One of the major shortcomings of independent India’s diplomacy has been Delhi’s failure to promote regionalism in the Subcontinent and beyond in the Indian Ocean. Last week’s summit in Kathmandu of the so-called BIMSTEC forum has raised hopes that India might start breaking from that unfortunate but persistent negative trend. The era of global grandstanding in the early decades after Independence left little room for knitting the neighbourhood together. The Partition of the Subcontinent and its bitter legacies made it harder to promote regional cooperation. India’s inward economic orientation dissipated the regional commercial connections inherited from the pre-Independence era. It was only when the statist model broke down at the turn of the 1990s that India turned to regionalism.
The adoption of the logic of economic globalisation also opened the door, tentatively, for existing regional institutions, like the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Under its Look East Policy, India sought greater economic engagement with the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Delhi also moved to create new forums like the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) and the BIMSTEC, which aligns India with four South Asian neighbours — Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka — and two South East Asian neighbours, Myanmar and Thailand. Success, however, has been elusive. The SAARC remained ineffective because Pakistan tied progress in regional economic integration to a successful resolution of the dispute with India over Jammu and Kashmir. And Delhi could never mobilise the political and policy energy to turn BIMSTEC and IORA into active organisations. What has changed in the last few years is the new political will in Delhi to look beyond Pakistan and SAARC to advance regionalism.
