ISAS Working Papers

Existing discussions of regionalism in Asia reveal diverse ideas of Asia’s composition, with a lack of agreement about which states should be included/excluded in representations of ‘Asia’. This paper seeks to engage the debate by looking at the case of Indian political elites and their efforts to frame India’s own regional space within these larger questions on regional spaces in ‘Asia’ and the ‘Asia-Pacific’. It aims to locate contemporary representations of India’s regional space in a comparative historical framework by looking at India’s earlier tryst with different regionalist projects like the Asian Relations Conference (ARC), New Delhi, in 1947 and the Afro-Asian Conference, Bandung, in 1955. It would be argued that such similarities/differences in Indian representations of its regional space over time can be related to how Indian political elites have sought to negotiate Indian state identity, and as a result, India’s role beyond its own borders from the time of its independence in 1947.