MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 90 of 100

Correct — option (3), Kuala Lumpur. The 5th ASEAN-India Business Summit was held on 6 March 2023 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the Berjaya Times Square Hotel, on the theme 'Strengthening and Moving Forward ASEAN-India Economic Relations for a Strategic Business Partnership'. Speakers and delegates from the ASEAN member states and from India discussed how business linkages, connectivity and the resilience of supply chains could be strengthened through deeper ASEAN-India cooperation, and companies from both sides signed memoranda of understanding on inclusive business models; the Union Minister of State Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar addressed the summit. The event belonged to a run of activity marking the maturing of the relationship: 2022 was observed as the ASEAN-India Friendship Year, commemorating thirty years of dialogue relations, and in November 2022 the two sides elevated their ties to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Even a candidate who has not read about the summit itself can travel a long way on the structure of the question. A summit of ASEAN and India will normally be held either in India or in an ASEAN member state, and of the four cities offered, one is in India, one is in a country that is not an ASEAN member at all, and two are in ASEAN member states — so the question effectively narrows to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, both of them plausible business venues. Only the specific fact of March 2023 separates those two, and it points to Kuala Lumpur. Option (3) is the answer. Note the printing: the English stem reads 'Which of the following city was', a singular noun where the sense requires a plural, and the ordinal '5th' is printed with a superscript; neither is a signal of anything.

• (1)New Delhi — New Delhi is a serious-looking option because India hosts a great deal of ASEAN-related activity and because a candidate preparing for an Indian examination expects Indian venues, but the 2023 business summit was held in Malaysia. It is worth keeping the different strands of the ASEAN-India relationship separate, since each has its own calendar and its own venues: the annual ASEAN-India Summit at leaders' level is held alongside the ASEAN Summit in the country chairing ASEAN that year; commemorative summits marking round-numbered anniversaries have been held in New Delhi; and business summits of the kind asked about here are organised with the business chambers and think tanks of the host country. A candidate who has seen a photograph of ASEAN leaders in New Delhi and generalises from it to every ASEAN-India event will misplace a good many of them.
• (2)Dhaka — Dhaka can be eliminated without knowing anything about the summit at all, because Bangladesh is not a member of ASEAN. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, and grew to ten members with Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia; Timor-Leste was accepted in principle as a future member in November 2022. Bangladesh belongs to a different set of regional groupings — the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation, the latter of which does bring it together with Thailand and Myanmar. This is the single most valuable elimination available in ASEAN questions, and it costs nothing beyond knowing the membership list, which is short and stable.
• (4)Singapore city — Singapore is the hardest of the three wrong options to dismiss, because everything general about it fits. It is a founding member of ASEAN, it is the region's leading financial and business centre, it hosts a large share of the region's conferences, and its trade and investment relationship with India is among the deepest of any ASEAN state. A candidate reasoning from plausibility rather than recall will very often choose it. The 2023 summit nonetheless went to Kuala Lumpur, and this is the characteristic residue of a well-set current affairs question: after the eliminations that general knowledge permits, what remains is a choice between two answers that are equally reasonable in the abstract and are separated only by the fact of the year. The option also prints as 'Singapore city', which is a slightly odd formulation for a city-state, and that oddity is a printing feature rather than a hint.

ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was formed in 1967 and has ten member states — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia — with Timor-Leste accepted in principle as a future member in November 2022. India's engagement with it began with the Look East Policy of the early nineteen-nineties, which made India a sectoral dialogue partner in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995, a summit-level partner in 2002 and a strategic partner in 2012; the Act East Policy announced in 2014 restated the same orientation with an emphasis on delivery, connectivity and the North East. The architecture that has grown around this includes the annual ASEAN-India Summit, the ASEAN Regional Forum on security, the East Asia Summit, and an ASEAN-India Free Trade Area in goods that entered into force in 2010, with separate agreements on services and investment. The business summit sits on the commercial side of this architecture, bringing chambers of commerce and companies together rather than governments, and its recurring themes — supply chain resilience, connectivity, the digital economy — track what the two sides most want from each other. The relationship was elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in November 2022.

Summits and conferences are the staple of the international relations portion of MPSC's current affairs block, and the question is nearly always about the host city, the edition number or the theme. What makes them answerable without perfect recall is that the option sets are usually built to include at least one city that could not have hosted the event, and eliminating it requires only a membership list. Here Dhaka is that option, because Bangladesh is not in ASEAN. The lists worth carrying are short and change slowly: the ten members of ASEAN, the eight of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the seven of the Bay of Bengal initiative, the members of BRICS and of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the composition of the G20. A second habit helps as much: note the date of an event relative to the examination. This summit met on 6 March 2023 and the paper was written on 4 June 2023, so the current affairs window that mattered for this paper extended to within three months of the examination. Candidates who stop following the news a few months before the paper lose exactly the questions that were written last.

• The 5th ASEAN-India Business Summit was held on 6 March 2023 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on the theme 'Strengthening and Moving Forward ASEAN-India Economic Relations for a Strategic Business Partnership'.
• The summit discussed business linkages, connectivity and supply chain resilience, and companies from ASEAN and India signed memoranda of understanding on inclusive business models; the Union Minister of State Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar addressed it.
• ASEAN was founded in 1967 and has ten member states — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia — with Timor-Leste accepted in principle as a future member in November 2022.
• Bangladesh is not an ASEAN member; it belongs to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and to the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation.
• India became a sectoral dialogue partner of ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995, a summit-level partner in 2002 and a strategic partner in 2012, and the relationship was elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in November 2022.

• Assuming an ASEAN-India event must be held in India, when the venue alternates and business summits are usually hosted in ASEAN member states
• Failing to notice that one option names a city in a country that is not an ASEAN member, which is the free elimination the question offers
• Confusing the ASEAN-India Summit at leaders' level with the business summit, the commemorative summits and the East Asia Summit, each of which has its own calendar and venue
• Dropping the news in the final months before the examination, when a paper written in June 2023 draws on events as recent as March 2023

International summits appear in MPSC papers as venue questions, edition-number questions, theme questions and occasionally as questions about who represented India. The reliable preparation is a table built through the year with one row per event, carrying the edition, the host city and country, the month, the theme and India's representative. Wrong options in such questions come in two grades: cities in countries ineligible for the event, which a membership list eliminates, and cities in eligible countries, which only the fact itself can settle. Because a State PSC also wants to test whether the candidate understands the grouping rather than merely remembering the meeting, the same block of the syllabus supplies questions on ASEAN's founding year, its membership, the Act East Policy and the free trade area, and those repay preparation more than any single summit does.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following countries is NOT a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ?

  • (a)Cambodia
  • (b)Bangladesh
  • (c)Laos
  • (d)Brunei Darussalam

  Answer(b) Bangladesh — ASEAN's ten members are Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, which founded it in 1967, together with Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. Bangladesh belongs to SAARC and to BIMSTEC, the latter of which does bring it into the same forum as the ASEAN members Thailand and Myanmar, which is a common source of confusion.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  India's relationship with ASEAN was elevated to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in which year ?

  • (a)2012
  • (b)2018
  • (c)2022
  • (d)2023

  Answer(c) 2022 — the elevation came in November 2022, in the year observed as the ASEAN-India Friendship Year marking three decades of dialogue relations. The year 2012, named in the first option, is when the relationship was raised to a strategic partnership at the commemorative summit, and the progression from sectoral dialogue partner in 1992 to full dialogue partner in 1995 and summit-level partner in 2002 is worth carrying as a single sequence.