India’s Act East Policy and Implications for Southeast Asia

The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the upgrading of India’s erstwhile “Look East Policy” (LEP) to a more action-oriented “Act East” strategy at the India–ASEAN summit in Myanmar in November 2014. Since then, much debate and discussion has taken place on the nature and content of the strategy. A large part of the debate has been speculative, since India is yet to come out with an official vision statement for it. However, various pronouncements by India, as well as the shifting pattern of its engagement with countries to its East, are beginning to throw greater light on the strategy. This chapter discusses the features of the strategy as discernible till now and emphasizes its geographic scope and strategic depth. It discusses the specific relevance and implications of the Act East strategy for Southeast Asia. While India’s engagement with ASEAN is likely to become more comprehensive and strategic over time, the region would need to be prepared for the implications of India playing a more active role in regional affairs.

Act East: What it Means

One of the noticeable aspects of the Act East strategy has been the lack of any specific articulation about it from the Indian establishment. This could well be due to the strategy being an evolving one. Apart from its own evolution through the Indian strategic prism, Act East, clearly, is trying to take note of the rapid and complex developments in the region, particularly changes in the economic and security dynamics.

An analytical understanding of Act East, since its announcement a year ago, has been largely gleaned from a number of official statements emphasizing India’s eagerness to play a proactive role to its East. Most of these statements are attributable to Prime Minister Modi, who has contextually alluded to Act East on several occasions. As mentioned earlier, the first of these was at the ASEAN Summit in November 2014 in Myanmar, when he announced the upgrading of the LEP to the action-oriented Act East policy.¹ He mentioned Act East again during his visit to South Korea in May 2014, emphasizing the country’s importance as a partner in the policy.² Soon after, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj underlined India’s efforts to engage more deeply with Southeast Asia through the Act East policy and described Thailand as a significant partner in this respect during her visit to Bangkok in June 2015.³ The Indian President Pranab Mukherjee also mentioned the policy during his address to the Heads of States of the Pacific Island countries in Delhi in August 2015.⁴ Prime Minister Modi provided the most emphatic conceptual illustration of the strategy to date during his visit to Singapore in November 2015, more on which will be discussed later.

Notwithstanding these various utterances, some confusion continues to prevail over the precise scope and content of the policy. The main reason for the confusion could be the absence of an official vision statement from India outlining the policy. Nonetheless, a few aspects of the policy since its first mention by Prime Minister Modi a year ago are becoming increasingly evident and can be pieced together as part of a broader regional construct to be adopted within the larger rubric of future Indian foreign policy. The most distinct among these aspects are the far greater geographic scope of the policy and its strategic depth compared with the LEP. It is clear that the policy aims to posit India as a prominent regional actor — an objective consistent with the Modi government’s ambition of achieving greater global and regional geostrategic influence. While the specific dimensions of the policy would become clearer over a period of time through its contextual mentions, the shifting pattern of India’s engagement with its Eastern neighbours and the Asia-Pacific region would increasingly reveal greater insights into the policy.

Geographic Scope

A conspicuous feature of Narendra Modi’s foreign policy has been his almost equal robust engagement of the East and the West. During his first one and a half years in office, apart from the immediate neighbourhood of...