Has India’s ‘Act East’ Policy Lost Its Urgency?

Missed diplomatic chances in Southeast Asia suggest that New Delhi’s decade-old policy may be running out of steam just as regional rivalry intensifies.

For more than a decade, India’s Act East policy has promised a deeper political, economic and civilisational immersion in Southeast Asia. Yet in recent years, as strategic contests sharpen across the Indo-Pacific, New Delhi’s voice in its eastern neighbourhood has appeared curiously subdued. Missed diplomatic openings and muted responses to regional crises now raise an uncomfortable question: has India’s much-vaunted eastern outreach begun to lose momentum just as the stakes are rising?

Unveiled by Narendra Modi in 2014 and fleshed out the following year by his minister of state for external affairs, V.K. Singh, the Act East policy was meant to be more than a rebranding of the tentative ‘Look East’ outreach of the 1990s. It sought, explicitly, to “revitalise and re-energise” India’s civilisational, strategic and economic ties beyond its eastern frontiers. Although the policy implementation did work well initially as well as for some more time ahead, it seems to have lost the energy for an alert and consistent progress. This leads to another question whether the Indian establishment has stopped viewing the said policy as equally relevant as it was a decade ago, or is it that ever-so-observed Indian trait of beginning with a bang, achieving some milestones, basking in that glory and allowing slackness to creep in thereafter, that is responsible?

Temple tensions

The recent flare-up between Cambodia and Thailand over the Prasat Preah Vihear temple offers a telling illustration. Though the dispute has simmered for decades, its latest eruption in late May 2025 dragged on until July, leaving dozens of people dead. In October, at the 47th ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, United States President Donald Trump, true to his taste for diplomatic theatre, stepped in to broker a ceasefire between the two sides. Amid the flurry of international manoeuvring, one absence was striking. India, despite its deep historical stakes in the region and its proclaimed Act East ambitions, issued not a single public statement, offered no mediation and displayed no visible diplomatic interest at all.

Why was it so? Prasat Preah Vihear, an eleventh century Hindu temple, having become a subject of dispute between officially Buddhist nations of Cambodia and Thailand, for being a matter of common heritage claim, can be viewed, apart from as a bilateral issue, also as a matter pertaining to the Indic civilizational family, the progenitor of both Hindu and Buddhist faiths, where both Cambodia and Thailand indisputably belong. India, being the ‘mother country’ of the civilization, could have been expected to make clear its stand on the matter or at least put forth an opinion from the view-point of a ‘family elder’ or a naturally concerned nation. Ideally speaking, India should have actively approached both Cambodia and Thailand, proposing to mediate between them and facilitate an amicable solution at the end. India could even have done with invoking Buddha’s message of peace, while making an appeal to both the warring nations to calm down, which it had the full moral right to do. At the worst, both of them or either of them would have shown their discomfort at India’s proposal for some reason or the other, which looks impossible at least theoretically, since both of them enjoy good bilateral relations with India, apart from being the members of ASEAN of which India is a Summit-level partner, having over three decades of progressive partnership. At best, India could have succeeded in actually facilitating and working out a respectable and mutually workable solution between them.

Missed mediation

The point here is when President Trump of a physically as well as culturally distant America can work out a ceasefire treaty between them, (which was eventually put under suspension by Thailand within less than a month’s time), would it have been difficult for a physically much closer and culturally well-connected India to do at least the same, that lasted longer?

Apart from the general angle of being the mother country of Indic civilization and the elder of the Indic family, India has also been specifically associated with Prasat Preah Vihear, coinciding with or rather facilitated by its announcement of Act East policy in 2014. India cochaired the International Coordinating Committee meant for safeguarding and development of that historic site in 2014-15, along with the host country Cambodia, and has been taking active interest in its restoration and preservation from 2019-20 onwards, funding the work with USD 5.55 million in aid, in 2020-21, which is under progress as on date. With such credentials to back, India not only had a duty to care about but also had a kind of right to have a say in the context of the conflict.

The question then arises is why India allowed this opportunity to pass by? Was it afraid of ruffling Trump’s feathers after having denied him the pleasure of credit-taking for halting Operation Sindoor? No, that does not seem plausible at all, as there was enough time for India to think and act decisively in the Cambodia-Thailand matter before Trump actually jumped in.

Then, was India afraid of China’s reaction, given the latter’s fixation with treating Southeast

Asia as its own backyard?

If that is so, then India has certainly committed a big mistake of signalling acceptance of China’s positioning, thereby practically ceding ground to its arch rival in the eastern Indo-Pacific. Rather, India should have acted in its own long-term interest of getting closer to the Southeast Asian nations through such opportunities, not bothering about China’s reaction or post-facto repercussions. After all, this part of the Indo-Pacific has been an age-old battleground for underlining civilizational supremacy between its Indic and Sinic components, and even if India has qualitatively kept itself far ahead and above of China for long, there is no guarantee of maintaining the same position in the dynamically shaped future for two reasons – China’s consistently aggressive actions of various nature for gaining grounds and occupying spaces in the region, physical and mental, and lack of matching rigour in India’s actions or even lack of action in many cases, for example, the instant one.

Although it may not be possible to read the Indian policy-makers’ minds accurately, with regard to India’s total silence in this Cambodia-Thailand matter, India’s decision to play it safe or follow its time-tested policy of wait and watch, can safely be presumed, which it has been following practically everywhere, except in the case of Pakistan, that too lately. Whatever may be the case, India cannot afford to have a slackened approach towards guarding own image and visibility, thereby protecting credibility and interests in this eastern theatre of the Indo-Pacific.

Lack of timely responses or appropriate actions not only harms them all, but, more dangerously, also creates a negative and burdensome precedent. India has let such openings slip before. After Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979, New Delhi had a genuine chance by 1984 to step in as a familial mediator within Southeast Asia. Instead, it squandered that role by tilting openly towards Hanoi, at odds with the prevailing position of the ASEAN states at the time, apparently under pressure from the Soviet Union’s strategic embrace of Vietnam. The result was not leverage but lasting distrust.

But now, when circumstances have much improved overall, propelling India into an unprecedently stronger position, it can ill-afford to miss such heaven-sent opportunities any more.

(The writer is a research scholar in international relations. Views personal.)