East of India, South of China: Sino-Indian Encounters in Southeast Asia.

AuthorMishra, Rahul
PositionBook review

East of India, South of China: Sino-Indian Encounters in Southeast Asia. By Amitav Acharya. Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hardcover: 260pp.

Southeast Asia is a "confluence zone" where personas of Indian and Chinese civilizations have met over several millennia through recurring and often coalescing waves. The India-China interface in Southeast Asia has long been a matter of scholarly debates, and particularly since India launched its "Look East" policy in 1992 (rechristened as the "Act East" policy in 2014). China's "Good Neighbourly Policy" and its recently launched Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have brought China-Southeast Asia relations into sharper focus.

Although several recently published books have probed the interplay between India and China in Southeast Asia, almost all of them have focused on either New Delhi or Beijing's perspective, or both. In this context, Amitav Acharya's book is a remarkably fresh piece of scholarly work because it looks at the issue from Southeast Asia's "own" perspective, thus aptly justifying the title East of India, South of China.

Moreover, instead of analysing the region as a mere theatre of rivalry, and Southeast Asia as a passive actor, Acharya considers Southeast Asia to be an active player which has vigorously shaped ties with both India and China, thus determining its own regional destiny. Instead of looking at India-China ties in binaries, Acharya explores India-Southeast Asia-China interplay to examine how their interactions have defined, and have the potential to redefine, Asia's future (pp. 217-18). Most importantly, he uses a normative lens to examine the triangular relationship, which, so far, has been mainly examined through the lens of geopolitics.

Acharya covers a broad historical canvass, beginning with the post-World War II era until Manmohan Singh's tenure as India's prime minister. However, much of his focus is on Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's era, from 1947 to 1964. Acharya has used declassified documents from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the 1950s and 1960s, which is another novelty of the book. Analysing the 1962 Sino--Indian War, Acharya argues that India not only lost territory to China, but also Southeast Asia's respect as India was no longer considered a credible major power in the region. Furthermore, India's own compulsions--such as its war with Pakistan in 1965, its role in Bangladesh's liberation war in 1971, Cold War politics...

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