Abstract

India’s near east encompasses Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Indian states of the ‘Northeast’—Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Celebrated as a theatre of geo-economic connectivity typified by India’s ‘Act East’ policy, the region is key not only to India’s great-power rivalry with China, which first boiled over in the 1962 war, but to the idea(s) of India itself. It is also one of the most intricately partitioned lands anywhere on Earth. Rent by communal and class violence, the region has birthed extreme forms of religious and ethnic nationalisms and communist movements. The Indian state’s survival instinct and pursuit of regional hegemony have only accentuated such extremes.

The book, India's Near East: A New History by Avinash Paliwal, scripts a new history of India’s eastward-looking diplomacy and statecraft. Narrated against the backdrop of separatist resistance within India’s own northeastern states, as well as rivalry with Beijing and Islamabad in Yangon and Dhaka, it offers a simple but compelling argument. The aspirations of ‘Act East’ mask an uncomfortable truth: India privileges political stability over economic opportunity in this region. In his chronicle of a state’s struggle to overcome war, displacement and interventionism, the author lays bare the limits of independent India’s influence in its near east.

Speaker

Avinash Paliwal

Avinash Paliwal PhD is Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London, specialising in South Asian strategic affairs. A former journalist and foreign affairs analyst, he is the author of India's Near East: A New History and My Enemy's Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal, both published by Hurst.

Discussant

Bérénice Guyot-Réchard

Dr Bérénice Guyot-Réchard is a Reader in international and South Asian history at King's College London, with special expertise in the connections between state-making, nation-building and geopolitics, notably in border spaces like the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. She is the author of Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-62 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which won the James Fisher Prize in Nepal and Himalayan Studies 2017, and South Asia Unbound: New International Histories of the Subcontinent (Leiden University Press, 2023), edited with Elisabeth Leake.

She is currently working on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean since 1945, and writing a history of India’s contribution to the world order from the 18th to the 21st century.

Chair 

Anit Mukherjee

Anit Mukherjee is a Senior Lecturer at the King's India Institute. He joined King's after ten years in Singapore where he was an Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. From 2010-2012, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), New Delhi. 

He is the author of The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India (NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), which examines the role of civil-military relations and military effectiveness. He is the co-editor of India-China Maritime Competition: The Security Dilemma at Sea (Routledge, 2019) and India’s Naval Strategy and Asian Security (Routledge, 2015).

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