Two Decades of India's Look East Policy: Partnership for Peace, Progress and Prosperity

The contemporary Look East policy, conceived, conceptualized and implemented in the early 1990s first by former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War and in the context of the extraordinary domestic economic challenges confronting the country, had its own contextual rationale, imperative and compulsion. Since then, in the last nearly two decades, it has evolved and acquired its own momentum and, arguably, critical mass to give it a new and greater meaning, relevance, depth and content in the changing context of geo-politics and globalization. Today, many believe, it is a defining partnership among some of the most dynamic and geo-strategically important countries of the world, including those which are the future economic power houses of the Asia-Pacific, impacting not only regional but global equations. The compilation of essays in this volume written by eminent diplomats who, as practitioners and propagators, helped shape and give direction to the Look East policy, contains incisive and in-depth candid accounts of the policy and its evolving complexion.