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What is known today as India's Look East Policy had its beginnings in the early 1990s. The decade of the 1990s can perhaps be considered as an important threshold in the annals of modern history. It marked the end of the cold war and the beginning of an altogether new framework of relations among the major powers of the world. It also marked the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century and from the second to the third millennium of the Christian era.
In the aftermath of the end of the cold war, the world appeared to be standing at the threshold of a new era, leaving behind a century that had witnessed two world wars and the nuclear brinkmanship of the cold war. With the aura of peace and expectations of a future secure from the ravages of war embracing the political horizon, nations were full of new hopes. It was but natural that in that new dawn, India, like much of the rest of the world, would seek new opportunities and look towards new frontiers to serve its national interests. It meant thinking out of the box and seeking fresh paradigms to build a matrix of external relations in tune with the brave new world that seemed to be shaping up all around. India's Look East Policy, launched in the early 1990s, was a significant step in that direction.
Briefly, that policy meant connecting India more firmly to South East Asia, East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region and building bridges to them, especially through India's eastern states - both in the north and the south. These states had played precisely that role from times immemorial but it had got atrophied during the colonial era and then by the intensity of the cold war. On the eve of India's independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had highlighted his dream of reviving that role for India when, at the first Asian Relations Conference convened by him in New Delhi, he talked of the resurgence of Asia and of its rising nations like India, China and Japan. He referred to their ancient glory and expressed the hope that they would contribute towards forging a new world order in which colonial exploitation would have no role...