Volume 17, No. 1, 2020
Look East (Act East) Policy And Emerging Scenario Of North-East Indian Trade With Myanmar
Bikash Mazumdar , Urmila Nath
Abstract
During the pre-British period, India’s foreign trades with different countries were wonderful. India was quite famous for her exporting goods specially textile handicrafts. However, that bright image, somehow, was erased during the British rule for dual exploitation of economic resources, as already explained by Dadabhai Naoroji (The Drain Theory). In the post-independence era also, India, could export her agricultural and agro based products to most of the western countries. In the recent trend, ie., after economic reforms, when a new trade policy has been prescribed and implemented by Narsimha Rao’s government, the trade direction altered from west to East. That revolutionary policy was the Look East policy, which was implemented for making the base of foreign relationship with the eastern countries like Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia Vietnam etc. Though the outlook of that policy was to strengthening the economic relation with these countries, yet some internal causes were also come to light that was to break the vicious chain of China that has been constructing along the boundary countries of India. It is worth mentioning that the look east policy became the Act East policy in 2014 by Present Prime Minister of India, Shree Narendra Modi that extend the view of the look east policy to economic as well as cultural unite with the eastern countries. Since independence, Indian-Myanmar foreign relation was one of the remarkable one. However, since 1980’s and after 1991, India, specially the North Eastern Region, which is presently known as the sports centre of India, has become significant hub for trade with Myanmar, Bangladesh, Laos, Thailand etc., With growing importance of the critical foreign relations, India, now try to footprint in the South East Indian countries through the union like SAARC, ASEAN etc. In our paper, however, the discussable area is limited to emerging reasons of Look East policy and the growing trend and composition of NER trade with Myanmar.
Pages: 448-456
Keywords: Look East Policy, North East India, Myanmar