India's Neighbourhood: Relations and Connectivity

BRICS, G20 and Regional Groupings already covers the multilateral side of India's regional diplomacy: BIMSTEC, SAARC's stalling, and the INSTC corridor. This note covers the bilateral half that the Mains syllabus names separately, "India and its neighbourhood relations": who India exercises with, which corridor runs where, and the specific frictions that recur.

The framing: Neighbourhood First, and the doctrine behind it

Two named policy frames sit behind everything below, and both are tested as vocabulary.

The Gujral Doctrine, set out by I. K. Gujral as External Affairs Minister and then Prime Minister (1997-98), is a set of five principles for dealing with South Asian neighbours, and its defining idea is non-reciprocity: India, as the larger power, gives what it can to Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka in good faith without demanding equivalent return. The doctrine's other pillars are non-interference in internal affairs, non-use of territory against another in the region, respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, and settling disputes bilaterally through negotiation. Note the asymmetry deliberately built in: the doctrine explicitly excludes Pakistan from the non-reciprocity principle, which is why it is described as a South Asian rather than an all-neighbours doctrine.

Neighbourhood First, launched in 2014, is the current operative policy: a consultative, non-reciprocal and outcome-oriented approach organised around connectivity (road, rail, waterway, digital), development partnership, disaster relief and health diplomacy. It is often summarised through five Sanskrit terms, Samman (respect), Samvad (dialogue), Shanti (peace), Samriddhi (prosperity) and Sanskriti (culture). The continuity worth noticing is that Neighbourhood First inherits the Gujral Doctrine's non-reciprocity rather than replacing it.

Bilateral military exercises: the pairing is the whole question

India runs a named annual army exercise with almost every neighbour, and the exam format is reliably the same: give the exercise, offer the wrong partner country. The pairings worth fixing precisely:

Two further details a statement-based question likes to attach to these: the exercises are held alternately in India and the partner country, rotating the host each edition, and they are army-to-army exercises, distinct from the naval drills India runs with the same neighbours (SLINEX with Sri Lanka, Bongosagar with Bangladesh), which is a separate list with its own names. The single most common trap is swapping Mitra Shakti and Sampriti, since both are counter-insurgency exercises with a neighbour and the names give no clue which is which.

Connectivity: where each corridor actually runs

India's neighbourhood connectivity projects are tested on their endpoints, and the wrong endpoint is the standard distractor.

The India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway is planned to run from Moreh (Manipur) to Mae Sot (Thailand) through Myanmar. It does not connect Guwahati to Bangkok, a plausible-sounding pairing of two larger, better-known cities that a question can offer instead.

The reason so much of this effort exists is a single piece of geography. India's entire Northeast connects to the rest of the country through the Siliguri Corridor, the narrow strip in West Bengal between Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh that is roughly 20 to 22 km wide at its narrowest and is nicknamed the "Chicken's Neck". Every road, rail and pipeline link to eight states passes through it, which makes it both a logistics bottleneck and a strategic vulnerability, and it is why India keeps pursuing routes to the Northeast that go around it, through Bangladesh or Myanmar, rather than simply widening domestic capacity.

The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project is exactly such a route, reaching the Northeast through Myanmar instead of the corridor, and it is genuinely multi-modal, which is why its sequence matters: Kolkata to Sittwe (Rakhine State, Myanmar) by sea, then up the Kaladan river to Paletwa (Chin State), then by road to Zorinpui on the Mizoram border. The sea leg runs about 539 km and the river leg about 158 km; the Paletwa-to-Zorinpui road is the segment that has held the project up.

The BCIM (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar) Economic Corridor was envisaged to link Kunming (China) with Kolkata. India's enthusiasm for it cooled as BCIM became difficult to separate from China's wider Belt and Road framing.

Chabahar Port, on Iran's southeastern coast, is developed by India for one overriding strategic reason: it opens a trade and transit route into Afghanistan and onward to Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan entirely, a land route India is otherwise denied. It is not a naval base, not India's main crude-oil import terminal, and gives no access to the Mediterranean, three distractors that have been offered against it. Chabahar complements rather than replaces the INSTC corridor covered in the groupings note.

Also worth keeping straight because it is domestic and gets pulled into the same question: the East-West Corridor of the national highway programme runs Silchar (Assam) to Porbandar (Gujarat), not Dibrugarh to Surat.

The neighbours, one anchor fact each

The clause is "India and its neighbourhood relations", and each relationship has a durable anchor that outlives any particular year's news.

• Nepal: the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 1950 underpins the open border and the right of citizens to live and work in each other's country. The live territorial dispute is over Kalapani, Lipulekh and Limpiyadhura, which Nepal's revised map claims. Surya Kiran is the joint exercise.
• Bhutan: the 1949 Treaty, revised in 2007 to remove the clause under which Bhutan was to be "guided by" India on foreign policy, a change that matters because it is the standard example of a treaty updated to reflect a sovereign partner. Hydropower is the economic core of the relationship; Doklam (2017) is the security flashpoint.
• Bangladesh: the Land Boundary Agreement, finally implemented in 2015 through the Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, exchanged 162 enclaves and ended a roughly 300-year anomaly, the clearest case of India amending its own Constitution to cede and acquire territory. The Ganga Water Treaty (1996) governs Farakka; a Teesta water-sharing agreement remains the long-pending item.
• Sri Lanka: Katchatheevu was ceded in 1974 and the fishermen question recurs from it. The 13th Amendment to Sri Lanka's constitution, providing for devolution to provincial councils, came out of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987, which is why India keeps raising its implementation.
• Maldives: Ekuverin is the exercise; the Greater Male Connectivity Project is India's flagship infrastructure commitment, and the relationship swings with Male's domestic politics.
• Myanmar: carries both connectivity projects above, plus the Rohingya displacement and the post-2021 coup instability that complicates them. The Free Movement Regime, which had let people living near the border cross up to 16 km either side without a visa, was announced as being scrapped in February 2024 on internal-security and demographic grounds; what actually took effect from December 2024 is a stricter regime rather than an outright end, cutting the free-movement range to 10 km and requiring documents and biometric capture. Border fencing remains minimal in practice, and Nagaland and Mizoram objected to the change, since the border cuts through communities with kin on both sides.
• Pakistan: the Indus Waters Treaty (1960), brokered by the World Bank, allocated the three eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and the three western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) largely to Pakistan. India placed the treaty in abeyance in April 2025 after the Pahalgam attack, stating it would remain so until Pakistan credibly ends cross-border terrorism; a Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling in August 2026 held the treaty still binding, which India rejected as outside the court's jurisdiction. Treat the treaty's current status as contested rather than settled.
• Afghanistan: India's access runs through Chabahar, not Pakistan. India's visible development footprint includes the Afghan-India Friendship Dam (Salma Dam) and the Zaranj-Delaram highway.
• China: the boundary is undefined along the Line of Actual Control, with Doklam (2017) and Galwan (2020) as the recent flashpoints. The LAC is managed, rather than settled, through a series of confidence-building agreements, the 1993 Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the LAC and the 1996 Agreement on Confidence-Building Measures in the Military Field being the two foundational ones. Their practical significance is that they commit both sides to restraint and to not using force to alter the line, which is precisely what a border incident is measured against.

Communities that drive bilateral friction

Questions pair a community with a country, and the community is usually one whose situation directly shapes an India relationship.

The Madhesis are concentrated in Nepal's southern Terai plains, culturally and linguistically close to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh across the open border; their agitation over representation under Nepal's 2015 constitution is the reason the community is in the news, and is tied to a period of severe friction in India-Nepal relations. The Rohingya are a largely Muslim minority centred on Myanmar's Rakhine State, whose mass displacement into Bangladesh (and onward) made it a three-country issue for India. The Kurds, by contrast, have no South Asian connection at all: they are a West Asian community spread mainly across Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran, and a question offering "Kurds : Bangladesh" is relying on the name being familiar from headlines without the geography being anchored.

The Belt and Road Initiative, and why India objects

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's connectivity and infrastructure programme, linking it to partner countries across Asia, Africa and Europe through trade routes, ports and rail corridors. It is not a Russian, Japanese or Indian initiative, and the plain "whose initiative is it" question has been asked directly.

India's objection is specific and worth knowing as a reason rather than a slogan: the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a BRI flagship, runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, territory India claims, so endorsing BRI would mean acquiescing in a project routed through disputed Indian territory. India has therefore stayed out of BRI while most of its neighbours joined, which is the structural reason connectivity in this neighbourhood is a competitive space rather than a purely cooperative one.

Why this matters for the exam

Almost every question in this cluster is a matching or statement puzzle resting on one precise attachment: exercise to country, corridor to endpoints, community to country, initiative to sponsor. The distractors are built to sound right, a bigger city instead of the actual border town, a neighbour instead of the real partner, a familiar community attached to the wrong country. Anchor each pairing individually rather than remembering the cluster as a general sense of "India's neighbourhood policy", because the general sense is exactly what the wrong options are designed to survive. Where a fact has a live status (the Indus Waters Treaty most of all), note both the durable framework and the current position, since a question can test either.

Quick revision points

• Doctrine: the Gujral Doctrine (1996-97) rests on non-reciprocity towards South Asian neighbours, explicitly excluding Pakistan; Neighbourhood First (2014) carries that forward as Samman, Samvad, Shanti, Samriddhi, Sanskriti.
• Exercises: Mitra Shakti (Sri Lanka), Sampriti (Bangladesh), Surya Kiran (Nepal), Ekuverin (Maldives); held alternately in India and the partner country.
• India-Myanmar Free Movement Regime: announced scrapped Feb 2024; what took effect Dec 2024 is a tighter regime, free movement cut from 16 km to 10 km with documents and biometrics.
• India-China LAC: managed through the 1993 peace-and-tranquillity and 1996 military CBM agreements; boundary itself undefined.
• Trilateral Highway: Moreh (Manipur) to Mae Sot (Thailand) via Myanmar, not Guwahati to Bangkok.
• Kaladan: Kolkata to Sittwe by sea, Kaladan river to Paletwa, road to Zorinpui (Mizoram). BCIM: Kunming to Kolkata. East-West Corridor: Silchar to Porbandar.
• Siliguri Corridor ("Chicken's Neck"): roughly 20-22 km at its narrowest, the sole land link to the eight Northeastern states, and the reason routes through Bangladesh and Myanmar are pursued at all.
• Chabahar: access to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan; not a naval base, not an oil terminal.
• Anchors: Nepal 1950 Treaty and Kalapani; Bhutan's 1949 treaty revised 2007; Bangladesh LBA via the 100th Amendment (2015), 162 enclaves, Teesta pending; Katchatheevu 1974 and Sri Lanka's 13th Amendment from the 1987 Accord; Indus Waters Treaty 1960, in abeyance since April 2025.
• Communities: Madhesis (Nepal), Rohingya (Myanmar), Kurds (West Asia, not South Asia).
• BRI is China's; India stays out because CPEC runs through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

Test these pairings against real statement-based questions rather than re-reading them, since recognition is exactly what the distractors defeat.