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India and Southeast Asia: Challenges and Opportunities. Edited by Baladas Ghoshal. New Delhi: Konark Publishers, in association with India International Centre, 1996. 127 pp.
This slim volume may be received as the first academic response to India's new policy orientation towards Southeast Asia, as part of its "Look East" priority in post-Cold War Asia. The volume has seven contributions of varying lengths and expertise and it comes to the reader as outdated, not only because it was published two years after the seminar on this subject was held, where these papers were presented, but also because rapid and extensive developments in India's relations with Southeast Asia, in myriad areas, have taken place during these two years. One would have expected the editor of the volume to highlight some of these significant developments in his introduction but he does not go beyond presenting a brief summary of the contributions.
It is quite in order to look back at India's policy towards its Southeast Asian neighbours while analysing recent developments. Almost all the contributors blame India, and for right reasons, for neglecting this region, but in doing so they are dealing with the theme at a broad generalized level, not going deeper into the strategic dynamics of inter-Asian relations and constraints imposed on India's policy by the Cold War. As a result, the volume does not give a proper place to India's very close relations with the Indochinese states nor does it underline the compulsions which led India to support the Vietnamese position in Cambodia. India's efforts to explain that its relationship with Vietnam had nothing to do with its strategic proximity to the then Soviet Union, and that India saw Vietnam as an ally in keeping China contained in Asia would not cut much ice. Strangely, the ASEAN members now acknowledge the same strategic logic, although Vietnam continues to be governed by a communist system. At least, Indian scholars should keep this perspective in mind and arrive at a balanced judgement, taking into account the imperatives of the Cold War which put India and the ASEAN countries on opposite sides of the global strategic divide. Indian contributions need not be...