Mani Shankar Aiyar

New Delhi, June 20: Mani Shankar Aiyar’s zeal to develop the Northeast will get its biggest boost yet when he hosts Thai commerce minister Krirk-Krai Jirapaet over the next four days in Agartala, Aizawl and Guwahati.

The visit — the first in recent memory by a minister from abroad to the Northeast — will help Aiyar send a strong message on the external affairs ministry’s “Look East” policy that had Pranab Mukherjee travelling to Shillong over the weekend, en route to Indonesia and Singapore.

Moreover, by ensuring a visit by a foreign minister to the Northeast, for the first time in recent memory, Aiyar is showing up the Union ministers who have repeatedly been turning down his pleas to visit the region.

PMO sources acknowledged that Union ministers had been requested to travel to any one of the northeastern states at least once a month “to end the perceived sense of isolation by the people there”.

However, with the exception of the minister of state for commerce, Jairam Ramesh, and the minister of state for shipping, road transport and highways K.H. Muniappa — both were in Guwahati and Shillong, respectively, for business summits organised by Aiyar’s ministry — nobody else was interested.

With the Hindi heartland obsessed with itself, Aiyar decided to look elsewhere. In Bangkok in March for a conference, he found the Thais more than willing to break new ground in the Northeast. After all, the region is so much closer to Bangkok than to New Delhi.

“India’s Look East policy has benefited the rest of India, but it has hardly had any impact on the Northeast, which should be its first beneficiary. Because it is in northeast India that Southeast Asia begins,” Aiyar told The Telegraph.

Aiyar’s ministry for the development of the northeastern region (Doner) is now providing the foreign ministry with the bridges to make trans-border connections. After the Thai visit, Aiyar is hoping Russian ambassador Vladimir Trubnikov and Australian high commissioner John McCarthy will also travel to the Northeast.

The Thai commerce minister will bring with him a business delegation that will focus on infrastructure, rubber, bamboo, handloom, inland waterways, tourism and horticulture.

The Thai gesture is timed well. Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont is in Delhi early next week, on June 26. By inviting a general who overthrew Thaksin Shinawatra last year, New Delhi is signalling that “its Look East policy is also pragmatic”.

Aiyar is doing to Doner what he did to the petroleum ministry when he was there — give it a profile.

Critics say his zeal stems from the fact that he is a former officer of the Indian Foreign Service and, like in petroleum, may have to tone down Doner’s international perspective.