Do we have the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment? One of the most obvious questions, even the cycle of heat waves engulfing India this summer, has been missing during the largest democratic practices as 834 million Indians are voting in the 2024 General Elections. Ironically, the election manifestos of both national and regional political parties have failed to commit to ensuring the right to a healthy environment for all Indians if they are elected to power on June 4, 2024. At best, environmental well-being is a non-issue in this General Election.

India’s External Affairs Minister, Mr Natwar Singh, while attending the ASEAN - plus 3 meetings and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Jakarta in July 2004, had noted that India was ready to provide security in the Malacca Straits and stressed that it was in India's national interest to ensure that the Strait remained a crime-free sea-lane.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has a geopolitical dimension that people outside the foreign policy circuit in India may not be sufficiently aware of. The ASEAN has always wanted to influence the shape of the regional order in Southeast Asia and the role of major powers in it. How can a group of ten relatively small countries aspire to manage the geopolitics of a region that is stalked by military or economic giants like the US and Japan and rising behemoths like China and India with populations of more than one billion each?

The East Asian Community has been propagated as the new harbinger of comprehensive security processes. The idea of an East Asian Community got an impetus with the December 2003 Tokyo Declaration between Japan and ASEAN. Although East Asia has witnessed sufficient degrees of ‘regionalization’, ‘regionalism’ still has a long way to go. The former refers to those processes, which come from markets and private investment flows while the latter emerges as a result of intergovernmental dialogues and treaties.

The unprecedented destruction caused by Tsunami waves on December 26 last year, is not only a rare phenomenon for Indian Ocean countries, but it is also unique as it witnessed intense diplomatic maneuvering in the name of aid. The aid flowing from donor countries carry not only humanitarian assistance but are also seen as a diplomatic tool used to further their foreign policy objectives. The first move in this regard was made by India while coping with the disaster on its eastern shores. It is interesting to note that despite suffering loss of almost 15,000 lives and need for Rs.

Amidst security threats, sporadic bomb blasts, international criticism towards one of the member states (Myanmar), the tenth ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) summit had successfully laid out its plans to achieve the objectives of ASEAN Vision 2020 in November 29-30 in Vientiane, Capital city of Laos.