What are the motivations for India’s ‘Look East’ policy? (2007, 20 Marks)
The Look East Policy was not a doctrine written in advance. It was the improvised response of the P. V. Narasimha Rao government in 1991–92 to a state that had run out of foreign exchange, lost its superpower partner and found its own neighbourhood offering nothing it could use. Its motivations are best sorted by levels of analysis, after the “images” of Kenneth N. Waltz (Man, the State and War, 1959): system, region, state and identity.
Systemic motivations
- The Soviet collapse removed India’s main arms supplier, diplomatic shield and rupee-trade partner at once, making diversification of partners a necessity.
- A unipolar moment demanded a wider recasting: normalisation with Israel (1992), warmer ties with Washington, and relevance in the world’s fastest-growing region.
- China’s rise in Southeast Asia, economic first and then military, made Indian presence a hedge. Beijing’s arming of Myanmar’s junta after 1988 and its access to the Bay of Bengal drove India’s shift, by 1993, from backing Myanmar’s democrats to engaging its generals: the policy’s first realist test.
Economic motivations
- The 1991 balance-of-payments crisis and the liberalisation of Rao and Manmohan Singh needed export markets and foreign capital, which the ASEAN “tiger” economies had and the Soviet bloc never did.
- The East Asian model offered a template of export-led industrialisation.
- India became an ASEAN sectoral dialogue partner in 1992 and a full partner in 1995; the 2003 framework agreement and the 2005 East Asia Summit seat later widened the agenda.
Regional motivations
- South Asia’s stagnation: SAARC, paralysed by India–Pakistan rivalry, offered little trade, so growth had to come from beyond the subcontinent.
- Repairing a Cold War estrangement: ASEAN read India’s 1971 treaty with Moscow and its 1980 recognition of the Vietnam-installed Heng Samrin regime in Cambodia as Soviet alignment, while India’s naval build-up and its Sri Lanka and Maldives interventions fed fears of a regional hegemon. Outreach was partly reassurance.
- Later reinforcement: after September 2001, counter-terrorism gave a shared security agenda with states facing their own insurgencies.
Domestic and identity motivations
- The North-East: a landlocked, insurgency-hit region, cut off from its outlets at Partition, could be developed only through the east; security cooperation with Myanmar against Naga and Manipuri insurgents was an early, quiet motive.
- Civilisational return: Buddhism, the Ramayana traditions, Angkor and Borobudur, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Asian Relations Conference (1947) let India present the turn as a return, not an entry. Rao’s 1994 Singapore Lecture grounded India’s claim in history rather than commerce. Amitav Acharya (Civilizations in Embrace, 2012) shows that Indic ideas were localised in Southeast Asia without conquest, which gives this claim substance.
Weighing the motivations
| Phase | Dominant motive |
|---|---|
| 1991–2003 | Economic survival and diversification |
| 2003–14 | Institutional entry and managing China |
| 2014– (Act East) | Strategy in the Indo-Pacific |
- Neoclassical realism explains the mix best: systemic shocks set the direction, domestic economic crisis set the timing and form.
- C. Raja Mohan (Crossing the Rubicon, 2003) places the policy within India’s wider post-1991 turn from ideology to pragmatism.
- Liberals stress interdependence; critics note that the North-Eastern motive stayed rhetorical for two decades.
Conclusion
India looked east because the old world had ended, its economy needed Asia and its neighbourhood could not supply growth. What began as economic survival matured into strategy, and that continuity of motive explains why the policy has survived every change of government since 1991.