Look-east to act east: Contextualising India's engagement with Singapore.

The paper highlights how the prevailing geo-political environment in the past as well as in the presenthas conditioned India's engagement with its Southeast Asian neighbours. With a special reference to India-Singapore bi-lateral relations, the paper seeks to analyse way international economic and political set-up influences a nation's engagement with each other. A nation interprets its bi-lateral as well as international engagement by interfering on its national interest -What serves better its survival remains at the core of such inferences. The foreign policy of nations accordingly gets oriented to that end. Hans. J. Morgenthau's construction of ‘national interest in explaining nation's behaviour holds effective while analysing the actions of an actor. India's relations with Singapore show how the prevailing global situation weighted on the trajectory of their bi-lateral conduct.