These events mark a major departure from the unwritten rules of India’s recent engagement with Southeast Asia. Since the launch of the Look East policy in the mid-1990s, India has consciously avoided highlighting the deep cultural sources of its relationship with the region. New Delhi had good reasons for this underwhelming attitude. The earlier iterations of India’s cultural diplomacy turned out to be disastrous. India’s nationalist historians were right in drawing attention to the newly discovered evidence at the turn of the 20th century of the past interaction between the subcontinent and Southeast Asia. They were utterly wrong, however, in projecting the Southeast Asian kingdoms as India’s “cultural colonies”. Singing the glories of ancient India might have boosted self-esteem in a subjugated nation; but it played badly in the rest of Asia, itself in the new thrall of nationalism.

Equally unsuccessful were independent India’s early foreign policy initiatives on Asian solidarity. The decolonised nations had no desire to subordinate their emerging national identities to the notion of Asian unity; nor were there any takers in East and Southeast Asia (EAS) for the Indian claim that it was the “mother of all civilisations” in Asia.

An India that turned insular from the late 1950s had little to offer to Asia other than irritating homilies about ancient civilisational links or the modern virtues of non-alignment. As it returned to Asia in the mid-1990s, a pragmatic India recognised the value of focusing on economic cooperation, restoring physical connectivity, and shedding the earlier notions of cultural superiority.

... contd.