EXTERNAL Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that the NE region of the country is a region into whose progress and development the country can dovetail its ‘Look East’ policy. With the gradual integration of this part of the country ‘through cross-border market access,’ the NE states can become the bridge between the Indian economy and South-East Asia, the fastest growing and dynamic region in the world, he said. Mr. Mukherjee who was delivering a keynote address at a three-day conference on India’s Look East Policy and the challenges for sub-regional cooperation said that the country’s Look East policy was based on the vision of the first Prime Minister of the country Late Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to make India the pivot around which issues relating to economic and security in South East Asia would have to be considered.

It has also the approach enunciated by former Prime Minister Late P V Narasimha Rao that the Look East policy is not merely an external economic policy. It is also a strategic shift in the country’s vision of the world and its place in the evolving global economy. “Most of all, it is about reading out to our civilizational Asian neighbours in the region who by emerging as regional economic powerhouses, also present us with a model worthy of emulation,” said Mukherjee.

One of the major objectives of the policy is to develop ties with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). As part of its endeavour to strengthen its linkages with the region and reinforce its Look East policy, a sub-regional grouping, called BIST-EC, comprising Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand was established in 1997. With the addition of Myanmar and, in 2004, of Bhutan and Nepal, the grouping came to be known as BISTEC of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation.

With the paradigm shift from state centralism to interdependence and global and regional cooperation, India is aware of the geo-economic potential of its NE region as a gateway to East and South-East Asia. The very geographical location of the NE states has made it the doorway to Southeast and East Asia and vice versa, a doorway for these economies into India, said Mukherjee. He also apprised the audience, who included also the Deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India Montek Singh Ahluwalia and senior bureaucrats of the NE States and Central Government and investors, that he had requested the Indian Ambassadors to Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand to attend the conference and they had obliged him with their presence.

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