The West typically occupies an overwhelming place in our geopolitical and economic calculus, reinforced by 9/11 and Pakistan. In contrast, despite years of urging by businessmen and diplomats, India has not looked east with great determination; the execution of the "Look East" policy of the 1990s has at best been anaemic. The visit last week to India of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, leading a business delegation, and the visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the first week of November must be used to reinforce India's cause and effect in the region that extends from the Bay of Bengal to the Pacific Rim.

There is much at stake, besides boosting India-ASEAN trade from its present $9 billion (Rs 43,200 crore) a year, a mere third of earlier projections and a fraction of what China deals in the 10-nation ASEAN region which it considers its backyard. For India this region is also of great strategic importance and directly affects projection of power outward from the Andamans. India should leverage its new global status in the war against terrorism to network with increasingly worried governments in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. It will bring common cause and friendship to the table and elevate India's status in ASEAN.

India has a toe-hold, with its Dialogue Partner status in ASEAN, and warm bilateral relationships with Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. However, except for its relatively robust economic link with Singapore, India still relies on the old saw of cultural links and Soviet-era relationships for the rest. Unless sentimentality is waived and hardball diplomacy, business and intertwining of it, which India has effectively used with the West, applied to ASEAN, India will have only itself to blame when it looks east and sees a setting sun.

Positive Blow

The rot in India's sporting system catches up with another bright athlete

The performance by Indian athletes at the Asian Games, India's best in two decades, caused much celebration that died down quickly with the announcement that distance runner Sunita Rani had tested positive for dope. The athlete from Punjab was stripped of her gold and bronze medals and her records and returned home in disgrace. It's not a new scenario for Indian sport which has for several years now been ridden with accusations of a widespread and sustained campaign of doping.

In the past four months, three Indians including Rani have tested positive in major competitions. Dope-control procedures in India are very lax as they are conducted by a laboratory in Delhi that is not certified by the International Olympic Committee. Athletes cleared by the Government for overseas competition have to clear tests before departure. When they then test positive abroad, it indicates that there is more than a rogue athlete acting on his or her own. It indicates that there is official connivance in a sustained and supervised doping programme.

Indian athletes who test positive are punished and usually left to cope with humiliation on their own. The accessories to the "crime"-officials, doctors, coaches-continue in their jobs. The presence of "sports medicine" doctors from the old Soviet states hired to help Indian athletes may have coincided with improved results in athletics in the past two Asian Games, but coincidentally so has the bad news about the use of performance-enhancing drugs. In Rani's case a compromised and corroded sporting system has caught up with one of India's brightest athletic hopes. The argument that doping is a self-evident truth in international sport will not help put her athletic career back on track.