Explain the major flaws in India’s ‘Look East Policy’. Is it possible to steer and implement the policy successfully in view of China’s emergence as a high-tech power in Asia-Pacific? (2011, 30 Marks)
India’s Look East Policy began in 1991–92 as a turn toward Southeast Asian markets after the balance-of-payments crisis and the end of the Soviet partnership. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh widened it to the Asia-Pacific. Its flaws lie in design and delivery rather than direction. Whether it can be steered successfully against a technologically dominant China depends on what success is taken to mean.
The major flaws
- No defined content. The policy had no founding document. P. V. Narasimha Rao’s Singapore Lecture (1994) never used the phrase, so the policy was easy to declare and hard to audit.
- Lopsided trade design. Under AITIGA (in force 2010) India removed duties on about three-quarters of its tariff lines, while Indonesia freed only about half of its own. Loose rules of origin let Chinese goods enter through ASEAN, and the deficit reached US$45.2 billion in 2024–25.
- Mainland blindness. The policy ran by sea and air. The land routes through Myanmar, the Kaladan project and the Trilateral Highway, came late, remain unfinished and still lack a motor vehicles agreement.
- The North-East as transit. Rubul Patgiri and Dilip Gogoi (South Asian Survey, 2022) argue that a neoliberal corridor model has brought little dividend to the region it claims to serve.
- Weak execution. Responsibility is split across several ministries, lines of credit go undisbursed, and most Indian investment in ASEAN goes to Singapore alone. C. Raja Mohan judged in 2014 that Delhi’s “default impulses remain insular”.
- Strategy outrunning economics. India won seats at every regional table (East Asia Summit, 2005) while staying a modest trader. Sanjaya Baru’s argument that strategic weight follows economic performance explains the cost.
Can it be steered and implemented against a high-tech China?
The difficulty is real. China and ASEAN are each other’s largest trading partners, with trade near US$1 trillion in 2024. The October 2025 ACFTA 3.0 upgrade extends their agreement into the digital and green economy. Chinese telecom equipment, submarine cables, e-payments and electric vehicles are woven into the region, and plants relocating to Vietnam or Thailand stay inside Chinese supply chains. India cannot match this on volume.
But success need not mean displacing China.
- Hedging creates demand. Kuik Cheng-Chwee (2008) shows that Southeast Asian states hedge: they take China’s economics while insuring against its power. A credible second partner is valuable even at smaller scale.
- India competes in kind. It offers digital public infrastructure (the UPI–PayNow link with Singapore, 2023), pharmaceuticals, space services, and defence exports such as BrahMos to the Philippines. Amitav Acharya adds that ASEAN’s norms favour inclusive, non-coercive partners.
- Steering has improved. The policy became Act East in 2014, with a separate mission to ASEAN (2015), a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (2022) and an Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Vietnam (6 May 2026), which also joined the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative.
- Implementation has not. At the Manila economic ministers’ meeting of 22 September 2026, the AITIGA review was still mired in “complexities”, and the Myanmar corridors remain closed by civil war.
| Requirement | Present status |
|---|---|
| Rebalanced AITIGA | Review unfinished, Sept 2026 |
| Single delivery agency | Still fragmented |
| Technology offer | DPI, space, defence |
| North-East stake | Weak local participation |
Conclusion
The flaws are largely self-inflicted and therefore fixable: rules of origin, delivery capacity and a North-East that takes part in the policy. China’s technological lead rules out parity, not success. If India aims to be Southeast Asia’s indispensable second option rather than China’s rival for primacy, the policy can be steered successfully, but only if its economic offer catches up with its strategic one.