The Historical Roots and Evolution of India’s Eastward Engagement

India’s Act East Policy is often described as a creation of 2014, the year it was formally announced. But that date marks a renaming, not a beginning. The story of India’s engagement with the East stretches back more than two thousand years, through traders, monks, scholars, and kings who carried ideas and goods across the Bay of Bengal. To understand why India turned eastward in the 1990s and why it continues to do so today, we need to look at three distinct layers of history: the ancient civilisational links, the strategic isolation of the Cold War decades, and the dramatic reorientation that produced the Look East Policy. Each layer explains a part of the policy we know today.

Ancient connections across the Bay of Bengal
Temples, epics, and shared culture
The Cold War years and strategic distance
Two different paths
The 1990s reorientation and the Look East Policy
Why India turned east
From Look East to Act East
What changed and what stayed the same
Why this history matters

Ancient connections across the Bay of Bengal

Long before modern diplomacy, India and Southeast Asia were bound together by trade and culture. From around 500 BCE, expanding land and maritime trade routes carried Buddhist and Hindu ideas into the region, shaping its religious and political life for centuries. This was not conquest. It was a slow process of exchange driven by merchants, teachers, and priests who travelled the sea lanes connecting the subcontinent to the islands and mainland to its east.

The scale of this influence was enormous. Southeast Asia remained within the Indian sphere of cultural influence from roughly 290 BCE until the fifteenth century CE, with Hindu and Buddhist elements absorbed into local kingdoms. Southern Indian traders and religious figures were a dominant cultural presence in the region until about 1500 CE. Interestingly, while Buddhism became a major religion across Southeast Asia, it eventually became a minority faith in the land of its birth.

Temples, epics, and shared culture

The physical evidence of these connections still stands today. Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Borobudur temple in Indonesia are among the most striking examples of a religious and architectural legacy rooted in Indian traditions. Stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata spread widely and remain popular in local versions across the region. In Bali, people still follow a form of Hinduism adapted to their own culture, and texts like the Manu-smriti were carried east and reworked to suit indigenous societies.

What makes this history important for foreign policy is that the relationship was built on commerce and cultural emulation rather than military domination. Indian culture was largely invited by Southeast Asians to meet their own political and religious needs, spreading through trade and local adoption rather than outside imposition. There was only one major Indian military expedition to the region, the Chola campaign against Srivijaya in 1025 CE. This long memory of peaceful, mutually beneficial contact is exactly what later policymakers wanted to revive.

The Cold War years and strategic distance

Despite these deep roots, India’s connection with the East weakened sharply in the decades after independence. The early signs were promising. After 1947, India under Jawaharlal Nehru placed a strong emphasis on building close ties with newly independent Asian states, based on shared values of anti-imperialism and a vision of Pan-Asian solidarity. The significance of Southeast Asia had been recognised even earlier by strategic thinkers like K.M. Panikkar.

However, the polarised politics of the Cold War pulled India away from the region. As global affairs split into two camps, and as India leaned increasingly on its partnership with the Soviet Union, it found itself isolated from the geopolitics of a Southeast Asia that was largely aligned with the Western bloc. The economic story made this worse. India followed an inward-looking, state-controlled model, while countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the ASEAN nations were integrating rapidly into global trade and growing at remarkable speed.

Two different paths

By the late 1980s, the gap between India and its eastern neighbours had become hard to ignore. The contrast was stark: a dynamic, export-driven East Asia on one side, and an Indian economy on the other that was struggling under heavy regulation and approaching a serious financial crisis. The civilisational links remained in the background, but in practical terms India and Southeast Asia had drifted into separate worlds. The stage was set for a major rethink, and external events would soon force one.

The 1990s reorientation and the Look East Policy

Two shocks at the start of the 1990s changed everything. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which removed India’s most important strategic partner and left it searching for new relationships in a world where the United States had emerged as the sole superpower. The second was a severe balance of payments crisis at home, which pushed India to abandon decades of economic protectionism. The 1991 liberalisation reforms under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao were designed to attract investment and open the Indian market to global capital by reducing tariffs and dismantling state monopolies.

Out of this combination of crisis and reform came the Look East Policy. Launched in 1991 under the Narasimha Rao government, it aimed to develop political contacts, increase economic integration, and build security cooperation with the countries of Southeast Asia. It marked a genuine shift in how India saw the world, finally recognising the strategic and economic weight of a region it had long neglected.

Why India turned east

The reasoning behind the policy was practical, and several factors pushed in the same direction:

Economic opportunity: The booming economies of East and Southeast Asia offered exactly what a newly liberalising India needed, namely markets, capital, and technology to fuel rapid growth.

Avoiding exclusion: As regional trade blocs deepened, India worried about being shut out of regional economic integration and wanted a seat at the table.

Strategic diversification: With the Soviet partnership gone, India needed new partners and a more pragmatic, less ideological foreign policy.

The policy delivered steady institutional progress. India became a sectoral dialogue partner of ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1996, and joined the East Asia Summit in 2005. Over time the focus widened from pure trade to a broader agenda covering economic cooperation, political partnership, physical connectivity through road and rail, and security. A significant driver in this later phase was the rise of China, which gave the policy a strategic dimension aimed at maintaining balance in the region.

From Look East to Act East

By 2014, the foundations laid over two decades needed an upgrade. The honest assessment was that the Look East Policy had achieved a great deal but had sometimes been criticised as more talk than action. The new government decided that a more energetic, action-oriented approach was required to meet modern challenges, including the growing influence of other regional powers.

The Act East Policy was announced on 13 November 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the East Asia Summit in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar. It was presented as an upgrade rather than a replacement. The shift from “Look” to “Act” was meant to signal a move from passive observation to active participation in the affairs of the region.

What changed and what stayed the same

The continuity is real. Act East and its earlier form, Look East, are best understood as two sides of the same coin, representing continuing phases in the evolution of India’s approach to the Asia-Pacific. But the differences matter too. In several important areas the Act East Policy has gone well beyond what the Look East Policy achieved in over twenty years, partly because the India of 2014 was far stronger and more confident than the crisis-hit India of 1992.

The newer policy widened the scope to cover strategic, security, and defence ties alongside economics. It emphasises connectivity, trade, culture, defence, and people-to-people contact at bilateral, regional, and multilateral levels, often summarised through the themes of commerce, connectivity, and culture. A defining feature is its focus on developing India’s North Eastern Region as a land bridge and gateway to Southeast Asia, turning a previously landlocked frontier into a corridor for trade.

This is where the full circle becomes clear. The ancient sea routes that once carried Indian culture eastward are now being matched by modern infrastructure projects like the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project. The policy that looks so contemporary is, in many ways, an attempt to rebuild a relationship that is more than two thousand years old.

Why this history matters

Understanding the background of the Act East Policy helps explain why it is so durable. It is not the project of a single government or a reaction to a single crisis. It rests on three reinforcing foundations: a civilisational memory of deep cultural and trade ties, the strategic lessons of Cold War isolation, and the economic logic that emerged from liberalisation in the 1990s. Each phase added something the next one could build on.

This layered history also gives the policy flexibility. As the global order shifts once again, with rising tensions and renewed great-power rivalry, India’s eastward engagement continues to adapt while keeping its core purpose intact. The names have changed from Look East to Act East, and the emphasis has moved from trade to a broader strategic partnership, but the underlying direction has remained remarkably steady for over three decades.

What do you think? Does the renaming from Look East to Act East represent a genuine change in India’s foreign policy, or is it mainly a difference in tone and ambition? And how much should ancient cultural ties influence the strategic and economic decisions a country makes in the present day?

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Table of Contents

Ancient connections across the Bay of Bengal 🔗

Temples, epics, and shared culture 🔗

The Cold War years and strategic distance 🔗

Two different paths 🔗

The 1990s reorientation and the Look East Policy 🔗

Why India turned east 🔗

From Look East to Act East 🔗

What changed and what stayed the same 🔗

Why this history matters 🔗