During his visit to Singapore, Mukherjee will release a book on Subhas Chandra Bose’s speeches in the region during the early 1940s. If the Indian National Army is a reminder of the more recent links between India and Southeast Asia, the plans to build an international university at the ancient seat of learning Nalanda are about discovering deeper civilisational bonds between India and Asia.

This year, Indian tourist arrivals in Singapore is likely to touch one million. India now needs to leverage this impressive flows to deepen contact with the ten member ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) as a whole.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent offer to negotiate an “open skies” agreement with the ASEAN needs to be quickly translated into a reality. Equally important is to get states like UP, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh to improve their basic infrastructure and make it easier for Asian tourists to come to the many Buddhist sites in northern India.

If the “Buddhist circuit” has been crying for an accelerated development, so is an ‘Indian heritage” circuit in South East Asia. From Seam Reap, Cambodia which hosts the spectacular Angkor Wat temples to the remains of the Champa Kingdom in Vietnam to Yogyakarta and Borobudur in Indonesia, the rich Indian cultural heritage in East Asia is yet to make a mark on the Indian middle classes that have acquired a new wanderlust.

If Indian ignorance is part of the problem in restoring the richness of our shared cultural geography with East Asia, so is resistance from vested interests to an expanded economic relationship with the region, especially in the trade domain. India’s trade with the 15 other members of the EAS was about US$ 80 billion in 2006. In contrast China’s trade with this group in the first five months of 2007 was more than US $ 200 billion.

... contd.