Exploring New Frontiers

Entrepreneurs from the Northeast can play a vital role in connecting markets and producers of South Asia and Southeast Asia

- Bhairavi Jani

For centuries, way before the Look East Policy was even envisioned, India’s Northeast was the country’s connect to Southeast Asia. In fact, maps dating just a hundred years before India’s Independence show a region completely integrated with South Asia and Southeast Asia – which today constitute India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. Southeast Asia was even known as ‘Farther India’ not too long ago. There were intermarriages between clans and royal families of these regions and there was a continuous exchange of knowledge, culture and trade. And, India’s Northeast served as the bridge between these civilisations and nations.

India’s partition in 1947, and its border issues with earlier East Pakistan and then Bangladesh and the long military rule in Myanmar hampered the seamless connectivity that India’s Northeast enjoyed with mainland India and Southeast Asia. Now with the resolution of almost all border issues with Bangladesh via the BIMSTEC agreement, a more democratic atmosphere in Myanmar and the Act East policy of the Union Government in Delhi; the nature of peopleto-people exchange in the region is drastically shifting. And, it is heralding a time of great opportunity for India’s Northeast to once again become the bridge between India and Southeast Asia.

A Time for New Opportunities