The Eastern path~ I

The rising economic opportunities in the region offered further incentives to modify the Look East Policy to a refocused, proactive Act East Policy, more comprehensive in scope and outreach. To support a free and open Indo-Pacific, India formed the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) with the USA, Japan, and Australia and kept on making this engagement deeper and stronger, to the chagrin of China which has already extended its influence and penetrated deeply into the region through its BRI projects

- GOVIND BHATTACHARJEE

India's Act East policy was launched in 2014. As pointed out by Prime Minister Modi, it rests on four pillars: Culture, Commerce, Connectivity and Capacity. The policy was nothing but an action-oriented upgrade of the Look East policy that was launched by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1991-92, soon after India had embraced globalization by dumping its command-control based Nehruvian economic structure that had kept growth under a stranglehold ever since independence. Circumstances then forced India to direct its gaze eastward, and circumstances again forced India to refocus and re-strengthen its engagement with the east.

In 1991, the old-world order was crumbling fast. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Empire had imploded and disintegrated and the Cold War was over. Barriers that defined the pre-1991 world were giving way to integration, command was replaced by contracts, and control by liberalization. These structural changes also forced the Indian economy to liberalize and globalize, saving it from imminent collapse, and its foreign policy to become multidimensional replacing its earlier USSR-centric approach.

India then started seriously engaging with the USA, discarding its earlier attitude defined by mutual hostility and contempt to one of cooperation and closeness, culminating in the civil nuclear cooperation agreement of 2008. But engagement with the USA still lacked wholesome trust, the Russian Federation remained weak, and the USSR on which the Indian economy depended much existed no more. India's relations with SAARC countries, though old and with shared historical and cultural roots, were also fraught with lack of trust; besides the region was economically backward and could not offer much scope for trade and investment.