Chapter 5: The Forgetting and the Remembering

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On the night of 21 July 1947, a twin-engine Dakota lifted off from Jakarta with a cargo that no manifest could properly describe. At the controls was Biju Patnaik — thirty-one years old, Odia, a pilot who had trained at the Delhi Flying Club at seventeen and joined the Royal Indian Air Force at twenty. His passengers were Sutan Sjahrir, the Prime Minister of Indonesia, and Mohammad Hatta, its Vice President. The Dutch controlled Java. They had reimposed colonial authority after the Japanese surrender and were tightening the noose around the Indonesian republic’s fragile leadership. Nehru had asked Patnaik to get them out.

The Dutch threatened to shoot down the aircraft. Patnaik flew anyway. He took Sjahrir and Hatta to Singapore, then on to India, where they could broadcast Indonesia’s case to the world. It was not the first time Patnaik had made the run — in 1946, Nehru had asked him to ferry planeloads of medicine and humanitarian supplies to Indonesian freedom fighters, and he had done it. His wife, Gyan Devi, accompanied him on the 1947 mission. The Indonesian government later conferred on him the Bintang Jasa Utama — one of its highest civilian honors — and designated him Bhoomi Putra, a “son of the soil,” a status rarely granted to a foreigner.

Here is a detail worth pausing on. The man who physically connected independent India to the Indonesian independence struggle was from Odisha. Not from Delhi, not from Bombay, not from Madras. From the land of Kalinga — the same coast from which, for a thousand years, sadhabas had sailed to the islands of the archipelago. When Nehru needed someone to fly into Dutch-occupied Java, he asked an Odia pilot. And Patnaik did not merely succeed; he became, for a brief period, the living embodiment of a connection between Odisha and Southeast Asia that the previous chapter traced into silence.

That connection could have been revived. It was not. This chapter is about why.

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The Post-Independence Moment

The Asian Relations Conference convened in New Delhi on 23 March 1947 — five months before Indian independence. Jawaharlal Nehru, then Vice-President of the interim government, hosted it. Sarojini Naidu presided. Around 400 delegates arrived from across the continent: representatives from Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, China, Korea, Malaya, Turkey, the Soviet Asian republics, and others. It was the first large-scale pan-Asian gathering of the modern era.

The agenda was ambitious: Asian defense and security, racial problems, intra-Asian migration, the transition from colonial to national economy, agriculture, public health, cultural cooperation. The conference established the Asian Relations Organisation. For one week in March, in the hall where a new Asia was being imagined, the delegates operated on a shared assumption: that the colonial order was dying, that Asian nations shared fundamental interests, and that the future lay in cooperation among equals.

Nehru and Sukarno were the central figures. Their relationship predated their respective governments. Both were products of the anti-colonial movement, both Western-educated, both charismatic, both convinced that Asia’s future required Asian solidarity. Sukarno had declared Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, two years before India’s. When Indonesia’s struggle against the Dutch intensified, India was among the first to offer support — and the most consequential support came in the form of Biju Patnaik’s Dakota.

By 1954, Nehru had articulated the Panchsheel — five principles of peaceful coexistence: respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality, and mutual benefit. These became the diplomatic vocabulary of decolonized Asia. At the Bandung Conference in April 1955, twenty-nine Asian and African nations gathered in Indonesia. Nehru, Sukarno, Zhou Enlai, Nasser, Nkrumah — the architects of what would become the Non-Aligned Movement — agreed on ten principles derived from Panchsheel. The movement was formally established at Belgrade in 1961, with Nehru, Sukarno, Tito, Nasser, and Nkrumah as its founding figures.

For a few years in the 1950s, the Bay of Bengal appeared to be on the verge of becoming what it had been for a millennium: a shared space connecting India to Southeast Asia. The ideological framework existed (anti-colonialism, non-alignment). The personal relationships existed (Nehru-Sukarno, and the Patnaik-Indonesia bond). The geography had not changed — the monsoon winds still blew in the same directions they had blown when the sadhabas sailed. All that was needed was institutional structure: trade agreements, shipping routes, cultural exchanges, educational partnerships.

None of it materialized. Not because anyone decided against it, but because other forces — continental, ideological, structural — intervened.

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The Kalinga Prize: A Name Without an Institution

In 1951, Biju Patnaik did something that would outlast every other institutional connection between Odisha and the wider world. He established the Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science, in partnership with UNESCO. It was funded through the Kalinga Foundation Trust, of which Patnaik was founder and president. The prize awards $40,000, a UNESCO-Albert Einstein silver medal, and a Kalinga Chair — making it, at the time, one of the most prestigious science communication awards in existence. It is, to this day, UNESCO’s oldest prize.

The first laureate, in 1952, was Louis de Broglie — the French physicist and Nobel laureate who established the wave-particle duality of matter. Subsequent winners have included Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Arthur C. Clarke, David Attenborough, and Jayant Narlikar. The prize carries the name “Kalinga” into the international scientific community every time it is awarded.

This matters beyond the prize itself. Biju Patnaik was, at this point, a private citizen — he would not become Chief Minister of Odisha until 1961. Yet he understood something that Indian foreign policy makers would take decades to grasp: that a name, placed at the right altitude, becomes an identity marker. Every time a scientist anywhere in the world hears the word “Kalinga,” it is because of this prize. Not because of Ashoka’s war, not because of the sadhabas, not because of the temples of Bhubaneswar — because an Odia businessman and pilot had the instinct to plant a flag at UNESCO in 1951.

But — and this is the pattern that defines Odisha’s modern relationship with Southeast Asia — the Kalinga Prize remained a personal act, not an institutional bridge. Patnaik’s Indonesian connections did not produce an Odisha-Indonesia trade agreement. His UNESCO prize did not produce a Kalinga Center for Science in Bali or Jakarta. The Bhoomi Putra designation did not lead to a cultural exchange program. Every connection ran through a single person. When that person turned to other things — to Odisha state politics, to the complex business of governing a poor state — the connections attenuated.

This is a pattern any software engineer would recognize. In systems design, you distinguish between tightly coupled and loosely coupled architectures. A tightly coupled system depends on specific components — remove one, and the system fails. A loosely coupled system distributes dependencies — no single component is irreplaceable. Biju Patnaik was a tightly coupled connection between Odisha and the world. He was the single node through which the relationship passed. There was no distributed infrastructure — no trade missions, no cultural institutions, no university partnerships, no merchant networks — that could maintain the connection independently of him.

When Patnaik’s attention shifted, the connection did not transfer. It simply stopped carrying current.

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The Cold War Divide

The Bay of Bengal, which the sadhabas had sailed as a single integrated sea, was split in two by the Cold War. The division was not physical — no one drew a line across the water — but it was structural, and it lasted forty years.

The sequence matters. Until the early 1970s, India was broadly non-aligned. Nehru’s foreign policy kept India equidistant from both blocs, and the Non-Aligned Movement gave this position institutional form. But the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War changed the calculus. Pakistan was allied with the United States and China. India needed a counterweight. In August 1971, India signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation — not a formal alliance, but close enough to make India’s position unmistakable.

On the other side of the Bay, Southeast Asia was aligning the other way. ASEAN had been formed on 8 August 1967 in Bangkok — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand. The formation was driven partly by the need to manage intra-regional disputes (Sukarno’s Konfrontasi against Malaysia and Singapore had just ended with his fall and Suharto’s rise), but the Cold War framing was explicit. ASEAN’s first four dialogue partners were Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the United States. The Western camp. India was not invited.

The Vietnam War deepened the rift. India consistently supported Hanoi — endorsing North Vietnam’s “Four Points” for conflict resolution, opposing SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which India considered an instrument of Western intervention), and establishing diplomatic relations with North Vietnam on 7 January 1972, three years before the fall of Saigon. India was among the first countries to recognize unified Vietnam in 1975. This put India on the opposite side of the conflict from most ASEAN members — particularly Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore, which supported the American effort or at least feared a communist victory.

The divergence was not just diplomatic. It was economic. India under the license raj turned inward. Import substitution, state-controlled industry, restricted foreign trade. ASEAN countries — Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia — were doing the opposite: export-oriented industrialization, integration with the Japanese and American economies, building the manufacturing ecosystems that would make them the “Asian Tigers.” India’s trade with Southeast Asia declined as a share of total trade. The commercial links that might have maintained cross-Bay connections were never built.

Meanwhile, India’s strategic focus was overwhelmingly continental. The 1962 war with China, the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan — these defined India’s threat perception. The primary enemies were on land borders. The Indian Army and Air Force consumed the defense budget. The Indian Navy was the least funded of the three services. The Chief of Naval Staff would later observe, with the frustration of decades, that “the continentalist era is over and the next millennium will witness the dawning of a new maritime period” — but this realization came far too late to prevent the neglect of India’s eastern seaboard.

For Odisha specifically, the continental orientation was devastating. The state’s strategic value to Delhi was as a mineral reserve and an industrial base for continental defense — steel for tanks, aluminium for aircraft. Rourkela Steel Plant, commissioned in 1965, was a national security asset. NALCO, established in 1981, was a strategic industry. Paradip Port, opened in 1966, was built to export the raw materials that these industries consumed elsewhere. None of this required Odisha to face the sea in the way it had for a millennium. The sea was a loading dock, not a trade route.

The Bay of Bengal was treated, in Indian strategic thinking, as a defensive buffer — a stretch of water that needed to be protected from potential threats (particularly from the US Seventh Fleet, which had entered the Bay during the 1971 war), not a commercial space to be exploited. The eastern seaboard was the back of the house. The western seaboard — closer to the Middle East oil routes and the Pakistan threat — got the investment, the naval infrastructure, the port development.

For forty years, from roughly 1967 to 1991, India and Southeast Asia looked away from each other. The Bay of Bengal, which had carried sadhabas and monks and Buddhist texts and iron implements and cotton textiles for a thousand years, carried almost nothing between the two shores except naval patrols and mutual suspicion.

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Look East: The Pivot That Arrived Late

The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. For India, this was not merely a geopolitical event — it was an economic emergency. The Soviet Union had been India’s largest trading partner outside the Western bloc. Soviet-Indian trade had been conducted partly in rupees, insulating India from dollar shortages. Soviet military hardware equipped the Indian armed forces. Soviet diplomatic support had been the backstop of India’s foreign policy since 1971.

All of this disappeared in a matter of months. India’s foreign exchange reserves fell to enough to cover two weeks of imports. The balance-of-payments crisis forced India into IMF-supervised structural adjustment. Finance Minister Manmohan Singh began the economic liberalization that would transform the Indian economy. And Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, recognizing that India needed new markets, new partners, and a new strategic orientation, launched the Look East Policy.

The timing was not coincidental. The East Asian economic miracle was in full swing. The four Asian Tigers — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore — had demonstrated what export-oriented industrialization could achieve. ASEAN economies — Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia — were growing at seven to eight percent annually. China was a decade into its own opening. The center of gravity of the global economy was shifting eastward, and India had spent forty years facing the other way.

The Look East Policy was, at its core, a recognition of that mistake. Its goals were straightforward: develop political contacts with Southeast Asian nations, increase economic integration, forge security cooperation, create regional markets. But the implementation was slow and incremental — the careful diplomacy of a country that knew it had been absent for decades and could not simply announce its return.

The milestones tell the story:

India became ASEAN’s Sectoral Dialogue Partner in 1992 — the lowest rung of engagement, dealing with specific sectors like trade and tourism. It took three more years, until 1995, to become a Full Dialogue Partner. In 1996, India joined the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the bloc’s security discussion platform. Only in 2002 — eleven years after the policy launched — did India reach Summit-level partnership, putting it on the same plane as China, Japan, and South Korea.

The Framework Agreement for Comprehensive Economic Cooperation was signed in Bali in October 2003. The actual ASEAN-India Trade in Goods Agreement was not signed until August 2009. The ASEAN-India Free Trade Area (AIFTA) came into effect on 1 January 2010 — nearly two decades after Look East was launched.

The trade numbers reflect this slow start. India-ASEAN bilateral trade was $2.9 billion in 1993. It grew to $12.1 billion by 2003, an annual growth rate of about 11 percent — respectable, but starting from a tiny base. By 2008, it reached $47.5 billion. By 2022, $133.4 billion. These are real numbers. But compare them to China-ASEAN trade, which reached $878 billion in 2022. India was not just late to the party; it arrived after the other guests had already rearranged the furniture.

The most consequential element of the Look East Policy was not the trade numbers. It was the Myanmar pivot.

India’s relationship with Myanmar had been complicated since the 1988 military coup. India initially supported the pro-democracy movement and Aung San Suu Kyi — a principled stance that aligned with India’s self-image as the world’s largest democracy. But by 1993, pragmatism replaced principle. Indian Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit visited Yangon in March 1993, engaging the ruling SLORC junta. The reasons were strategic: Myanmar shared a 1,643-kilometer border with India across four northeastern states. Chinese infrastructure projects were penetrating Myanmar from the north — the Irrawaddy Corridor threatened to make Myanmar a Chinese client state. Indian insurgent groups were using Myanmar’s ungoverned spaces as safe havens.

The Myanmar pivot was not primarily about Odisha. It was about the northeast — Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh — and the fear that India’s entire eastern frontier was drifting into China’s orbit. But it set the stage for the physical connectivity projects that would, in theory, reconnect India to mainland Southeast Asia: the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project. Both would bypass Odisha entirely, running through the northeast. The state that sat on the Bay of Bengal, with 480 kilometers of coastline and one of India’s largest ports, was not the gateway that Look East imagined. The gateway was a 1,643-kilometer land border in the mountains.

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Act East: From “Look” to “Act” — and the RCEP Retreat

When Narendra Modi announced at the ASEAN-India Summit in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, on 12 November 2014, that India’s “Look East Policy has become Act East Policy,” the rhetorical upgrade carried a specific promise: that India would move from diplomatic engagement to action-oriented, project-based, outcome-focused partnerships.

The early signals were dramatic. In January 2018, all ten ASEAN heads of state attended India’s Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi as chief guests — the first time ten separate leaders had been so honored. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June 2018, Modi laid out India’s Indo-Pacific vision: “a free, open, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific Region,” with ASEAN centrality as its organizing principle. He deliberately avoided specific mention of the Quad (India, US, Japan, Australia), calibrating the message for a Southeast Asian audience wary of being drawn into great-power competition.

Strategic partnerships deepened. India-Vietnam relations were elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in September 2016. India extended a $100 million credit line to Vietnam for twelve high-speed patrol boats and gifted the missile corvette INS Kirpan to the Vietnamese navy in 2022. ONGC-Videsh secured a three-year extension in 2023 to explore Block 128 in the South China Sea — contested waters where India’s presence served both economic and strategic purposes.

The India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, a 1,360-kilometer road from Moreh in Manipur to Mae Sot in Thailand, was the flagship connectivity project. Construction began in 2012 with an original deadline of 2015, then 2020, then 2027. As of 2026, it is roughly seventy percent complete, but the Yar Gyi section — 121.8 kilometers — is only twenty-five percent done. Myanmar’s civil war, which erupted in February 2021, has severely complicated progress. The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, connecting Kolkata to Mizoram via Sittwe port in Myanmar, faces similar challenges: the road passes through areas now controlled by the Arakan Army.

But the defining moment of India’s Act East credibility — the moment that revealed whether “Act” meant what it said — came on 4 November 2019, when India withdrew from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

RCEP was to be the world’s largest free trade agreement: fifteen countries including all ten ASEAN members plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. India had been negotiating since 2012. The withdrawal was driven by fear — specifically, fear of Chinese manufactured goods flooding India. India’s trade deficit with its FTA partners had already nearly doubled from $54 billion in 2013-14 to $105 billion in 2018-19. RCEP would have allowed three-quarters of future Chinese goods to enter India duty-free. India proposed an auto-trigger safeguard mechanism — automatic tariffs if imports surged beyond a threshold. The other members rejected it.

From a pure trade perspective, the withdrawal may have been defensible. India’s manufacturing sector was not competitive enough to survive unrestricted access to Chinese goods. The AIFTA had already shown the pattern: after the free trade area came into effect in 2010, India’s imports from ASEAN grew at eight percent annually while exports grew at only five percent. The deficit widened.

But from a strategic perspective, the RCEP withdrawal was a blow to Act East’s credibility that no amount of Shangri-La speeches could repair. Here is the analogy from investing: there is a difference between stated allocation and revealed allocation. A fund manager can say they are bullish on Asian markets. But if they sell their Asian positions when the market dips, their revealed allocation contradicts their stated one. India said it was “Acting East.” But when the largest economic integration opportunity in Asia’s history was on the table, India walked away.

ASEAN noticed. The message was clear: India wanted strategic engagement with Southeast Asia, but not deep economic integration. It wanted the diplomatic benefits of partnership without the competitive exposure. It wanted to be in the room, but not in the game.

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BIMSTEC: The Framework That Should Have Been Odisha’s

If there is one multilateral institution that was designed, almost literally, for Odisha’s geography, it is BIMSTEC — the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation.

Founded on 6 June 1997, originally as BIST-EC (Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand), it expanded to include Myanmar the same year, and Nepal and Bhutan in 2004. Seven members. Combined population of 1.73 billion. Combined GDP of $5.2 trillion. A fourth of the world’s traded goods cross the Bay of Bengal annually. Priority areas include fisheries, trade and investment, technology, energy, transport and communication, and tourism.

Look at a map. Odisha’s 480-kilometer coastline faces directly into the Bay of Bengal. Paradip, handling over 150 million tonnes annually, is one of India’s largest ports. The Mahanadi delta and coastal Odisha are the natural hinterland for Bay of Bengal trade. Odisha’s minerals — iron ore, aluminium, chromite — are precisely what the developing economies of Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Thailand need. If you were designing a multilateral framework to benefit Odisha, you would design something that looks almost exactly like BIMSTEC.

And yet.

Intra-BIMSTEC trade is only seven percent of members’ total trade. Compare this to ASEAN, where intra-bloc trade runs at roughly twenty-five percent. The BIMSTEC Free Trade Agreement has been under negotiation since 2004 — over twenty rounds of talks, still unsigned. Disputes over sensitive lists, non-tariff barriers, protectionist instincts, and fears of asymmetric benefits for smaller economies have blocked progress for two decades.

The institutional apparatus is skeletal. An underfunded secretariat. A shortage of skilled personnel. Political commitment that evaporates between summit communiques. The infrastructure investment gap within BIMSTEC runs to an estimated $120 billion annually. Connectivity projects are delayed by the same bureaucratic inertia and funding gaps that have plagued the Trilateral Highway.

India accounts for approximately seventy-five percent of BIMSTEC’s combined GDP. This is a feature and a bug. The smaller members — Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan — fear domination. They participate cautiously, hedging their engagement, unwilling to commit fully to a framework where one member is ten times the size of all others combined. India itself has treated BIMSTEC as a backup — a SAARC alternative when Pakistan blocks progress in that forum — rather than a primary investment. India’s trade with BIMSTEC members remains, in the words of one analyst, “abysmally below five percent” of total trade, despite the geographic proximity.

Myanmar’s civil war has compounded every problem. The Kaladan project, which was supposed to connect eastern India to Myanmar’s coast, runs through Arakan Army territory. Bangladesh-Myanmar tensions over the Rohingya crisis have poisoned bilateral relations. Sri Lanka’s 2022 economic collapse diverted its attention entirely inward. The framework that should be knitting the Bay of Bengal together into a coherent economic space has instead become a catalog of delayed projects, unsigned agreements, and summit declarations that no one expects to be implemented.

Odisha’s position in all of this is a study in unrealized advantage. No Odisha state-level BIMSTEC engagement initiative exists. The state government has not lobbied for BIMSTEC infrastructure investments centered on Odisha. There is no Odisha BIMSTEC trade office, no Odisha representative to BIMSTEC working groups, no state-level advocacy for using Paradip as a BIMSTEC shipping hub. The geographic advantage is real. The institutional engagement is zero.

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Why India’s Eastern Turn Left Odisha Behind

Here is the question this chapter has been building toward: India turned east in 1991. It upgraded that turn in 2014. Trade with ASEAN grew from $2.9 billion to $133 billion. Strategic partnerships deepened. Diplomatic infrastructure was built. And yet Odisha — the state whose ancient identity was defined by its eastern maritime reach, the state whose coast faces directly into the Bay of Bengal, the state whose former Chief Minister literally flew into Southeast Asia to rescue Indonesia’s leaders — has been largely absent from this entire process.

This is not a failure of awareness. In January 2025, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar stood in Bhubaneswar at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas and said, explicitly: “The Look East policy has its historical roots in this state. The Bali Yatra, which linked India to South East Asia, actually originated in Odisha.” The Prime Minister mentioned Bali Yatra at the G20 Summit in Bali in 2022. Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam visited Odisha in January 2025. The recognition is there. What is missing is everything that should follow from recognition.

The reasons are structural, and there are seven of them. Each one is a wall. Together, they form a compound barrier that no single policy can breach.

First, there is no living diaspora. Tamil Nadu has Tamils in Singapore and Malaysia — roughly seven percent of Malaysia’s population, five percent of Singapore’s. Tamil is one of Singapore’s four official languages. Primary education in Tamil is available in Malaysian schools. The Tamil diaspora provides a living, breathing institutional connection: cultural festivals that serve as diplomatic platforms, business networks that facilitate trade, family ties that sustain tourism. Gujarat has a merchant diaspora across Southeast Asia. Kerala has Malayali networks.

Odisha has no one. The sadhabas vanished centuries ago. There is no Odia community in any Southeast Asian country. No Odia business networks, no Odia cultural organizations, no Odia language instruction. The connection between Odisha and Southeast Asia is archaeological, not social. You can find it in pottery shards and temple carvings and shared vocabulary fossils — but not in a phone directory.

This matters more than any government policy. Diasporas are, in network terms, the persistent connections that keep a link alive even when official relationships are dormant. Tamil Nadu’s engagement with Singapore does not depend on the Indian government’s Look East Policy. It is self-sustaining, because the people are there. Odisha’s engagement with Southeast Asia depends entirely on government initiative — and government initiative is intermittent, subject to electoral cycles, and easily displaced by more urgent domestic priorities.

Second, India’s strategic orientation was continental, not maritime. The primary threats since independence have been land-based: China across the Himalayas, Pakistan across the western border. The Indian Army consumed the defense budget. The eastern seaboard was the back of the house. Odisha’s coast was a cyclone-prone liability to be managed, not a trade frontier to be exploited. Paradip was built to ship ore, not to connect civilizations. The Bay of Bengal was a defensive buffer, not a commercial space. Forty years of this orientation — from the 1962 Sino-Indian War to the 1991 liberalization — left the eastern seaboard structurally underdeveloped compared to the western one.

Third, Odisha’s economy remained extractive. The state exports raw materials: iron ore, coal, bauxite, chromite, aluminium ingots. It does not produce manufactured goods or services that require Southeast Asian markets. The minerals go to Tata Steel in Jamshedpur, or to POSCO in South Korea, or to Chinese steelmakers. Odisha is a supplier in global value chains, not a participant. A supplier does not need trading relationships with end markets. It needs a port and a conveyor belt. Paradip — India’s largest cargo-handling port — functions exactly as a conveyor belt terminal. It handles over 150 million tonnes annually, almost entirely bulk commodities. It lacks the container terminal infrastructure needed for high-value manufactured goods trade.

The pattern is the same one the Freight Equalization Policy created, just continued by different mechanisms. When your economy is organized around extraction, you do not build the commercial networks, the marketing infrastructure, the business relationships, or the cultural fluency that trade in manufactured goods and services requires. You do not send trade delegations to Bangkok. You do not maintain a trade office in Singapore. You do not need to, because your customer is not a market — it is a factory somewhere else in India or East Asia that buys your ore by the shipload.

Fourth, no surviving merchant class carries the legacy. Gujarat has Banias and Patels — merchant communities whose commercial identity has survived centuries and now extends globally. Tamil Nadu has Chettiars, whose banking and trading networks once stretched from Madras to Saigon. Kerala has Mappilas and Nairs with trading traditions. These are not historical footnotes. They are living commercial cultures — communities in which business networks, trade knowledge, and international relationships are transmitted across generations. A young Gujarati merchant inherits not just capital but connections, introductions, and an institutional understanding of how trade works.

Odisha’s sadhabas — the merchant-mariners who sailed to Bali and Java — disappeared as a living tradition centuries ago. Chapter Four traced the process: the Chola pressure, the Islamic commercial revolution, the Portuguese disruption, the colonial reorientation. The merchant class did not merely lose its trade routes. It lost its identity as a merchant class. No community in modern Odisha carries the sadhaba tradition as a living commercial culture. The Bali Yatra commemorates their memory. But a festival is not a network.

Fifth, Bihar captured the Buddhist circuit. This is a competitive dynamic that rarely gets discussed honestly. Buddhism is one of Odisha’s strongest cultural connections to Southeast Asia. Ashoka converted to Buddhism after the Kalinga War, fought on the banks of the Daya River at Dhauli, eight kilometers from Bhubaneswar. The Diamond Triangle — Ratnagiri, Lalitgiri, Udayagiri — constitutes a thousand years of Buddhist monastic development, from Theravada through Mahayana to Vajrayana. Ratnagiri was a major Vajrayana center whose teachings influenced Tibetan and Indonesian Buddhism. These are not minor sites. They are historically significant.

But Bihar has Bodh Gaya — the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Bihar has Nalanda — the ancient university that is being revived as a modern institution with ASEAN participation. Bihar has Rajgir. In the competitive landscape of Buddhist pilgrimage tourism, these are the anchor attractions. Southeast Asian Buddhist tourists — from Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Japan — visit Bihar. In 2024, Bodh Gaya alone received roughly 250,000 foreign visitors. Odisha received 53,392 foreign tourists total, across all categories. Southeast Asian countries do not even appear in Odisha’s top foreign tourist source markets.

The Diamond Triangle is virtually unknown to the average Southeast Asian Buddhist pilgrim. It is on India’s UNESCO tentative list, but it has not received the investment, the international marketing, or the infrastructure — hotels, multilingual guides, transportation links, foreign-language signage — that would make it a viable extension of the Buddhist circuit. Bihar has Thai, Japanese, and Burmese monasteries at Bodh Gaya. Odisha has a single Japanese-built peace pagoda at Dhauli from 1972, beautiful but isolated.

This is not just about tourism spending. Buddhist heritage is one of the most powerful cultural diplomacy tools available for India-Southeast Asia relations. The Nalanda University revival was endorsed at the East Asia Summit in 2007, with ASEAN members, Australia, China, Korea, Singapore, and Japan all promising support. When the new Nalanda campus was inaugurated in June 2024, it was a moment of India-ASEAN cultural partnership — and it happened in Bihar. Not in Odisha, where Ratnagiri and Pushpagiri had been among ancient India’s greatest Buddhist learning centers. Not because Bihar’s claim is stronger in historical terms, but because Bihar invested in the claim and Odisha did not.

Sixth, there is no institutional champion for Southeast Asian engagement. Tamil Nadu has the Tamil Nadu Foundation, which supports the Tamil diaspora globally. Kerala has NORKA (Non-Resident Keralites’ Affairs), a state government department dedicated to the Kerala diaspora. These institutions maintain the connection between state and diaspora, facilitating investment, cultural exchange, and political engagement.

Odisha has no institution specifically tasked with Southeast Asian engagement. No Odisha-ASEAN trade office. No state-level body promoting Odisha’s cultural heritage in Southeast Asian markets. No equivalent of NORKA for a diaspora that does not exist. Bali Yatra, the annual festival that commemorates the sadhaba voyages, remains a local cultural event and trade fair — granted “National Fair” status in February 2025, drawing seven million visitors, almost entirely domestic. The first international partner nation — Indonesia — participated only in 2025. No bilateral agreements, no trade MOUs, no cultural exchange programs have been launched during Bali Yatra in its entire history.

Seventh, BIMSTEC has underperformed. The one multilateral framework where Odisha’s geography gives it a natural advantage has itself failed to deliver meaningful trade integration. Seven percent intra-bloc trade. A free trade agreement stalled for two decades. An infrastructure gap that dwarfs available investment. A secretariat that lacks resources. A member state in civil war. For BIMSTEC to serve as Odisha’s platform for Southeast Asian engagement, BIMSTEC itself would first need to become a functioning economic bloc. The prospects for that, as of 2026, are not encouraging.

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The Forgetting and the Remembering

There is a concept in software engineering called “technical debt” — the accumulated cost of shortcuts, deferred decisions, and expedient compromises that, over time, make a system increasingly difficult to change. Technical debt is not a single bad decision. It is the compound interest on many small decisions, each of which made sense at the time, but whose cumulative effect is a system that resists improvement.

Odisha’s absence from India’s eastern turn is a form of civilizational debt. Each structural factor — the continental orientation, the extractive economy, the lost merchant class, the missing diaspora, the captured Buddhist circuit, the absent institutions, the underperforming BIMSTEC — was not, individually, a decision to abandon the Southeast Asian connection. No chief minister sat in Bhubaneswar and decided that Odisha should not engage with ASEAN. No policy document said “ignore the Bay of Bengal.” The debt accumulated through omission, not commission. Through decades of not building a trade office in Singapore. Not marketing the Diamond Triangle to Thai tour operators. Not investing in container infrastructure at Paradip. Not sending trade delegations to Jakarta. Not converting Bali Yatra from a festival into an institutional platform.

The forgetting was structural. The remembering, when it comes, will also need to be structural.

There are signs. Jaishankar’s 2025 statement. Modi’s Bali Yatra reference at the G20. Indonesia’s participation in Bali Yatra 2025. The Bhubaneswar-Singapore direct flight — subsidized, below breakeven, but flying. The MOU between Odisha’s culture department and the Light of Buddhadharma Foundation International for annual prayer ceremonies at the Diamond Triangle. The Odisha Tourism Amendment Policy of 2026, which specifically targets the Buddhist circuit for development. Singapore’s President visiting Odisha.

But here is the honest assessment, stated with the margin of safety that the principles of this project require. These are gestures. Speeches and MOUs and subsidized flights. They are the remembering — the recognition that something was lost. What they are not, yet, is the structural rebuilding that would convert remembering into reconnection. The distance between a minister saying “Look East has its roots in this state” and Odisha actually functioning as India’s eastern gateway is the distance between a diagnosis and a cure. Between knowing you have technical debt and actually paying it down.

The previous chapters traced what was. This chapter has traced what happened between then and now. The sadhabas sailed to Southeast Asia for a thousand years. Then the connection died — slowly, structurally, irrecoverably in its original form. Then India turned east again, but Odisha, which should have been the natural beneficiary, was structurally unprepared to participate.

What could change this — what specific opportunities exist, what has actually been tried, and what the realistic prospects are — is the question for the remaining chapters.

One thing, though, is worth stating before moving on. The comparison between what Biju Patnaik achieved personally — the Java flight, the Bhoomi Putra honor, the Kalinga Prize at UNESCO — and what Odisha achieved institutionally — almost nothing — is not just a historical contrast. It is a diagnostic. It tells you that the raw material exists. Courage exists. Historical legitimacy exists. Even international recognition exists. What does not exist is the institutional architecture that converts individual acts into sustainable systems.

A pilot can fly one rescue mission. An institution can run a trade route. The sadhabas understood this. They did not sail to Bali as individuals making heroic voyages. They sailed as part of a system — a network of ports, monsoon calendars, merchant guilds, and cultural relationships that sustained the connection across centuries. When the system broke, no individual heroism could replace it. When Patnaik flew to Java, he was, in a sense, the last sadhaba — a lone pilot crossing the Bay of Bengal on personal courage and historical instinct, with no institutional system to catch what he started.

Whether Odisha builds that system, or continues to commemorate its absence with miniature paper boats on the Mahanadi every November, is the question that the remembering must eventually answer.

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Next: Chapter 6 — What Odisha Has Done