In a first, MEA to be involved in North-East growth

In what is being seen as a significant move, the foreign office is now fully involved in the development of the north-east region as a strategic extension of India's foreign policy objectives.

For the first time, MEA is now deeply involved in the North-East, taking forward its new mantra of bringing India's foreign policy to its borders. After the first comprehensive group of ministers meeting on developing the North-East, foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee said infrastructure development had emerged as the single largest hurdle to not merely development of the region but the region's carrying capacity for India's foreign policy as well.

"Physical connectivity and infrastructure emerged at the meeting as crucial issues which need our immediate attention. For this purpose, our desire to cooperate with neighbouring countries to enable more efficient transit stands firm and we will be making all efforts to ensure that our objectives are achieved as quickly as possible," Mukherjee said.

It means India's foreign policy on countries like Myanmar would be dictated by these premises rather than anything else. It's a signal statement of Indian foreign policy that will not only affect India's Look East initiatives but also its neighbourhood policies.

Top priority would be given to transit through Bangladesh. According to sources, Mukherjee is personally involved in recrafting India's Bangladesh policy. Next on the list is a by-pass through Myanmar, for which the Kaladan multi-modal transport project is top on the list. High-level government sources said India would soon sign a formal agreement with Myanmar, including one for a rail line from Barak Valley into Mizoram.

Next on the list will be to link the north-east to Thailand through Myanmar. This would be India's real gateway to south-east Asia. The government also wants to reopen the Stillwell Road from the North-East into Kunming in China's Yunnan province. Further down the road are plans to improve transport links between Arunachal and Tibet (but within India.)

In all of these, Myanmar is clearly crucial to India's long-term strategic objectives, which therefore makes
clear why India's foreign policy towards Myanmar is the way it is.

Government sources described the meeting as a trend-setting exercise after Mukherjee chaired the first meeting of north-eastern state chief ministers along with A K Antony, Shivraj Patil, P Chidambaram and T R Baalu. The meeting came about as a result of the exhaustive efforts of Mani Shankar Aiyar, minister for north-east, who, in a concept note recently said, "All the government is doing within the region is proving inadequate... unless we are able, through an imaginative leap in foreign policy, defence policy, internal security policy and international trade policy, to spring NER from the geo-political trap".

Underlying the government's renewed interest in the region is undoubtedly the "dramatic improvement in connectivity" between mainland China and Tibet as well as the Tibetan plateau. Aiyar observed that the discrepancy in Indian and Chinese development paradigms was evident to the people living in the sensitive areas of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh which are both coveted by China.

The meeting, therefore, was an exercise in bringing together the principal actors in the region to work out a new development-foreign policy equation.

Mukherjee said in a statement, "What we are looking at here is a new paradigm of development whereby our foreign policy initiatives blend seamlessly into our national economic development. Given that we have, over 15 years of pursuing our Look East policy, put in place certain diplomatic and political structures, there is need now to make these structures work for our north-east region. Diplomatic initiatives urgently need to be converted into commercial opportunities."