“Despite the potentialities, India’s ‘Look East Policy’ requires a major course correction.” Discuss. (200 words) (2012, 15 Marks)
The Look East Policy grew out of the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis and the Soviet collapse. Its intellectual statement was P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Singapore Lecture of 8 September 1994, which never used the label. By 2012 the diplomatic gains were plain, but the economic and physical foundations lagged behind them. That gap makes the statement largely correct.
The potentialities
- Economic: Southeast Asia offered the markets and capital that South Asia, among the world’s least integrated regions, could not. Trade rose from about US$2 billion in 1991 to US$128.38 billion in 2025–26, about a tenth of India’s global trade.
- Institutional: sectoral partner (1992), full dialogue partner (1995), the ASEAN Regional Forum (1996), annual summits (2002), founding seat in the East Asia Summit (2005), Strategic Partnership (2012).
- Strategic: Evelyn Goh calls ASEAN’s strategy omni-enmeshment, drawing every great power in so that none dominates. That gives India a welcome role as China rises.
- Domestic: the North-East could become a gateway instead of a periphery.
Why correction is needed
- Economics behind strategy. Under the goods agreement (AITIGA, in force 2010) India cut tariffs faster than several partners did. The deficit grew from about US$5 billion to US$45.2 billion in 2024–25, and Chinese goods leaked in through loose rules of origin.
- The delivery deficit. The Kaladan project (agreed 2008) and the Trilateral Highway are unfinished. Paletwa fell to the Arakan Army in January 2024, so the land bridge is built at both ends and broken in the middle.
- A corridor, not a constituency. Thongkholal Haokip (India’s Look East Policy and the Northeast, 2015) argues that the North-East is treated as a trade route, not as a set of livelihoods.
- Insular habits. C. Raja Mohan wrote in November 2014 that the gap between potential and reality had steadily grown, and that Delhi had much to do before the policy gained credibility in Asia.
What correction has meant
Barack Obama urged India in 2010 to “engage East”. In 2014 Narendra Modi renamed the policy Act East, with four Cs (culture, commerce, connectivity, capacity building), an Indo-Pacific frame and a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with ASEAN (2022). Vietnam’s elevation to an Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (6 May 2026) and its entry into the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative show the strategic correction working. The economics lag: at the Manila economic ministers’ meeting (22 September 2026) the AITIGA review was still caught in “complexities”. The agenda remains to:
- enforce rules of origin in a rebalanced AITIGA
- give one agency charge of connectivity delivery
- build the North-East’s internal links before external corridors
- use sea routes while Myanmar is closed
Conclusion
The statement is right about economics and delivery, and less right about strategy, which Act East has largely corrected. India is a wanted security partner but a modest trading partner, an imbalance that cannot last. The correction still due is domestic: competitiveness and the capacity to execute.