By Sreeram Chaulia
Can India seize the opportunities offered by its growing engagement with South Korea and Japan?
The state visit to India this week by South Korean President Park Geun-hye represents a significant opportunity to stretch New Delhi’s two-decade-long “Look East” policy and cement strategic and economic relations with a major emerging power.
Traditionally, India has concentrated more on Southeast Asian countries as the lynchpins of its quest to spread political influence and profit from the region’s economic dynamism. New Delhi’s relative neglect of the geographically more distant Northeast Asia, of which South Korea is a pivotal country, is gradually being redressed with a spectacular warming of ties between India and Japan.
If Japan is entrenching itself as a close strategic partner of India, can its main neighbor South Korea stay far behind? To host Park as a state guest just before Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrives for the Republic Day celebrations in India later this month is a propitious lineup of Northeast Asian powers who matter to India’s national security and economic growth. It is also a sign that India is thinking bigger, eyeing a horizon further from its own immediate neighborhood, and seeking a broader footprint than just being a subcontinental power nestled in South Asia.
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