By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 23 2004 (IPS)

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this week displayed his determination to forge closer economic ties with South-east Asia as a strategy to uplift India’s long-neglected north-eastern states and end decades of insurgency festering in the region.

Symbolically Monday, Singh, on the last leg of a three-day tour of the troubled region flagged off the first Indo-ASEAN Car Rally at Guwahati, the capital of Assam.

Assam is also in the ‘family’ of the ‘seven sisters of the north-east’ that includes, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.

ASEAN or the Association of South-east Asian Nations is an economic grouping that includes the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Burma.

The rally that will wind through Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia before culminating in Bangkok on Dec. 5 – to coincide with birthday celebrations of the Thai monarch – reopens ancient routes between India and Indochina that previously carried culture, religion and trade but were frozen when the Cold War broke out.

India’s north-eastern states which are well-endowed with natural resources such as petroleum, have borders with China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma. They are also home to at least 200 Indo-Burman ethnic and indigenous groups.

”The development of the north-east and its integration with the larger regional processes was one of the determining factors of India’s engagement with regional groupings like ASEAN and BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation),” Singh, a former World Bank economist said at the officially- televised function.

Besides India and Thailand, the members of BIMSTEC include Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Singh signaled his keenness to develop India’s ‘Look East’ policy soon after he took over as prime minister in May. His government, together with the office of Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra were the prime movers of BIMSTEC which held its inaugural summit in July, in Bangkok.

In Singh’s ‘Look East’ policy, the premier also revealed that India was seeking a closer alliance with ASEAN out of recognition that economic growth in the new millennium is centered in the Asia-Pacific region,

India’s trade with ASEAN countries, which stood at around 10 billion U.S. dollars annually, could go up to 30 billion dollars, said Singh in Guwahati.

”This is a welcome shift from India’s development strategy which was so far concentrated on its western seaboard facing the oil-rich Middle East and the western economies,” Ganganath Jha, a specialist on India’s north-eastern region at the Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), told IPS.

According to Jha, India’s plan to develop the north-eastern states had the twin objectives of bringing peace to the region by giving the people there a stake in confidence-building measures while reaping the economic benefits of interaction with prosperous ASEAN countries.

”Insurgency in the region feeds on lack of employment and opportunities for educated young people in the north-east,” he said.

India’s ‘Look East’ policy was crafted in the early 1990s when Singh was finance minister in the then Congress government.

”Historically we belong to an integrated region with many complementarities. Our cultural and civilisational ties run deep in time. These are being further strengthened by economic and trade links,” Singh said.

But bullets and bombs could threaten the premier’s grandiose economic plans and prolonged Indian army operations in the north-east have achieved little to curb violence and militancy.

For that reason New Delhi is determined, now, to try to seek negotiations with the dozens of rebel factions fighting for greater autonomy or independence in India’s northeast. At the same time, Singh’s government, too, is negotiating with neighbouring countries to seek their assistance in curbing cross-border rebel activity.

”Our government is willing to talk to any group which shuns the path of violence and seeks a peaceful resolution of all outstanding problems,” Singh said at a press conference on Saturday in Imphal, the capital of Manipur – as he began his three-day tour.

The Indian government has in recent times been engaged in negotiating peace with major insurgent groups operating in the north-east such as the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) and the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) which was flushed out of its camps in Bhutan, last year, by the Royal Bhutanese Army in a deal with New Delhi.

Late last month, India laid out a red-carpet welcome for Burmese military strongman, Senior General Than Shwe partly in gratitude for help in containing Naga insurgents who operate from both sides of the 1,700 kilometers-long Indo-Burmese border.

According to JNU’s Jha, India’s bid to stay in the good books of the Burmese generals, condemned by human rights groups as repressive and anti-democratic, was also a pragmatic recognition of the fact that Burma’s cooperation was critical for the ‘Look East’ policy to work.

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