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 globalisation 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 we’re giving away to integration, command was replaced by contracts, and control by liberalisation. These structural changes also forced the Indian economy to liberalise and globalise, 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. Meanwhile, the Gulf War had imposed heavy costs upon the economy through rising fuel costs and import bills to finance which there was no foreign exchange whose reserves had fallen to an abysmally low level of $1.2 billion in June 1991, which looks absurd today in comparison with our current reserves of $700 billion.

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The economy was on the brink, and the country was forced to liberalise and globalise its economy. There was also an urgent need to develop strategic relations with new friends in a world that was turning friendless for India. Thus, in 1991, we started to look at the east ~ towards southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region ~ not only for trade, investment and economic collaboration, but also for security and defence co-operation as well as building strategic relationships with the Asian Tigers. China and Japan, the two biggest economies in the world, had........

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