India’s Contacts with GMS
The regional and sub-regional cooperation today is no longer confined to geographical parameters. The United States, for instance, remains an integral member of several Southeast Asian forums. But when it comes to India’s engagement with what is now called the GMS, their geographical linkages and therefore cultural homogeneity is not a mere construction of their political perceptions. It has been established without doubt that India and GMS share long geological history, the unfolding youngest mountain ranges and the same monsoon rhythm which has resulted in shared needs, values, rituals and cultures.14 The political distortion of this historical reality was to intervene only from the fact that India and Indochina were to be colonized by separate (British and French) powers and this was to result in their political segregation, undermining their continuum of cultures and interdependence of their communities since ancient times. The British, for instance, were to enforce their boundaries between Burma and Siam based on their security and economic (timber) interests.15 But such acts were to only further facilitate contacts between the liberation movements amongst these colonized people keeping their bonds alive. What remains of critical significance today is that this historical experience makes both Indian and Indochinese people extremely comfortable with each other and this remains the starting as well as central point of India’s current engagement with the GMS countries. 1 - Shared Experience, Common Values The contemporary phase of this long story of India’s contacts with the GMS countries begins from India’s freedom movement which had