Origin and Architecture

• India’s eastward orientation came to the fore in the early 1990s after the Cold War ended. The collapse of the USSR — an Indian ally — forced India to look for new partners and to reassess emerging power structures and its own place in them. The Look East Policy was formulated in 1991.
• Since then: strong economic and commercial ties, investment possibilities, strategic alliances, and cultural and historical links with the eastern neighbours.
• The India–ASEAN relationship and BIMSTEC are both motivated by the LEP. Originally aimed at Southeast and East Asia, the policy was reworked to include Bangladesh — energy, transport, security.
• Under Act East, India also looks to Southeast Asia and, through the India–Central Asia Dialogue, westward to Central Asia.

The forums that let India engage its wider neighbourhood while marginalising Pakistan. 1991 (Look East Policy formulated after the Soviet collapse) → 1997 (BIMSTEC · Indian Ocean Rim Association) → 2000 (Mekong–Ganga Cooperation) → 2015 (BBIN Transport Agreement) → Act East (Southeast Asia + India–Central Asia Dialogue)

The strategic point

The eastern orientation was one instrument of India’s distancing from SAARC. Each new forum widened the circle of engagement while leaving Pakistan outside it.

The Northeast Dimension

• Bangladesh is vital to India’s communication with its own northeastern states — therefore the gateway to the eastward reorientation. India’s development assistance and commercial engagement are driven by three considerations: access to energy supplies and commercial markets for a growing economy, domestic security, and India’s rising importance as a regional and global power.
• Focus on re-linking the Northeast with Bangladesh by road, rail, water and air — which explains the rise in the expenditure budget of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region, from ₹562.78 crore in 2014-15 to ₹2,657.87 crore in 2019-20.
• The Northeast is the gateway to Southeast Asia. Linkages benefit Bangladesh too — markets for its jute, garment and leather industries, and development of its economically backward eastern districts. Bangladesh has expressed eagerness to partner in the India–Myanmar–Thailand trilateral highway.
• Strategically, the linkages bring India closer to Southeast Asia and raise its influence there. With the QUAD and the Indo-Pacific becoming the new theatre of world politics, the Bay of Bengal gains importance and Bangladesh becomes a key partner in India’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

Bangladesh is not only a key part of ‘Neighbourhood First’ but central to ‘Act East’: “We see Bangladesh as a key neighbour and a valued partner not only in South Asia but also in the broader Indo-Pacific region.”

S. Jaishankar

Connectivity under Act East

• The India–Myanmar–Thailand trilateral highway; the Kaladan Multimodal Corridor; Sittwe Port; the Feni bridge; restored rail links; inland waterways between Sonamura and Munshiganj.

From Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific

Geopolitical imagination

A mental map in which there is no single way of framing the world — and power contests change this mental topography. “Asia-Pacific” and “Indo-Pacific” are two such constructs defining twenty-first century geopolitics; despite overlap and efforts to change the official vernacular, a tension remains between them.

Two constructs, two centres of gravity

• Asia-Pacific emerged in the 1960s and was institutionalised through the formation of APEC in the 1980s. Two shortcomings: it was not inclusive of important regional countries such as India, and it did not take into account the growing importance of the Indian Ocean for world maritime trade.
• It was Japan that saw the need to accommodate both shortcomings and, with support from Australia and the United States, championed the concept of the Indo-Pacific. Debate over the shape of the region is far from settled, and with that lies the promise of ongoing rivalry.
• The Indo-Pacific has emerged as the geopolitical epicentre of the twenty-first century, shaping global trade, security dynamics and normative contestations over regional order. It encompasses a vast maritime space stretching from the eastern coast of Africa to the western shores of the Americas, hosting nearly 60% of global GDP and facilitating two-thirds of global energy flows and over 90% of international trade by volume (Brewster, 2021). Its significance lies not only in economic centrality but in the intensifying rivalries that traverse it — between a rising China and a recalibrating United States, and in the strategic responses of middle powers such as Japan, Australia and, increasingly, India.
• The conceptual emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a unified construct represents a shift from the earlier Asia-Pacific paradigm, reflecting the securitisation of the maritime commons and the growing salience of the Indian Ocean in global power politics. The region houses 38 states, about 62% of global GDP and half of world trade.
• Authorship — Shinzo Abe’s “confluence of the two seas” and “broader Asia” supplied the intellectual frame, drawing on Dara Shikoh. Chokepoints such as Hormuz and Malacca carry more than half of maritime oil trade.
• Strategic content — joining the Pacific and Indian Oceans into a single theatre is what makes the Quad, FOIP, IPEF and the EU’s Indo-Pacific Strategy coherent. Indian stake — it moves India out of the South Asia box and beyond South-East Asia, where the Look East policy had stopped, and supports the ambition of being net security provider. The change of vocabulary is a change of strategy.

India’s response to the Indo-Pacific

• Formulation — given by PM Modi at Shangri-La (June 2018), resting on “inclusiveness, openness and ASEAN centrality and unity” — deliberately not a containment framework.
• Institutional participation — the Quad, upgraded to summit level; IPEF, where India joined the Overarching Agreement and Pillars 3 and 4 in 2024; the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, which the United States has joined; and the Indian Ocean Rim Association.
• Doctrinal instruments — Act East, SAGAR, Project Mausam, and the “net security provider” ambition.
• Bilateral architecture — the 2015 Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region with the United States; the Act East Forum with Japan; the Joint Strategic Vision with France for the Indian Ocean Region (2018).
• Maritime capability — Malabar with Japan as a permanent participant since 2015, the Andaman and Nicobar build-up, and associate partnership in the Combined Maritime Forces from 2023.
• European dimension — the EU’s Indo-Pacific Strategy (2021) and the national strategies of France, Germany and the Netherlands have brought Europe back into Asian waters, which New Delhi now welcomes. India has accepted the geography, joined the institutions, and refused the alliance.