Border Provinces in Foreign Policy: China’s West and India’s Northeast

China has given greater leeway in economic matters, to these provinces of the west under its Western Development Strategy (WDS). In India, too, there is greater attention being paid to connecting India’s Look East Policy (LEP), a foreign policy initiative, with the economic development of the Indian Northeast. Might the WDS and the LEP be compared?

Guns, Blankets and Bird Flu

The India-Myanmar border regions form a forgotten frontier in the Indian and global imagination but violence, trade and transnational challenges such as drug-trafficking and the spread of diseases have kept both a regional identity as well as specific community identities alive.

Disaster Relief Politics

In Asia, as important as the aid itself is, is who provides it and how. There is clearly politics – foreign policy interests and domestic factors of both donor and recipient nations – involved in humanitarian relief and assistance.

Chinese Presence in the Indian Ocean

It is important to start with that oft-repeated statement made by a Chinese admiral, “We can no longer accept the Indian Ocean as an ocean of the Indians.” Apart from a sense of nationalist hurt that Indian reactions to the statement portrayed and continue to portray, the statement succeeded also in evoking a realization hitherto largely ignored or even suppressed that the Indian Ocean which had long ago ceased to be India’s ocean.