C Raja Mohan who is the head of strategic studies and distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi said Bangladesh, India and Myanmar could form a trilateral group to build the community.
He said on Thursday that the three littorals along the Bay can create a framework for cooperation.
He put forward an idea when China was pressing for an economic corridor with these three countries called BCIM –Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar.
Mohan, a former professor of South Asian studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, also known as JNU, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, however, said anyone including China and the US who have keen interest on the Bay can help in the process.
But he said strong India and Bangladesh would matter in any regional cooperation.
He said new trends and forces brought the Bay back to global politics.
“In the globalised economy, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar are going to turn the Bay into a more active and important domain,” he said, “Energy and natural resources would make it more important”.
Mohan wrote a book titled Samudra Manthan, or ‘churning the ocean’, invoking a tale from Hindu mythology to tell the story of a Sino-Indian rivalry spilling over from the Great Himalayas into the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
The Indira Gandhi Cultural centre (IGCC) organised his lecture as part of its ongoing month long guest lecture series. Former ambassador Humayun Kabir, also vice-president of Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, moderated the talk.
Sujit Ghosh, counsellor of the Indian High Commission in Dhaka, introduced Mohan as one of the India’s foremost strategic thinkers and commentators.
He had been the Henry Kissinger chair in foreign policy and international relation at the Library of Congress in the US in 2009-2010.
He is currently a member of India’s National Security Advisory Board (NSAB).
Mohan has also been the Diplomatic Editor and the Washington Correspondent of The Hindu and the Strategic Affairs Editor of The Indian Express, he said.
He is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore, and a Non-Resident Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC.
Mohan said his proposal was “a very simple” one.
He said anyone can help in the process of the Bangladesh, India and Myanmar collaboration.