIGA) was signed at Bangkok on 13 August 2009 and entered into force on 1 January 2010 — India’s first regional trade agreement with any bloc.
  • The Trade in Services Agreement and the Investment Agreement were signed in November 2014 and entered into force on 1 July 2015, adding the sector where India’s comparative advantage actually lies.
• The regional security architecture opened to India.
  • India was a founding member of the East Asia Summit at Kuala Lumpur in 2005, admitted before the United States and Russia, and over Chinese objections that Vietnam helped overcome.
  • India joined ADMM-Plus at its inception in 2010, giving defence cooperation with ASEAN a standing multilateral forum.
  • The relationship was elevated to a Strategic Partnership in 2012 at the commemorative summit marking twenty years of dialogue.
• The phase’s limitation was that its strategy outran its economics. India acquired seats at every table in the region while its share of the region’s trade and investment stayed marginal.

Act East from November 2014: the rename and what it changed

• The rename was announced at the East Asia Summit at Nay Pyi Taw, November 2014, where Modi told the meeting that India’s Look East Policy had become an Act East Policy.
• The four Cs are the government’s own formulation of what the policy now covers: Culture, Commerce, Connectivity and Capacity building.
  • The declared objective is to promote economic cooperation, cultural ties and strategic relationships across the Asia-Pacific through bilateral, regional and multilateral engagement.
  • The declared domestic purpose is enhanced connectivity for the North Eastern states, which the policy statement names as a priority rather than a beneficiary.
• Three things genuinely changed with the rename, and they should be separated from the branding.
  • The Indo-Pacific replaced the Asia-Pacific as the operative space, which relocates India from the western edge of someone else’s region to the centre of its own.
  • Institutional investment followed: a separate Indian Mission to ASEAN and the EAS in Jakarta with a resident ambassador from April 2015, and an Indo-Pacific Division created in the Ministry of External Affairs in 2019.
  • Connectivity became the operational test, with a US$1 billion line of credit for physical and digital connectivity announced in 2015 and the Myanmar land projects moved to the centre of the agenda.
• The symbolic peak came in January 2018, when all ten ASEAN heads of state and government attended India’s Republic Day and the commemorative summit adopted the Delhi Declaration under the theme Shared Values, Common Destiny.

Was the rename rhetoric or substance?

• The honest scholarly judgement is that the rebranding was as much rhetorical as substantive, and the case for saying so is strong.
  • The verbs changed before the delivery did: the call to “act” rather than “look” was made by Barack Obama in the Indian Parliament in November 2010, four years before Delhi adopted it.
  • Act East is not a legislated policy or a published strategy — like its predecessor it is an overarching orientation, which makes it easy to redescribe and hard to audit.
  • The flagship connectivity projects predate the rename: the Kaladan project was agreed in 2008, the Trilateral Highway framework in the 2000s, and both remain incomplete more than a decade after the rebranding.
  • The trade trajectory worsened after 2014, not before it: India’s deficit with ASEAN widened sharply in exactly the period the policy was supposedly becoming action-oriented.

“Like your neighbors in Southeast Asia, we want India not only to ‘look East,’ we want India to ‘engage East’

because it will increase the security and prosperity of all our nations.” — Barack Obama, Indian Parliament, 2010

• The case for substance is nonetheless real, and a verdict that dismisses the rename entirely is as lazy as one that accepts it.
  • Summit attendance became unbroken, and a policy whose head of government turns up every year is not the same policy as one that sends officials.
  • Bilateral relationships were systematically upgraded — Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships with Vietnam (2016), Indonesia (2018), Australia (2020), Malaysia (2024) and Singapore (2024).
  • The security content is new: defence exports, logistics agreements, co-development, and joint exercises across the region did not exist at this scale before 2014.
  • The North-East acquired a named place in the policy, which the Look East decades never gave it.

The institutional ladder with ASEAN

• The ladder is the most concrete achievement of the whole policy, and it was climbed against real resistance rather than granted.
  • ASEAN initially opposed India’s entry into the ARF, fearing India would import its disputes with China and Pakistan into a forum designed to avoid them.
  • China objected to India’s inclusion in the East Asia Summit, and India’s entry was secured by Singapore, Japan and Vietnam insisting on it.
• Pakistan’s position is the control case: it became a sectoral dialogue partner in the same year as India, 1992, and has advanced no further since, which measures what the ladder actually represents.
• The Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of November 2022 was agreed at the summit marking thirty years of dialogue relations and put India in the same tier as ASEAN’s other major partners.
• The Plan of Action for 2026–2030, adopted in 2026, is the current work programme, succeeding the plans for 2010–15, 2016–20 and 2021–25.
  • Its named priorities include completing the Trilateral Highway with extensions to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, maritime domain awareness, digital and cyber cooperation, and civil nuclear and critical-minerals collaboration.
  • 2026 has been designated the ASEAN–India Year of Maritime Cooperation, following the Year of Tourism in 2025.

What the ladder has not produced

• Institutional depth has not converted into economic weight, and ASEAN’s own tallies say so.
  • India ranks around eighth among ASEAN’s trading partners and comparably low as a source of foreign direct investment among ASEAN’s dialogue partners.
  • Roughly 95% of Indian FDI into ASEAN is concentrated in Singapore, which means India’s investment presence in the region is really a presence in one city-state.
• Each side’s disappointment is a mirror of the other’s. India feels its outreach has not been met with comparable energy; ASEAN members judge that India’s capacity to supply security assurances, market access and development finance remains limited.
• The US$1 billion connectivity line of credit announced in 2015 went substantially unutilised for years, which is the single cleanest illustration of the delivery problem: the money was announced, the projects were not built.

The trade architecture and its unravelling

• AITIGA was signed on terms India now regards as unbalanced, and the asymmetry is arithmetical rather than rhetorical.
  • India eliminated duties on about 74% of tariff lines; Indonesia offered around 50% and Vietnam around 70%, while the headline bloc average was inflated by Singapore, which already had duty-free access on everything.
  • Because India’s applied tariffs were higher to begin with, symmetrical-looking concessions delivered asymmetrical market opening.
• The deficit is the political fact that drives everything else.
  • The deficit was roughly US$5 billion when the agreement entered into force in 2010; it reached US$43.6 billion in 2022–23 and has since passed US$50 billion.
  • In 2024–25 Indian exports to ASEAN fell 5.8% to about US$39 billion while imports rose to about US$84 billion.
  • The target of US$200 billion in two-way trade by 2025 was missed by a wide margin; the figure reached was US$128 billion in 2025–26.
• Rules-of-origin abuse is India’s central complaint, and it is a China complaint wearing an ASEAN label.
  • Subsidised Chinese goods, steel above all, have entered India through transhipment via ASEAN members, claiming preferential tariffs without substantial regional value addition.
  • The agreement lacks the tight process rules — a melt-and-pour requirement for steel, for instance — that would close the loophole.
• Non-tariff barriers run the other way. ASEAN standards, certification and sanitary and phytosanitary requirements bear disproportionately on Indian pharmaceuticals, agriculture and processed foods, which are precisely India’s export strengths.
• The AITIGA review began in 2023 and has become the relationship’s live economic issue.
  • The review missed its December 2025 deadline; the 13th Joint Committee met in July 2026 and set time-bound deliverables for the sub-committees on customs procedures, market access and rules of origin.
  • India’s objective is a restructured agreement, not marginal tariff adjustment — which is why ASEAN members have found the negotiation slow and uncomfortable.

The wider architecture and the sub-regional instruments

Mekong–Ganga Cooperation

• Launched with the Vientiane Declaration of November 2000, it links India with Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam — the region’s least developed economies and its mainland land bridge.
  • Its four founding pillars were tourism, culture, education, transport and communication, since expanded to health and traditional medicine, agriculture, small and medium enterprises, water resources, science and technology and skill development.
  • Quick Impact Projects are its most visible output — small, fast, community-level grants, of which the great majority of a first tranche of over seventy have been completed at modest cost.
• Its strategic purpose is to contest Chinese primacy in the Mekong basin, where Beijing runs the far better-resourced Greater Mekong Subregion and Lancang–Mekong Cooperation frameworks.
• Its record is one of intermittence, and India’s partners have noticed.
  • Meetings lapsed for long stretches, and Thailand launched its own sub-regional framework rather than wait, which is a diplomatic verdict in itself.
  • The mechanism was revived after 2014 with a plan of action, an MGC Business Council, a lead-country mechanism, and a US$1 billion line of credit and a US$77 million grant for the CLMV countries.
• The civilisational framing is genuine and unusually well chosen — the Ganga and the Mekong are both civilisational rivers, and the framing gives India a claim in the region that is not derivative of commerce.

The BIMSTEC bridge

• BIMSTEC is where Act East and Neighbourhood First meet, and India’s investment in it is a direct consequence of both.
  • It excludes Pakistan, and therefore escapes the veto that immobilised SAARC.
  • It joins South Asia to Southeast Asia through Myanmar and Thailand, which gives the North-East a regional rationale rather than a purely national one.
  • It is Bay of Bengal centred, aligning with the maritime turn in Indian strategy.
• Its elevation over SAARC was deliberate and public — BIMSTEC leaders were invited to the BRICS outreach at Goa in 2016 and to the 2019 swearing-in in place of SAARC leaders.
• Its own weaknesses limit what it can carry for Act East: a free trade framework signed in 2004 and still unconcluded, a small secretariat, and land connectivity hostage to the same Myanmar crisis.

The bilateral tracks that carry the policy

• The pattern is that security cooperation runs bilaterally while economic cooperation runs through ASEAN, and this is a consequence of ASEAN’s own limits.
  • ASEAN’s consensus rule and its members’ divergent threat perceptions mean the bloc cannot itself contract security arrangements, so India works state by state.
  • The Act East Forum with Japan, established in 2017, is the one framework that ties an external partner directly to North-Eastern development.

Culture, capacity building and the two soft Cs

The Culture and Capacity-building limbs of the four Cs are the least reported part of the policy and the part where India’s offer is genuinely differentiated, because it is one no other external power in Southeast Asia is making in the same form.

• Heritage conservation is India’s most visible cultural instrument in the region, and it is unusual in being restorative rather than promotional.
  • Indian teams have worked on Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm in Cambodia, My Son in Vietnam and Vat Phou in Laos, all sites of Indic religious architecture.
  • The Buddhist circuit and the Ramayana and Mahabharata traditions of Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Laos give India a cultural claim it did not have to manufacture.
• Institutional cultural machinery has been built around the relationship since the 1990s.
  • The conferences on ASEAN–India cultural and civilisational links at New Delhi in 2015 and Jakarta in 2017 formalised the theme at official level.
  • The ASEAN–India Network of Think Tanks, the Eminent Persons Lecture Series and the annual Delhi Dialogue provide the track-two layer.
  • Youth summits, student exchanges, media exchanges, artist camps and a diplomatic training programme for ASEAN officials run continuously.
• Capacity building is where India’s comparative advantage is clearest, because it transfers systems and skills rather than assets.
  • The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation programme has trained officials and technicians from the region for decades, and its alumni sit inside partner administrations.
  • Nalanda University, revived as an ASEAN-supported project, is the flagship educational symbol, with scholarships doubled in 2024 and new agriculture-focused places added.
  • IIT campuses have opened in Malaysia and Thailand, and space cooperation includes a tracking and data reception station in Vietnam and satellite services for ASEAN partners.
  • Digital public infrastructure — identity, payments and data exchange offered as replicable public goods rather than procured products — is the newest and most distinctive element, with UPI linkages across the region.
  • Pandemic assistance — a contribution to the ASEAN COVID-19 Response Fund and vaccine supply to the region under Vaccine Maitri — was the clearest recent demonstration of India as a supplier of public goods rather than of infrastructure.
• The honest limitation is that cultural reach has not kept pace with cultural claim.
  • Indian film and music have lost regional ground to Korean and Chinese content, and the popular-culture presence India had in Southeast Asia in the mid-twentieth century has thinned rather than grown.
  • Visa restrictiveness on the Indian side works directly against people-to-people ambitions, and remains the most frequently raised practical complaint from ASEAN partners.

Defence and security cooperation

• Security was almost absent from the relationship at the start, and its arrival is the clearest content difference between Look East and Act East.
  • India joined the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1996 and the ASEAN Post-Ministerial Conferences the same year, its first participation in an Asia-Pacific political-security discussion in half a century.
  • ADMM-Plus from 2010 gave defence cooperation a standing multilateral home, with India co-chairing working groups including cybersecurity.
• Three areas define India–ASEAN cooperation as a bloc: counter-terrorism, cybersecurity and maritime security.
  • The first ASEAN–India Maritime Exercise was held in 2023, and the first ASEAN–India Defence Ministers’ meeting followed as an informal format.
  • India contributes maritime domain awareness through information-fusion arrangements and coordinated patrols.
• Bilateral defence content is where the substance sits, and it has grown fastest since 2014.
  • Defence exports — the BrahMos contract with the Philippines above all — mark India’s arrival as a supplier rather than only a partner in the region.
  • Logistics and access arrangements with Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam extend the Indian Navy’s reach east of Malacca.
  • Co-development and co-production, rather than sale of finished platforms, is the direction the newer agreements take.
• India’s position on the South China Sea is stated in terms of principle rather than of alignment: freedom of navigation and overflight, unimpeded commerce, and settlement of disputes under UNCLOS.
  • ONGC Videsh operates exploration blocks in Vietnamese waters that China contests, which gives the position a material stake and not merely a declaratory one.
  • India is careful not to be read as a party to the dispute, which is the price of ASEAN’s comfort and a limit on how far the security relationship can be pushed.

The Indo-Pacific turn

• The replacement of “Asia-Pacific” by “Indo-Pacific” is a conceptual move before it is a geographical one, and India adopted the term because it changes India’s position in the map.
  • The Asia-Pacific was a Pacific-rim construct organised around APEC and the American alliance system, in which the Indian Ocean was a separate theatre and India was peripheral.
  • The Indo-Pacific treats the two oceans as one continuous system through which trade and energy actually move, which places India at its centre.
  • A power operating across both oceans cannot be met in one, which is the material argument for the reconception.
• Modi’s Shangri-La Dialogue keynote of June 2018 is India’s authoritative statement of the concept, and its distinctive features matter because they differ from the American version.
  • The region runs from the shores of Africa to the Americas; it is inclusive, meaning open to all states including China; and it is not a strategy or a club of limited members.
  • ASEAN centrality is explicitly affirmed, which is the price of ASEAN’s comfort and the reason India’s formulation is more acceptable in the region than Washington’s.
• The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, announced at the East Asia Summit in Bangkok in 2019, is the operational vehicle.
  • It organises cooperation into seven pillars — maritime security, maritime ecology, maritime resources, capacity building and resource sharing, disaster risk reduction, science and technology, and trade connectivity and maritime transport — with different partners leading each.
  • It was consciously aligned with the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific of 2019, so that India’s construct reinforces ASEAN’s rather than competing with it.
  • SAGAR (2015), and its successor framing MAHASAGAR, is the Indian Ocean counterpart of the same idea.
• The Quad is the policy’s most visible strategic expression and its most delicate one.
  • India insists it is not an alliance — no mutual defence obligation, no secretariat, no treaty — and resists its militarisation, which distinguishes India’s position from Australia’s and Japan’s.
  • Several ASEAN members are uneasy about the Quad precisely because it forces choices the ASEAN Way exists to avoid, so India’s insistence on ASEAN centrality is a hedge against that discomfort.
• The maritime stake is the underlying reason for all of it: the great majority of India’s seaborne trade transits Southeast Asian waters, and the Malacca Strait carries the bulk of China’s energy imports, which makes the same chokepoint an Indian vulnerability and a source of Indian leverage.

Connectivity: where Act East is actually judged

Connectivity is the point at which the policy’s rhetoric meets terrain, and it is the reason the North-East matters. Every land route from India to Southeast Asia runs through the North-East, and every one of them runs onward through Myanmar.

The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project

• The design is elegant and the logic sound — a US$500 million project agreed with Myanmar in 2008 to give the landlocked North-East its own sea access.
  • Kolkata to Sittwe in Rakhine by sea, roughly 539 km.
  • Up the Kaladan river from Sittwe to Paletwa in Chin State, roughly 158 km.
  • By road from Paletwa to Zorinpui on the Mizoram border, 108 km, and onward to Aizawl.
• What the route would deliver is a genuine transformation of the region’s economic geography.
  • It would cut the Kolkata–Aizawl distance from 1,880 km to about 900 km, bypassing the Siliguri corridor entirely.
  • It would give Mizoram and the southern North-East their own sea access, and potentially serve Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal as well.
  • India took operational control of Sittwe port in May 2023, when the first Indian cargo vessel docked, and the port has been operated by India Ports Global under an agreement approved in 2024 — India’s second overseas port after Chabahar.
• The project is stalled at the one point that mattered. Paletwa fell to the Arakan Army in January 2024, and the insurgent group now controls the completed stretch of the Paletwa road and levies a transit charge on commercial traffic using it.
  • The Indian side of the corridor is finished — the Zorinpui–Aizawl road was completed in March 2024 — which sharpens rather than softens the failure.
  • The remaining stretch to the Indian border is unsurfaced and its bridges incomplete, and construction cannot resume while the territory is contested.
  • The revised deadline has slipped from 2014 to 2023 to 2027, and each revision has been overtaken by the war.
• The strategic consequence is that India must deal with an armed non-state actor to complete a sovereign-to-sovereign project — a position no amount of policy rebranding anticipated.

The India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway

• The route runs about 1,400 km from Moreh in Manipur through Mandalay to Mae Sot in Thailand, where Thai rail connects onward to Bangkok, Malaysia and Singapore.
  • Its purpose is to give India a land route into Southeast Asia that bypasses the Malacca and Lombok chokepoints.
  • Extensions to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have been proposed, which would produce a roughly 3,200 km India-to-Vietnam corridor.
• It is approximately 70% complete and has been for years. India built the Tamu–Kalewa stretch and funded the replacement of 69 bridges on the Tamu–Kyigone–Kalewa section.
  • The Kalewa–Yagyi section in Myanmar is the binding bottleneck, and work on it has been suspended by the civil war.
  • Even the completed stretches are unusable as a commercial corridor: conflict around Myawaddy in 2024 and border disruptions since have made the route unreliable.
• The absent instrument is as important as the absent road. The India–Myanmar–Thailand Motor Vehicles Agreement remains unconcluded, so even a finished highway would not permit through traffic.

The other corridors

• The Rhi–Tiddim road in Chin State, the shortest link from Mizoram into Myanmar’s interior, is an Indian-funded project that has advanced slowly and is now subject to the same conflict conditions.
• The Agartala–Akhaura rail link, inaugurated in November 2023 at a cost of about ₹973 crore, would cut the Agartala–Kolkata journey from about 1,600 km to 500 km through Bangladesh.
  • The Indian 5.46 km section is commissioned; the link is not in commercial service, and work on the Bangladesh side stalled after the political transition of August 2024.
  • It is the clearest demonstration that India’s eastern connectivity is hostage to two neighbours’ politics at once, not one.
• The BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement of 2015 remains unratified by Bhutan and operates among the other three, so the northern land route is also partial.
• The maritime and air routes have worked where the land routes have not — coastal shipping, direct flights from North-Eastern cities, and the Sittwe sea leg all function; it is precisely the overland segments that fail.

Myanmar’s civil war is the binding constraint

• Every land component of Act East runs through Myanmar, and since the coup of 1 February 2021 none of it has been buildable.
  • The resistance and the ethnic armed organisations control large parts of the country, including much of Rakhine and Chin State — precisely the Kaladan corridor.
  • The elections staged from December 2025 were widely rejected and have not produced an authority capable of guaranteeing project security.
• India’s response has been engagement without endorsement — dealing with whoever controls the ground while calling for a return to democracy — which is defensible and has delivered nothing on connectivity.
• The strategic cost is compounding: an isolated Myanmar becomes more dependent on China, which extends Chinese access to the Bay of Bengal and narrows India’s room in exactly the corridor Act East depends on.

The North-East: gateway or corridor?

The North-East is where Act East is supposed to become domestic policy, and it is where the gap between the policy’s language and its effects is widest. Two claims are in tension: that connectivity to Southeast Asia will develop the region, and that the region is chiefly a route to somewhere else.

The gateway claim

• The official framing makes the North-East the policy’s “gateway” and its principal domestic beneficiary, and the statement of policy names it explicitly.
  • The region shares a long international boundary with Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and China, and is joined to the rest of India by the narrow Siliguri corridor.
  • The logic is that a region that is peripheral in the national map is central in the regional one, and that trade with Southeast Asia converts its geography from liability to asset.
• The rhetoric has been consistent across two decades and three governments, which makes the delivery record the only meaningful test of it.

The counter-case: what has actually been built

An honest assessment has to concede that the last decade’s investment in the region is real and unprecedented in scale, whatever one concludes about its distribution.

• Aggregate spending: approximately ₹6.11 lakh crore was expended on North-Eastern development between 2014–15 and 2024–25.
• Roads: national highways in the region grew from about 10,905 km in 2014 to 16,207 km by March 2025, alongside 46,296 km of rural roads.
• Rail: the annual railway budget for the region rose from about ₹2,122 crore a year in 2009–14 to ₹10,440 crore in 2025–26.
• Air: the number of airports has roughly doubled, and the regional connectivity scheme operates around 90 routes across the region’s airports and heliports.
• Digital and energy: more than 13,000 km of optical fibre, thousands of new mobile towers, a 1,600 km North East Gas Grid, and national waterways in the region expanded from one to twenty.
• Dedicated instruments exist: the North East Special Infrastructure Development Scheme, the Ministry of Development of the North Eastern Region and its schemes, and the Act East Forum with Japan, which funds road and connectivity projects directly.
• The 2025 investors’ summit and the Ashtalakshmi framing mark a deliberate attempt to reposition the region as an investment destination rather than a security problem, with semiconductors, energy and horticulture named as target sectors.

The case against: transit, not development

• The distributional critique is the strongest. Liberalisation’s benefits have been distributed highly unequally within India, and the North-East was largely excluded from the gains that the Look East decades generated elsewhere.
• Border trade has stayed trivial. The formal trade at Moreh and Zokhawthar is a small fraction of what crosses informally, and land customs stations handle volumes far below their design capacity.
  • Corridors carry through-traffic, not local value addition: goods pass, and the region collects neither the manufacturing nor the services margin.
• Scholarly work on the region has converged on this point. Thongkholal Haokip argues that successive policy frames have treated the North-East instrumentally — as a trade gateway rather than as a set of livelihoods — and that the framing does not engage the region’s actual economic needs.
  • Rubul Patgiri and Dilip Gogoi argue that Act East applies a neoliberal integration model to a region whose political, social and economic realities are at odds with it, and that it has therefore yielded very little dividend for the North-East.
  • Both conclude that the missing element is local agency: the region is the object of the policy and not a participant in designing it.
• The security precondition has never been met. Investment does not follow into a region with contested land regimes, episodic insurgency and, since 2023, an internal conflict in Manipur that has closed the very corridor Moreh sits on.
• Sequencing has been inverted throughout. The policy has repeatedly promised external connectivity before internal connectivity, when the region’s own intra-regional links, power supply and industrial base are what would let it capture value from a corridor.

The concerns of indigenous peoples

This is the dimension the gateway rhetoric is least equipped to answer, because the objections are not to inefficiency but to the model itself.

• Land is the central issue, and it is a constitutional as much as an economic one.
  • Much of the region’s land is held under customary and community tenure, protected by the Sixth Schedule in parts of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram and by Article 371A and 371G in Nagaland and Mizoram.
  • Infrastructure acquisition and corridor development sit awkwardly with community title, and the fear of land alienation to outside capital is the most consistent objection raised.
• Demographic anxiety is the second axis, and it is older than the policy.
  • The Inner Line Permit regime restricts entry by other Indian citizens into Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and, since December 2019, Manipur, and communities have resisted any dilution of it in the name of trade facilitation.
  • Open corridors are read as inward migration by other means, in a region where demographic change has repeatedly produced political violence.
• Environmental and displacement effects are concrete, not speculative.
  • Highways and pipelines cut through community forests and shifting-cultivation land, and compensation regimes calibrated to individual title do not fit collective ownership.
  • Large hydropower is the sharpest case. The Siang Upper Multipurpose Project in Arunachal Pradesh, proposed at up to 11,000 MW partly as a strategic counter to China’s Yarlung Tsangpo dam, has drawn sustained opposition from the Adi and Galo communities.
    • The Adi Bane Kebang rejected the pre-feasibility report and opposed the deployment of security forces to protect survey teams.
    • The objections invoke free, prior and informed consent, and the application of the Forest Rights Act and PESA protections that the region’s people say were bypassed.
• The Free Movement Regime’s scrapping is the most direct injury.
  • The regime dated from 1950, allowing hill communities to cross the Myanmar border without documents — up to 16 km, later narrowed to 10 km in places — in recognition that the boundary cut through single ethnic communities.
  • The Home Minister announced its termination on 8 February 2024, and fencing of the entire 1,643 km border was approved at a projected cost of about ₹31,000 crore, with a permit-based system replacing free movement.
  • Mizoram and Nagaland have formally opposed both measures, and Naga, Mizo and Kuki organisations have petitioned repeatedly for restoration, arguing that the fence divides kinship communities, ancestral land and customary usage.
  • Fencing progress has been slow — a small fraction of the border, concentrated near Moreh in Manipur — so the policy currently combines the political cost of the decision with almost none of the claimed security benefit.
• The argument these strands add up to is that Act East treats the North-East as territory to be crossed rather than a constituency to be consulted.
  • The policy’s instruments are negotiated with foreign governments and executed by central agencies, while the communities whose land they cross enter the process at the compensation stage.
  • The security and connectivity decisions point in opposite directions: the same policy that promises open corridors to Southeast Asia is building a fence across the communities that live on the route.
• The honest counter is that some of these objections are in tension with each other. Communities that oppose the fence on kinship grounds also raise demographic anxieties about open borders, and a policy cannot satisfy both at once — which is an argument for consultation, not for proceeding without it.

The flaws, and the case for course correction

The implementation and delivery gap

• This is the most frequently cited criticism of the policy and the best evidenced, and it is a capacity failure rather than an intention failure.
  • Nearly every flagship connectivity project is behind schedule, and most delays are caused by conditions in third countries India does not control.
  • Announced finance goes unspent: the connectivity line of credit, lines to the Mekong states, and project funds have repeatedly outrun the machinery available to disburse them.
  • Coordination is fragmented across the ministries of external affairs, commerce, home, road transport, shipping and the North-East, with no single agency owning delivery.
• The comparative point is what makes it damaging. India’s partners in the region do not judge Indian projects against an abstract standard; they judge them against Chinese projects that arrive on time.

The RCEP withdrawal and its cost

• India walked out of RCEP in November 2019 after seven years of negotiation, and the decision has shaped every economic conversation India has had in the region since.
• India’s reasons were coherent on their own terms.
  • Fear that the agreement would become a back-door FTA with China, exposing Indian producers to import surges the deal’s safeguards would not stop.
  • Rules-of-origin circumvention — the same transhipment problem AITIGA has since demonstrated in practice.
  • No adequate auto-trigger safeguard to raise tariffs when imports crossed a threshold, and objections to the most-favoured-nation obligation in the investment chapter.
  • Insufficient market access in services and on non-tariff barriers, and deficits with eleven of the fifteen members.
  • Domestic exposure in agriculture and dairy that no government could carry politically.

“When I measure the RCEP Agreement with respect to the interests of all Indians, I do not get a positive answer. Therefore, neither the Talisman of Gandhiji nor my own conscience permit me to join RCEP.”

Narendra Modi, Bangkok, 2019

• The regional cost was to India’s economic credibility, and this is the part Indian commentary tends to understate.
  • India had been in the negotiation from the start and had accepted its guiding principles; withdrawing at the last meeting read in the region as unreliability rather than as prudence.
  • It left India outside the only pan-regional trade architecture the Indo-Pacific has, at a moment when supply chains were being reorganised.
  • It weakened the economic half of the Quad’s logic, and Japan in particular pressed for India’s return.
• The counter-argument has strengthened since. India’s deficit with ASEAN under a much smaller agreement has widened to over US$50 billion, which is used domestically as evidence that the RCEP judgement was correct.

The asymmetry with China

• The scale gap is now an order of magnitude and it is widening.
  • China–ASEAN trade ran at about US$785 billion in the first nine months of 2025 alone; India–ASEAN trade for the whole of 2025–26 was US$128 billion.
  • China and ASEAN are each other’s largest trading partners; India is around eighth among ASEAN’s dialogue partners.
  • The ASEAN–China Free Trade Area 3.0 upgrade, signed in October 2025, extends the relationship into digital economy, green transition and supply chains — the sectors India’s own review has not yet reached.
• The technology dimension sharpens the point, and it is the substance of the case that India cannot simply out-compete China here.
  • China’s presence in Southeast Asia is now infrastructural in the digital sense — telecommunications equipment, submarine cables, e-commerce, payments, smart-city systems and electric vehicles.
  • Manufacturing relocation out of China into Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia has deepened rather than dissolved these links, because the relocated plants remain inside Chinese supply chains.
  • India’s counter-offer is different in kind rather than in scale: digital public infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, space and skills, which are systems and capabilities rather than assets.
• India’s realistic position is that it competes on terms, not on volume. Consultation, transparency, debt sustainability and respect for sovereignty are the declared distinguishing claims, and they are credible precisely because India cannot match Belt and Road financing.
  • India joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a founding member and is its second-largest shareholder, which is the clearest illustration of a strategy of working inside Chinese-led institutions rather than only against them.

Security ahead of economics

• India’s strategic profile has grown faster than its economic one, and this is the structural imbalance at the heart of Act East.
  • India is now a credible security partner — exercises, logistics agreements, defence exports, maritime domain awareness — but an insufficient economic alternative to China.
  • ASEAN states will take Indian security cooperation while continuing to trade with China, which limits how much strategic return the security investment generates.
• The obstacles are structural rather than policy-specific. Inadequate project financing, weak inter-agency coordination, and an implementation tempo incompatible with regional expectations recur identically across every theatre India engages.
• The corollary is uncomfortable: a policy correction that consists of more summits, more partnerships and more declarations addresses none of the three.

The course correction the policy needs

• Conclude the AITIGA review with enforceable rules of origin, or accept that the agreement will remain politically indefensible in India.
• Rebuild the economic leg, whether through a revived RCEP conversation or through upgraded bilateral agreements with the region’s larger economies.
• Create a single delivery authority for connectivity projects, since the diagnosis of fragmented coordination is now two decades old and unaddressed.
• Sequence the North-East correctly — internal connectivity, power and industrial capacity before external corridors, so the region can capture value rather than watch it pass.
• Consult before building, and treat consent under the Forest Rights Act and the Sixth Schedule as a design input rather than a clearance to be obtained.
• Diversify away from the Myanmar land route while it is unavailable, through the Bay of Bengal maritime corridors, coastal shipping and the Chattogram and Mongla port arrangements when politics permits.

What the scholars say

Would a common Asian market follow?

• The proposition that Look East could produce a common Asian market on the European model does not survive contact with Asia’s political conditions, and the reasons are structural rather than sequential.
  • A common market requires pooled sovereignty; ASEAN’s foundational norm is non-interference and consensus, and its members have declined even a supranational secretariat, let alone a common external tariff.
  • Europe integrated among states of comparable size and income; Asia contains Singapore and Laos, China and Bhutan in the same space, and the asymmetry defeats symmetrical rules.
  • Europe’s integration rested on a settled security order; Asia’s largest economies are rivals with live territorial disputes, and no customs union survives an unresolved border.
  • There is no shared political project of the kind that made the European venture possible, and no equivalent of the Franco-German reconciliation at its centre.
• What Asia has built instead is a dense web of overlapping trade agreements — ASEAN’s own community, the bloc’s agreements with each dialogue partner, RCEP, and the CPTPP — which produces integration without institutions.
  • This is functionally significant and politically shallow: it liberalises trade without creating obligations that constrain states.
  • India’s non-membership of RCEP places it outside the deepest layer of this web, which is the practical answer to whether India can lead the process.
• A realistic Indian objective is not a common market but a favourable position within Asian value chains — which requires competitiveness, logistics and regulatory reform at home far more than it requires new regional institutions abroad.

Contemporary developments

• The 22nd ASEAN–India Summit at Kuala Lumpur, October 2025 made the AITIGA review the headline item and designated 2026 the ASEAN–India Year of Maritime Cooperation.
• The Plan of Action for the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, 2026–2030 was adopted in 2026, linking cooperation to ASEAN’s own 2045 vision and naming supply-chain resilience, green transition, digital governance and maritime domain awareness.
• The AITIGA review missed its 2025 deadline and continues through 2026 with time-bound deliverables on customs, market access and rules of origin.
• India–Vietnam ties rose to an Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in 2026, with a trade target of US$25 billion by 2030 and Vietnam’s accession to the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative.
• The Kaladan project’s deadline has moved to 2027, contingent on conditions in Chin and Rakhine that neither India nor the Myanmar authorities control.
• The India–Myanmar border fence and permit regime remain contested by two state governments and by community organisations across three states.

Conclusion

Judged against its own founding purpose — to attach a newly opened Indian economy to the fastest-growing region within reach, and to secure India a place in the Asian order it had been written out of — the policy has substantially succeeded. India sits at every table that matters in the Indo-Pacific, holds ASEAN’s highest partnership tier, and is a wanted security partner in a region that once regarded it with suspicion.

• The failures are concentrated and they are the same three in every domain.
  • Economically, the policy has produced a widening deficit and an agreement India cannot defend, and its withdrawal from the region’s central trade architecture cost credibility it has not recovered.
  • Physically, the land bridge is built at both ends and broken in the middle, and the middle is a civil war.
  • Domestically, the North-East has received unprecedented investment while remaining, in the design of the policy, a route rather than a participant.
• What connects them is delivery capacity, not intent, which is why “course correction” has meant the same prescriptions for fifteen years and why the prescriptions have not been acted on.
• The realistic verdict is that India’s strategic position in the east is now considerably stronger than its economic position, and that this is an unstable configuration: partners who cannot trade with India at scale will eventually discount what India offers in security.