Shifting trends in India and Southeast Asia relations

India's Relations have passed through many phases and experienced ups and downs with Southeast Asia, a region which has indeed occupied a place in India's foreign policy. But the options and capabilities that were required to achieve desired goals and objectives were never put into operation until recently when India suddenly felt a sense of envy for the overall development and progress that region had accomplished within a period of three decades, and evolved to the extent of helping India to integrate itself with the global economy. That the line of thinking in India's relations towards Southeast Asia found its expression more concretely in the then India's Prime Minister Narasimha Rao's Singapore lecture in 1994, the precursor of what is now known as India's Look East policy. From that time onwards, India mobilized its diplomatic, political and economic resources to its optimal level so much as to achieve a multi-dimensional relation with the countries of Southeast Asia.

Had India realized two decades earlier the importance and the potentialities of the region and the opportunities that it could provide to it, India's relations with the region would have been more firm and mature than what they are now. To get a proper perspective on India's relations towards Southeast Asia and the forces and the circumstances that shaped those attitudes, it is necessary to have an introspection of the history of India-Southeast relations. When the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken a special interest in making better the relation with the south east by changing the Look East Policy to the Act East Policy, this paper deals with the evolution of relations between India and ASEAN and retrospect the major treaties with the south east.