This is the first analysis of India-U.S. foreign policy during the formative period of their relations to be able to use the Nehru Papers, the seminal source for understanding the worldview of India's first Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs, 1947-1964. Nehru established the twin pillars of Non-Alignment and Asianism as the foundation of India's foreign policy. Read alongside declassified U.S. documents and available declassified Chinese documents, they provide the foundational understanding of U.S.-India suspicion and India-China rivalry.

When P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh launched India's "Look East" policy, it was only the first stage of the strategy to foster economic and security cooperation with the United States. But "Looking East" became an end in itself, and Singapore a valid destination, largely because of Lee Kuan Yew. He had been trying since the 1950s to persuade India's leaders that China would steal a march on them if they neglected domestic reform and ignored a region that India had influenced profoundly in ancient times. With his deep understanding of Indian life, close ties with India's leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru on, and sound grasp of realpolitik, Lee never tired of stressing that Asia would be "submerged" if India did not "emerge." Looking East to Look West recounts how India and Singapore rediscovered long-forgotten ties in the endeavour to create a new Asia. Singapore sponsored India's membership of regional institutions. India and Singapore broke diplomatic convention with unprecedented economic and defence agreements that are set to transform boundaries of trade and cooperation. This book traces the process from the earliest mention of Suvarnadbhumi in the Ramayana to Lee Kuan Yew's letter to Lal Bahadur Shastri within moments of declaring independence on 9 August 1965, from the Tata's pioneering industrial training venture in Singapore to Singapore's Information Technology Park in Bangalore. It explains the part Lee played in India's emergence as a player in the emerging Concert of Asia. History comes alive in these pages as Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, who had eight long conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, tells the story in the words of the main actors and with a wealth of anecdotes and personal details not available to many chroniclers.

Charts India's uneasy relationship with the PRC since the 1962 War and New Delhi's burgeoning strategic realignment.

India's Eastward Engagement: From Antiquity to Act East Policy presents India's engagement with its extended eastern neighbours from ancient times to the present. It argues that this engagement has been long rooted in India's geographical location, its civilizational evolution and historical transformations. The book critically examines all the important phases--Nehru and Post-Nehru periods, and Look East and Act East policies. It exposes the widely entertained myths about India's eastward engagement and also underlines the prospective directions in which the Act East Policy may unfold in the years to come.

This volume will explore the role of India and China in regional geopolitics, with a focus on Southeast Asia. It highlights some of the key events and turning points in the evolving equations since the times of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister. In six chapters, it shows how Indias prominent position in devising the regional architecture in Asia was diluted after the Bandung era, especially after the Indo-China war in 1962. The author maintains that, relative to its earlier status as a major champion of Asian regionalism, India had become a political and diplomatic non-entity, if not a pariah, in Southeast Asia by the 1980s. While China emerged as the most important political entity in the region over the next three decades, India gradually made substantial inroads into the ASEAN scene, more so after its emergence as a 'rising' power in the post-Cold War era and economic reforms of 1991. 00This book revisits the question of contemporary Asian security from an Indian vantage point, posing critical questions about the future of regional leadership in Southeast Asia, and demonstrating how it depends as much on the India-China-Southeast Asia relationship as on China-US-Japan relations.

"On 1 October 1949, the People's Republic of China came into being and changed forever the course of Asian history. Power moved from the hands of the nationalist Kuomintang government to the Communist Party of China headed by Mao Tse Tung. All of a sudden, it was not only an assertive China that India had to deal with but also an increasingly complex situation in Tibet which was reeling under pressure from China. Clearly, newly independent India, with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at its helm, was navigating very choppy waters. Its relations with China progressively deteriorated, eventually leading to the Indo-China war in 1962. Today, more than six decades after the war, we are still plagued by border disputes with China that seem to routinely grab the headlines. It leads one to question what exactly went on during those initial years of the emergence of a new China"--Publisher's summary.