1In principle, the MGCI remains an important symbol of India’s trust and India’s growing stakes in promoting multilateralism in international relations. Even when several of these MGCI programmes and outcomes cannot be strictly compartmentalized into multilateral and bilateral and, both issues and individual in both often overlap and compliment each other all the time, India wishes to ensure that multilateral forums will continue to get preeminence in India’s foreign policy. This is precisely because multilateral forums represent democratic norms and allow weaker and smaller countries to have a say in decision-making though it may often be the bigger and most powerful countries that may bear larger responsibility in the implementation of these decisions. In bilateral format, smaller and weaker nations are likely to be influenced by bigger and powerful nations. In the long-run, therefore, multilateralism remains the cardinal principle guiding India’s vision of MGCI.

2Second and related priority for India’s engagement with GMS remains one to ensure that local powers continue to sustain their autonomy and independence without any outside power dominating (or unduly influencing) their thinking and their decision-making processes. The Japanese sway over this area last time (during World War II) remains the one most interesting example from recent history. At the most visible level, this had resulted in bombing and occupation of several of these territories including frontiers of India’s northeastern region and its group of islands of Andaman and Nicobars.1 While this Japanese occupation may also serve as a catalyst and an inspiration to Southeast Asian nationalist movements – as Japan set up nationalist governments in Myanmar and Indonesia, supported the establishment in Southeast Asia of the Indian National Army, and promoted a government in exile under former President of the Indian National Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose – this is hardly an experience that needs to be replicated ever again.2 The American have also had their share of misadventures, all flowing from sense of being all-powerful and having faith in the finality of their military means.

3The lesser known story remains the one of the Communist China. While both Japanese and Americans may have come under public censure and also learnt their lessons, it is the increasing compulsions and ambitions of rising China that are likely to make it increasingly vulnerable to temptations of seeking this southeastward expansion; not to just connect to these least developed countries of the GMS but to actually ensure its access to open oceans.3 And though Chinese remain extremely cautious for ensuring their acceptability amongst their neighbors, even the Chinese have not been completely immune to using force in these territories in the past. China’s first post-liberation engagement with this region, code named “Mekong River Operation” was its military operations in January 1961 against the nationalists under Chiang-kai Shek’s Guomintang (or KMT).

4On 26^th January 1961, a combined force of three divisions of regulars from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), a total of 20,000 men, had crossed the frontier between Sipsongpanna and Kengtung state. In human waves, they swept down across the hills surrounding Mong Yang, Mong Wa and Mong Yawng. The campaign broke the back of the KMT in northeastern Burma. Beaten, Nationalist Chinese forces retreated towards Mong Pa Liao on the Mekong River, where 5,000 Burmese troops launched an attack. Their base was captured without much resistance – and when the Burmese troops marched in, they found large quantities of US-made arms and ammunitions. When the news hit the papers in Rangoon, violent demonstrations were held outside the US embassy on Merchant Street. Neither the Burmese nor the Chinese, however, have ever acknowledged that the PLA formed the core of the forces that drove the KMT out of the eastern border areas.4 Any recurrence of such an eventuality does not augur well for India’s future and the future of GMS countries. And MGCI remains one of several initiatives by several countries to ensure that such episodes of history are never to be repeated.

5To sum up, the idea of the MGCI has been driven by the desire to explore alternatives to the realist paradigm and to emphasize on norms and values becoming the basis of inter-States ties. The MGCI was, accordingly, launched not to strengthen military and economic cooperation as basis of India’s engagement with the GMS but to rekindle cultural and civilizational linkages between India and these countries.5 The interactions have also since grown from being purely cultural to economic and military, as also from being purely multilateral towards strengthening bilateral initiatives that both strengthen cultural and people to people cooperation, as also their infrastructure links apart from the many other objectives for mutual benefit. The main areas of cooperation within the MGCI remains culture, education, tourism, and transport and communications. In the words of India’s former External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, spoken at their inaugural MGCI meeting in Vientiane on 10^th November 2000, leaders had agreed to launch the MGCI, with a “political willingness and aspirations aimed at strengthening our traditional bonds of friendship” and it is in this larger perspective that New Delhi continues to evolve its future initiatives within the MGCI.