There are three possible future articulations of India's Look East policy, each underpinned by a different conceptual orientation. Firstly, the Look East policy might be conceived as an extended security trajectory to project India's legitimate power and resist growing Chinese domination of the region. A second vision sees the Look East drive primarily as a strategy of economic cooperation based on globalisation and the pursuit of similar liberal policies by all the major states of the region. The third vision argues for a communitarian reading of the Look East venture, interpreting it in terms of sub-nationalisms and soft border exercises. While power, prosperity and community can be desired in equal measure, their policy implications vary, resulting in uneasy compromises, awkward bottlenecks and policy indecisions. Till India decides which image of space it wants to pursue, the power, market and community visions of the Look East initiative would keep playing against each other, generating complementarities as well as frictions.HOW A REGION is conceptualised determines to a significant degree a state's foreign policy towards it. Regions are configured primarily in terms of space. A region, in brief, connotes a particular kind of space, with its distinctive features and possibilities. A region usually embodies multiple notions, or rival conceptions of space. Accordingly, the meaning of a region not only changes over time but also varies across the notion of space underlying it. In simple terms, a region can be characterised or defined by three conceptions of space, although these definitions are often overlapping and are never exclusive in character. These concepts are region as power, as market and/or as community. In this study, we attempt to come to terms with the conceptual mapping of India's Look East policy.

The success of India's democracy hinges on the pivotal role played by its auxiliary institutions in negotiating major challenges through slow and persistent transformation. However, an objective audit of the performance of these institutions in the recent past would indicate a decline in operations and an acute crisis of corruption. Key institutions responsible for governance – Parliament, civil services, judiciary, the Election Commission, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Central Vigilance Commission, and the Comptroller and Auditor General – have been put under the spotlight by an alert and mobilized civil society, urging immediate measures for ensuring their operational efficiency and integrity. This essay undertakes a critical examination of the present performance and efficiency of major democratic institutions in India, in the light of their prescribed roles and the malaise of corruption that plagues them. It argues that in order to articulate a comprehensive institutional response to the problem, relevant measures of political reform and constant vigil by civil society would prove crucial. The article is divided into six sections; first, a brief outline of the structure and changing nature of the institutional political set-up in India is provided; the second section examines the existing literature on ‘corruption’, and the third section highlights the increasing incidence of corruption in India at various politico-administrative tiers. The fourth section delineates the inception and role of anti-corruption institutions in India, signifying the early response to corruption. The fifth section critically reviews the theoretical and statistical evidence of performance-decline in the major institutions at present and gauges the potency of corruption; the sixth section explores the existing and prospective institutional responses for tackling corruption and the final section presents concluding observations.

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