With reference to "Look East Policy" of India, consider the following statements: 1) India wants to establish itself as an important regional player in the East Asian affairs. 2) India wants to plug the vacuum created by the termination of Cold War. 3) India wants to restore the historical and cultural ties with its neighbours in Southeast and East Asia. Which of the statements given above is / are correct?

The correct answer is B, statements 1 and 3 only.

Look East Policy was launched in 1991 under Narasimha Rao, after the Soviet collapse and the balance of payments crisis. Its core aim was to shift India's diplomatic and economic outreach from the Soviet and West Asian orbit toward ASEAN and East Asia. Statement 1 is correct: India sought to become a credible regional player, visible in its full dialogue partnership with ASEAN (1995) and its membership of the East Asia Summit (2005). Statement 3 is also correct: the policy deliberately invoked historical and cultural links with Southeast and East Asia, including shared Buddhist and Indic civilisational ties, to build goodwill.

Statement 2 is the trap. The end of the Cold War did reshape India's external environment, but the policy was framed around economic integration, market access and strategic engagement, not as a deliberate effort to fill a vacuum left by others. The statement overstates the policy's stated purpose.

Core concept: Look East is a foreign policy shift linked to economic liberalisation. For Mains, it connects to GS-2 (India's neighbourhood and regional groupings) and GS-3 (connectivity and trade), and it was upgraded to Act East in 2014.

Trap: Treating every plausible-sounding rationale as an official objective. Check whether the statement matches what the policy actually stated.