Regional Cooperation in South Asia: India’s Neighbourhood First Policy and BIMSTEC’s Role

Regional cooperation is a long-standing pillar of India's foreign policy in South Asia. India's Neighbourhood First Policy (NFP) sets out a vision of trust, connectivity and shared prosperity with its neighbours, building on the consultative and non-reciprocal logic of the earlier Gujral Doctrine (Aryal and Bharti 2023). The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is one of the principal platforms through which India tries to put this vision into practice. This paper argues that BIMSTEC gives India a useful, Pakistan-free space to pursue the goals of the NFP, particularly in connectivity, trade, culture and security. However, the paper also argues that BIMSTEC's weak institutions, slow implementation and heavy reliance on Indian leadership limit how far the organisation can deliver on these goals (Bhardwaj 2025; Konwer and Hazarika 2025). BIMSTEC is therefore presented as a necessary, but not sufficient, instrument of India's neighbourhood diplomacy. The paper is based on a qualitative, document-based method, drawing on government statements, BIMSTEC's own documents, and the wider scholarly literature.