The Look East Policy/Act East Policy-driven Development Model in Northeast India

Introduction

India rediscovered the potential for engaging with its eastern neighbours—Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal (BBN), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members in the 1990s as the end of the Cold War, the consequent end of existing polarizations, and ascendancy of neoliberalism across the world changed the global political scenario. Indian ambitions for attaining the status of a great power reordered economic issues to the top of foreign policy priorities. For tapping the vast economic benefits from closer engagements with the ASEAN, India inaugurated a Look East Policy (LEP) in 1991. Prior to time of the LEP, it was understood to be within the best foreign policy interests of India to follow a simple principle of ‘Asian solidarity’, but non-Asian influences on foreign policy considerations had stymied real progress on building closer economic cooperation within South Asia and the ASEAN countries (Dubey 2013).

The LEP was a foreign policy change from a security-centric dealing with India’s neighbours in the east to a prioritizing of economic issues for benefiting from the common potential for economic growth across the region. There was a moving away from ‘state-centric traditional security perception’ (Patgiri and Hazarika 2016: 241). Economic liberalization in India in the 1990s widened the economic capacities in India and sought newer areas for trade expansion. In the mid-1950s, the share of foreign trade in gross domestic product (GDP) was 16.33 per cent. It declined until the 1970s and then began to climb with the gradual opening up of the economy. It accelerated under the New Economic Policy inaugurated in the early 1990s with the share of foreign trade reaching 25.24 per cent in 1998 (Sarkar and Bhattacharya 2005). The impact of the LEP on trade outputs in India can be gauged from the fact that since its coming into effect, India–ASEAN trade has grown from US$2.9 billion in 1993 to US$81.33 billion in 2018 (Ministry of External Affairs [MEA] 2018).

In 2014, the LEP was renamed as Act East Policy (AEP), and academicians and observers marked this as a re-energization of the LEP, especially as the LEP was not seen to have improved the potential for industrial and infrastructural growth in the Northeast region. The LEP/AEP has represented a foreign policy that proactively broadens economic cooperation with the eastern neighbours. Academics, such as Patgiri and Hazarika (2016), have argued that the transition from LEP to AEP contains increased advantage for the Indian North Eastern Region, located strategically between the edge of South Asia and Southeast Asia.

The Indian North Eastern Region has often been understood to be a natural adjunct to Indian neighbourhood policy in the east. The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 on the departure of the colonial British government in India reduced it to a hinterland, severed from pre-partition communication and economic linkages with East Bengal. The region suffered from a developmental deficit due to remoteness from the industrially advanced parts of India and due to communication and infrastructural lapses in the region. Despite this, after the Indian independence, the region was located within geopolitical security equations in foreign policy priorities. Periodical review of military preparedness against China rather than trade underscored the development of transport and communication in the Northeast.

However, with the change in foreign policy priorities, Northeast India is said to have become the launchpad for offering tactical counter to rival Chinese ambitions in the Southeast Asian region. The Chinese ambitions in the form of a connectivity development program called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is aimed at redeveloping trade and transit corridors along traces of traditionally existing intercontinental trade routes (Chaudhary 2017). At the same time, an alternate perspective with regard to Northeast India and adjoining Myanmar as the meeting point for collaboration rather than for competition of the economic giants India and China. Such shared goals of India and China, termed the ‘Chindia’ potential, locate promise of mutual benefits in Chinese-Indian-ASEAN collaborations (Engardio 2008; Myint-U 2011).

By departing from the traditional foreign policy imperatives, the LEP/AEP is said to have focused on dismantling the geographical barriers and remoteness of Northeast India. This has been sought to be done through development of connectivity infrastructures and transportation routes in the Northeast and across neighboring transnational regions. For this reason, Northeast India has come into geopolitical focus as the landmass that would connect the economies of India and Southeast Asia.

Therefore, pushing for economic development of Northeast India with foreign policy reorientations in India’s east, the LEP/AEP has brought about a particular development model in the region, influenced by neoliberal theories that advocate for withdrawal of the state from market participation. This shift has regarded expansion of trade as a result of infrastructure and connectivity development in the region a self-propelled mechanism for the delivery of development.

The economic gain to be had from the increased linkages with ASEAN countries has been seen as the way to undo the post-independence developmental deficit in the Indian North Eastern Region. Increased infrastructural investments in the region and in its international surroundings under the foreign policy objectives, for example, undertaking highway expansion programs and the Asian Highways Project with the aid of international funding agencies, seek to change transport and communications in the region. However, despite the growth in ties with ASEAN in the wake of the LEP/AEP, the ‘idea of connectivity’ has been a contested subject for the risk that impulse for building connectivity can be construed in neighboring countries as ‘an exercise in hard-wiring that influences choices’ (Raghavan 2016: 10). Moreover, much hoped for developmental benefits of closer economic ties with ASEAN and the infrastructural investments in the region are not seen to have dispersed across Northeast India.

This article reflects on the significance of development of connectivity and transport infrastructures within the LEP/AEP and the model for development of the region that the LEP/AEP offers. In the time since road construction and other connectivity projects have taken up in Northeast India, governments in the region have attempted to make economic environments conducive for industrial investment and trade growth. The infrastructural development projects have become part of the developmental agenda conjoined with the foreign policy objectives of the LEP/AEP even as social groups have protested the connectivity development projects for different reasons.

The first section of the article reviews the neoliberal underpinnings of the LEP/AEP, which has shaped the contours of the constructions-centric development model in Northeast India. The second section discusses about the place of road constructions and other connectivity projects in the LEP/AEP. The final section reflects on the impact of LEP/AEP on development of the Indian North Eastern Region. Certain sections of people and activists across Northeast India have opposed connectivity projects, such as extension of railway communication to the Indian states of Manipur and Meghalaya because of the fears of uncontrolled immigration of traders and workers and the damage to community resources of lands, forests, and rivers. There seems to have been a divide between societal developmental needs expressed by the sections of people and the development model the LEP/AEP advances. As four lane highways have come up in the region and physical infrastructure for industrial development has been created, questions have been put to the persisting decadence in industrial investments into the region and whether the development of connectivity and transport infrastructure have reduced the northeast to a mere transit zone for movement of trade.

LEP/AEP, Development, and Connectivity Constructions

Opportunities for development of trade and increasing economic output were said to have been limited in the socialist state-steered development model that post-independence India adopted. Criticisms came from economists and social scientists such as Atul Kohli for susceptibility of the Indian state to influences of various powerful interests and lobbies. Neoliberal theorists looked at lobbies as a threat to democracy and governance. Procedural layers in India were providing opportunities to a bloated bureaucracy for indulging in corruption and rent-seeking behaviour, and socialistic state development ambitions were unable to offer substantive spaces of growth opportunities sought by sectors of the economy (Joseph 2007). The size of private ownership in sectors such as road construction and connectivity development sector was small despite public demand for better infrastructure and faster communication. This was because the capacity for enabling growth in the construction sector was constrained by the concentration of public sector investments in core industrial infrastructure and agricultural growth.

Inability of the socialist development model to fulfil growth aspirations created an ideological vacuum in which the socialistic command economic model was losing credibility among the larger sections of the political class while on offer, for adoption, was a neoliberal development model. Toward the 1980s, by appearing as policy solution and development strategies, neoliberal theories of trade openness and trade freedom were reorienting global southern economies (Connell and Dados 2014). The neoliberal reforms in India in the 1990s brought about macro-economic changes to the systems of control on the economy. The reforms were perceived as implementation of solutions and failure of the developmental state in implementing social and economic developmental goals. Reforms accompanied adjunct changes in state and governance structures, which facilitated widening of economic growth opportunities (Joseph 2007). Regulations constricting operation of the free market were gradually liberalized so that the liberalization of the economy became the national political goal. Private participation in sectors of the Indian economy availed the opening up to expand trade operations and diversities in outputs.

Adoption of the Look East Policy in 1991 was an external reflection of the progressive domestic economic transformation. There was a realization that India’s becoming of a great power was rooted in the development of the economy and leveraging geo-economic foreign policy instruments, such as trade, investments, international migrations, economic sanctions, and financial lending. With gradual improvements in relations with Southeast Asian nations and domestic economic growth in the 1980s, India became less fearful of Chinese interference in insurgencies occurring in Northeast India and more confident of exerting influence in the region by way of the road constructions and infrastructural developments (Ahuja and Kapur 2018).

‘Encouraging a healthy external economic environment’ directed the Indian foreign policy change of formulating the LEP (Haokip 2011: 244). The later 1980s was a period of political turbulence in India. Successive governments came to power without majority in the Parliament. By the time the Congress party formed a relatively stable government in 1991, decrease in remittances to India due to the Gulf crisis and disruption of trade with East European countries that had just broken out of communist rule depleted India’s financial reserves. To these were added the domestic financial burdens of populist policies and rising non-productive expenditure in defense and subsidies. The economic reforms program in India taking place in the background of the LEP followed a balance-of-payments crisis arising out of the financial distress. The reforms period, therefore, was a period of discovery of the importance of foreign capital in national economic development and the importance of improving competitiveness of Indian goods in international trade (Haokip 2011). The reforms became a progression toward integrating the Indian economy with the world economy as foreign investments were invited and targets were made for increasing the Indian export trade. In this scenario of needing to secure the Indian external economic environment, the ‘Asian miracle’ and emergence of the Asian Tigers provided impetus to Indian foreign policy to look to Southeast Asia as a space of economic opportunity.

In the period since the economic liberalization, economic objectives for increase of trade output and economic productivity have been tied to development of roads and other connectivity infrastructures. Enlarging of transport and communication infrastructure networks due to its role in improving trade transits has constituted part of the post-liberalization development model. External policies for enhancement of trade and especially in the context of the LEP/AEP have factored the significance of connectivity infrastructures for trade growth. The correlating of connectivity development and economic growth has explained political narrativizing of road construction programs. Expansion of roads is seen as markers of economic development. Successive states’ and central governments in India have taken construction of roads as an indicator of performance of governments. In state-level elections in Bihar, in 2015, for example, the incumbent Janata Dal (United) government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ran poster campaigns, attacking one another upon successes and alleged corruptions in road construction programs in Bihar (Sinha 2017).

The narrative of rapid economic growth in India in the post-liberalization period has seen contributions from the road construction sector. The pace of road construction increased after the economic liberalization. The National Highways Act, 1956, was amended in 1995, allowing 100 per cent foreign direct investment in the road construction sector. With the making of this amendment, private investments started making up for lack of adequate state funds in highway construction and maintenance such that the private participation in road construction, transport, and connectivity sectors expanded. Private infrastructural firms increased and found an atmosphere conducive to growth of the sector. By 2008, private participation in public–private joint road constructions was estimated to have grown up to US$150 billion (Montgomery 2008). But this estimate has been surpassed recently when the newly instituted central planning body in India called the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog re-estimated total investments into the road construction sector growing at ₹500,00,000 million or about US$730 billion (Hans 2017).

Roads and connectivity infrastructures have been crucial in extending of trade- and industry-related economic packages and notions of well-being to peripheral parts of the country. The urban middle class in India have benefited from the setting up of real estate hubs close to expressways, offering housing amenities, tourism destinations, and shopping complexes, and for rural populations, roads have improved access to livelihoods (Sinha 2017).

In the periphery space of the Indian North Eastern Region, as the LEP/AEP has pushed the development of connectivity infrastructures, industrial investors and traders from within and outside the region have welcomed the pace of infrastructural development. This comes to be seen as patronage of investors and businesses for investment summits being held in capital cities of the region. A summit called ‘Advantage Assam,’ held in 2018, corporations committed to investing ₹64 3,860 million or US$9 billion in Assam (Singh 2018). State governments of the region project road and bridge construction schemes as economic development in the region. The state governments have become partners in the vision for accelerated economic growth in the region.

It is not only in India but also in Southeast Asia that roads and connectivity constructions have served as an instrument for economic development. Governments in Thailand, Indonesia, and Laos have utilized road constructions for securing political control in insurgency-affected areas and for achieving economic growth objectives in politically turbulent areas. In Northern Thailand, improvement of laterite roads in the countryside into motorable roads transformed local rural economies. The motorable roads enabled women to transport agricultural produce from villages to Chiang Mai city. It was observed that over a thirty-year period when roads were being constructed, aspirations of villagers changed. The villagers sought better schools in the city, urban employment opportunities, and reduction in commuting time to Chiang Mai (Rigg 2002).

The adoption of such a development approach in India makes the LEP/AEP regard infrastructure constructions as key to economic transformation of the underdeveloped Northeast region. With goals for reforms and liberalization of the economy, sustained economic growth, and economic integration with the East and Southeast Asia regions, the development of the Northeast region has been a cornerstone of the LEP/AEP (Haokip 2011). The agenda of the policy pitches the development narrative against the long ongoing fights of insurgencies in the region and delegitimizes violent protests against the state and the people. Although insurgencies have not completely dissolved, since the 2000s, state security goals in the region have been accompanied by state developmental packages for building of roads and physical connectivity. In Tripura state, for example, the success of a Left Front government incumbent in the state until 2018 in transforming a long-drawn environment of political violence in the state was attributed to construction of roads to remote villages formerly affected by violent contestations of the state and armed groups in Tripura and to the initiative of the government in the development of associated basic interconnected public infrastructures, such as schools, community halls, and hospitals (Chattopadhyay 2014).

Connectivity Constructions as Core of the LEP/AEP

The LEP/AEP in contrast to regional development policies in the past identified advantages for Northeast India in the building of closer connections with ASEAN. It has identified civilizational connections between Northeast India and Southeast Asia as commonness shared across the regions. The LEP/AEP has made references to the cultural histories of India, more specifically Northeast India, and Southeast Asia, and to the existence of traditional trade and passage routes. Across India and ASEAN, there have been historical evidence of contacts of trade, migration, language, culture, and religion between South India and Southeast Asia for two millennia (Yahya 2003). Literary and archaeological sources, such as the discovery of a port at Kothapatnam in Andhra Pradesh have supported references to existence of early trade contacts between places in India and Southeast Asia (Rao 2001). Indian soft power in a traditional sense was said to have travelled across to Southeast Asia, carrying influences of Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures and imprinting a continuity across the regions.

The Northeast region was connected to the Southeast Asian countries by land rather than sea and, therefore, the region has been said to have more immediate connections with Southeast Asia. One of the routes linking the Upper Irrawady and Chindwin with a stretch of eastern or Upper Assam, which became part of the Stilwell road during the Second World War, is said to have carried migrating Singpho, Shan, Naga, and other hill tribes across transnational regions (Patgiri and Hazarika 2016). There are also references to similarities in food habits and lifestyles of people inhabiting places across the regions.

Road construction took on a new context after the independence of India—roads became necessary for building connectivity across parts of India. The partition of British India, which divided Bengal into Indian and Pakistani territories, greatly reduced the overland connectivity between Northeast India and the territories of India. However, despite the political significance of developing connectivity, the Northeast region remained cutoff from adjoining Indian territories. Due to the lack of overland communications, industrial investment and industrial output in the region was slack. However, the problem of connectivity was double-headed. The absence of connectivity stymied industrial development, but, at the same time, the lack of connectivity became the reason for Indian development planners to decide shifting of developmental projects and industrial production units outside the region. The development of Northeast India, therefore, became factored on availability of connectivity.

Although the post-independence state realized the significance of constructing connectivity across its territories, the pace of development of connectivity to Northeast India was slow. Overland connectivity across both banks of the Brahmaputra River in Assam and West Bengal was completed only in 1962 with completion of construction of a bridge at Guwahati. The Brahmaputra River, running lengthwise through the territory of Assam, divides the state. The vastness of the river which makes it one of the largest rivers in India has traditionally made constructions of bridges across it difficult and it isolated areas of the river valley and hill areas of Northeast India. The difficulties of crossing the river delayed land-route communications. After independence, railway freight and passengers travelling to Upper Assam alighted on southern bank of the Brahmaputra at Guwahati and crossed the river to reboard trains heading westwards to West Bengal and beyond. In 1987, opening of another bridge across the Brahmaputra joined the bridge at Guwahati in being the only bridges across the wide river.

The Indian foreign policy strategy in the east, adapting to altered nature of international economic interactions since the Indian state came under the influence of the neoliberal impetus for expansion of the market, advocates taking the road and connectivity constructions across international borders. The objective has been enabling the expansion of international trade and exchanges with India’s neighbors in Northeast India’s surroundings—with Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and the ASEAN. In foreign relations with Bangladesh, for example, India’s neighbor located to the northeast’s south, India has been demanding commercial transit passage through Bangladeshi territories. The issues of connectivity—reopening of railway lines, land, and river navigational routes—which the British had developed during the colonial period through states of the Northeast region and connecting West Bengal have been foundational in the recent India–Bangladesh diplomatic relations (Dubey 2013).

The grant of significance to development of infrastructural connectivity with the Northeast region’s international neighbours under the LEP/AEP has been greater than bilateral foreign relations ordinarily impressed on Indian foreign policy. Constructions of connectivity become central to reorienting outwards from the traditional ideological leanings in Indian foreign policy as its foreign policy gears up to take advantage of the expanded economic outputs. Due to its location at the junction of South Asia and Southeast Asian regions, Northeast India has experienced the ground impact of these policy shifts. The geography of the region comes to be seen as a gulf between the expanding Indian economy and the sea of economic opportunities the South East Asian region offers.

Since inauguration of the LEP, the emphasis on road and connectivity constructions has come to be seen in the improvement of existing National Highways connecting the Northeast region with other parts of India. Bridge-building projects upon the Brahmaputra River have almost come all at once in the period since the opening of the second bridge across the river in 1987. Apart from four new bridges, the state government of Assam in Northeast India has wanted to build six more bridges across the river in 2018 (Sarma 2019).

The bridges across the Brahmaputra River are part of an LEP/AEP-inspired scheme for connecting navigable rivers across the region and its international neighbors. With development of roads, networks of navigable rivers have also emerged as capable sites for redevelopment of traditional access routes. The navigable waterways are small, shared waterways between Northeast India, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. These waterways were used in the pre-colonial and colonial past for drifting down tradable commodities across short distances. Numerous and of variable volumes, the rivers are part of large river systems of the Brahmaputra, the Surma–Barak–Meghna system, the Karnaphuli, and the Kaladan rivers. The rivers have the advantage of crossing international borders of the region and, therefore, are capable of becoming international transit routes.

The Kaladan Multimodal Transport Project is one such road and riverine link for connecting Indian territories in Mizoram to Sittwe Port in Myanmar. River navigational routes have combined with building of highways to offer trade access to remote and landlocked areas of the Northeast region, like Mizoram and Tripura. The Trilateral Highway is a land route project seeking to connect Moreh in Manipur to Mae Sot in Thailand. India is helping build bridges and roads for the Tamu–Kalewa–Kalemyo sector of the Trilateral Highway. A total of 740 km of existing highways in Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Manipur states of Northeast India connecting the towns of Dawki, Shillong, Dimapur, Kohima, Imphal, and Moreh have become part of Asian Highways called AH1 and AH2, which stretch all the way from Tokyo in the east end and runs westwards to Istanbul (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific [UNESCAP] 2016).

The ASEAN members Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam are also part of another connectivity project with India since 2014. This project, called the Mekong–India Economic Corridor (MIEC), has been said to capitalize on the potential for shared economic growth in India and ASEAN and for growth in transit of multilateral trade through the connectivity corridors under construction (MEA 2014).

Other than the international connectivity projects, there are interconnected road and other connectivity expansion projects running within the region of Northeast India, which seek to develop feeder trade and transit routes to the international routes under development. The policy for increasing inter-subregion connectivity has led to ordaining at least two state institutions responsible for the region—the Ministry of Development of Northeast Region (MDoNER) and the North Eastern Council (NEC)—with setting out schemes for development of regional infrastructural connectivity.

The MDoNER launched a project called the Northeast Road Sector Development Scheme in 2015 and tasked the NEC with implementation. The scheme identifies vital but neglected inter-state roads in the Northeast region for redevelopment and widening. The network of inter-state roads the NEC has identified as ready for redevelopment totals a road length of 1,665.75 km (Ministry of Development of Northeast Region [MDoNER] n.d.). In the financial year 2016–2017, the NEC allocated close to 40 per cent of its budget to the transportation and communications sector, the highest among all budgetary sectors (North Eastern Council [NEC] n.d.). Through the development of socio-politically backward areas and realizing the importance of state security objectives and creating market access for agricultural products, the state schemes for infrastructural development have as targets the same vision for development of the region as the development vision the LEP/AEP outlines.

The influence of the LEP/AEP has spurred the state to also increase connectivity infrastructures other than road construction and development of river navigation routes, such as railways and airports. Despite condensed location of connectivity infrastructures in a limited space of Northeast India, distances from established industrial sites and business hubs in India’s eastern region, from metropolitan cities and other parts, have sought to be covered through development of air connectivity. There are plans for developing twelve airports which include building of new airports and upgrading of existing ones across the Northeast region that together with the larger airports such as the Guwahati and Imphal airports envision condensing air connectivity within the region.

Until recently, Northeast India was the only region in India to have states that were completely untouched by railway lines. However, since the time developmental policy for the region has focused on building connectivity, projects for construction of nine new railway lines to connect the states of Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, and Arunachal Pradesh that were previously without rail connectivity and two projects for conversion of railway gauge have improved rail connectivity within the region. Taking the LEP/AEP line, state governments expect that improved roads and connectivity infrastructures in the region will unlock the northeastern states’ potential as an emerging trade hub of the South East Asia region.

The LEP/AEP’s Regional Development Model

The LEP/AEP has professed centrality of developing infrastructural connectivity and integrating the roads and connectivity routes to routes in South Asia and Southeast Asia in raising the Indian North Eastern Region to global significance. The development of connectivity seeks to invert the former condition of isolated geographical existence of Northeast India and make it a strategic nodal trade hub in the regions. The LEP/AEP’s vision for making the region a geographical springboard for raising Indian stakes in the geopolitical dynamics of South Asia and Southeast Asia, therefore, has combined foreign policy ambitions with the vision of economic development for the region.

The Northeast region has historically trailed behind other parts of India in industrial development and economic growth; this was attributed to a ‘step-motherly treatment’ by the center that led to regional political agitations. Natural resources were seen to be taken away from the region, and, in return, the state made negligible investments in industrial development. In the 1960–1970s, protests taking place in Assam did not reject the approach of the state to development but reproached the state for neglecting particular societal developmental needs. The Assam Movement of 1979–1985, for example, sought, apart from creation of employment opportunities, development of cultural capital and security for local identity. Rather than for freeing the economy from the clutches of the state, agitation politics in the other states of the northeast, especially Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland as well, centered around demands for recognition and cultural security of the societies.

Development of transport, connectivity, and other trade-related infrastructures or the lack of it has said to have the power to influence in making of Northeast India a metaphorical overland bridge connecting the economic opportunities in India and Southeast Asia. Through equipping the region with trade-enhancing infrastructure and infrastructure for industrial development in the form of building connectivity, the LEP/AEP has sought to act on neoliberal prescriptions for enabling of development, which have required states to minimize controls on the economy and create conditions for the growth of trade and industry. The infrastructure-centered policy for development of the Northeast region regards that, with the establishment of physical connectivity, the market economy will self-deliver economic growth in the region.

The neoliberal route to development, however, does not concede space to equalizing availability of economic opportunities. The poor have been made vulnerable to effects of exposure of the economy to volatility in the capital market in its era. Its development paradigm has lacked the social agenda of making economic growth ‘pro-poor growth’ (Williamson 2003: 14). Although growth in the neoliberal paradigm does raise incomes for the poor, the absence of state intervention increases the avenues for the rich to grow their incomes, but the proportionate increase for the poor does not amount to much if they start with very little. This has been the case in Northeast India where income levels have been traditionally poor. The plan for creation of opportunities through the connectivity construction schemes does not change the ability of the poor of this region to take advantage of such opportunities.

The nature of impacts of growths in trade and trade transits, fallouts of the neoliberal economic development model on people, and societal reactions in Northeast India due to the reduced role of the state in allocations of market outcomes are still being measured. Although development theories associate road constructions with development, empirical studies have established that construction of roads benefit some people more than others (Rigg 2002).

The inequitable impacts of road construction have a bearing on the scenario in Northeast India. The coming of the LEP/AEP is said to have opened the Northeast region’s space to insidious agencies of material life. The LEP/AEP has been a template for renewed capital accumulation in the territorial space (Samaddar and Mitra 2016). Despite the massive construction of roads and other connectivity infrastructures, the northeastern states, on average, are behind the national average on human development indices. Existing research, in fact, finds no confirmed evidence for correlation between road construction and social development (Srikanth 2016).

The critics of the LEP/AEP have desired state development policies to gear up the north eastern states’ economies for participation in the export-oriented and capital-intensive businesses that the LEP/AEP is understood to facilitate in the region. Focus on infrastructure creation has seemed to sideline social development goals, whereas civil society organizations (CSOs) of the region have projected societal demands for bringing focus onto social development. The movement of an organization called Krishak Mukti Xongam Xomiti (KMSS) in Assam has opposed big infrastructural development projects, such as the highway construction and dam construction on these grounds. It has been claiming that the poor sections of society have nothing to gain from infrastructure development and, on the contrary, the poor sections are losing access to traditionally cultivated lands and livelihoods due to diversion of lands.

The protesting CSOs have interpreted the huge infrastructural investments in the Northeast region but, more specifically, in Assam state as pathways facilitating capital-intensive investors to capture economic resources in the region in a renewed manner and take control of systems of economic production. Allotments of state lands to industrial investors in Assam State have been protested against upon the complaint that lands have not been simultaneously made available for landless peasants. A decision of the state government to allot lands to an investing firm called Patanjali Yogpeeth Trust in 2018 was called out in protests of local CSOs as a ploy to hand over scarce land resources to vested capitalist interests (India Today 2016).

State schemes and investor summits being held in Northeast India in the wake of the LEP/AEP have held the creation of connectivity spurred by the LEP/AEP as infrastructural resources capable of being harnessed for industrial growth. While investors and businesspeople in the Northeast region have welcomed the building of connectivity and connected infrastructures, organizations such as KMSS in the region have opposed operation of tolls on national highways, which were being developed through participation of the private sector.

Protestors contend that the development of access routes benefits only a handful of capital-intensive businesses and traders more than it benefits indigenous people of the Northeast region; protesting peasants have, as yet, showed no particular interest or inspiration for participation in export-oriented agricultural businesses that might develop in the region as a result of the LEP/AEP’s thrust. Protest organizations in Manipur and Meghalaya states have opposed projects for extension of railway lines from a different ground, which is that the development of connectivity might lead to migration of non-indigenous traders and investors and reduce availability of economic opportunities for indigenous people.

Coinciding in the time of the investment thrust in physical infrastructure in the region, organizations called the Asom Jatiyabadi Yuba Chattra Parixod (AJYCP) in Assam, the Joint Committee on the Inner Line Permit System (JCILPS) in Manipur and the Khasi Students Union (KSU) in Meghalaya have sought protection for the people of the states so that the liberalized labor movement made operational by the connectivity projects does not submerge the availability of livelihoods for the locals. Groups of people in Manipur, collected under different forums as diverse as human rights, social reforms, social protection, and environment protection, have brought railway expansion projects in states like Manipur to a halt. Road entryways to Manipur are kept under vigilance by the workers of the JCILPS to prevent entry of people allegedly brought in from Bangladesh to work in the construction sector.

The apparent xenophobia in the social protests against the idea of connectivity has been an outcome of the ongoing transformation of the political economy. The average inhabitant of the region, especially its tribal, does not immediately benefit from the new economic opportunities opening up but does risk losing the traditionally held rights over lands and resources, as these resources are made to fit into private ownership orders and claimed or taken for public infrastructure construction (Karlsson 2011).

Local protests at industrial sites in the region have opposed industrial projects for failure to offer economic rehabilitation to development-induced evacuees (Hussain 2008). But until the 1980s, the state policy for industrialization of Northeast India had faced a larger criticism that the industrializing process in the region was extractive in nature, concentrated in mining and quarrying sectors rather than in manufacturing, and, therefore, failed to offer opportunities for social development (Misra 1980). The opening up of the region to industrial investments that building infrastructure under the LEP/AEP has facilitated recently has raised renewed concerns that the policies have empowered instruments for extracting resources from the region without developing local enterprise. Despite the massive growth in volumes of India–ASEAN trade, exports from the Northeast region have constituted less than 1 per cent of the total Indian merchandise exports.

Samaddar and Mitra (2016) have mapped recent forays and establishment of resource-extracting industries in Northeast India since around the time of adoption of LEP. Samaddar and Mitra’s study echoes the opposition of the CSOs in seeing the development of infrastructure and industrial investments with skepticism under the LEP/AEP. In these lenses, the region has appeared reduced to becoming a logistics hub and nodal trade facilitator.

Despite governments in the region proactively inviting investments into industry in the region through holding of investor summits and business conclaves, especially since the time the LEP was remolded into the AEP, local enterprise does not seem to have developed greatly. The reason could be that infrastructure creation under the LEP/AEP does not focus on development of local enterprises and local capital in the region but emphasizes singularly on creating an infrastructural condition for seamless transit of trade. An Inland Container Depot (ICD), located at Amingaon across the river Brahmaputra from Guwahati city and the only ICD in the Northeast region, has reported, since the formulation of LEP/AEP, one-directional movement of cargo at the ICD with cargos transiting outwards, particularly to Kolkata Port. The ICD which exists almost exclusively for dispatch of tea from Assam has pointed to an absence of growth in export-oriented trade from the region (Sanyal 2013).

Conclusion

The LEP/AEP’s ambitious goals for the Northeast region contain developing of connectivity and trade infrastructure for seamless transits of commerce between South Asia and the South East Asian regions. Whereas traditional Indian foreign policy was approaching the Indian North Eastern Region through a security vantage, the LEP/AEP ‘opens up’ the northeast to trade and investments and combines geopolitical objectives with the impetus for economic expansion. The impetus for trade growth and economic expansion across the South Asia and Southeast Asian regions through the infrastructure constructions, however, has constituted a model for development of the region that concentrates almost singularly on development of physical infrastructure. As the South Asian scholar Faizal Yahya writes, Indian ‘engagement with ASEAN [since the 1990s] was to accelerate the expansion and modernization of Indian infrastructure in the form of communications, roads, ports and power’ (Yahya 2003: 80).

The model for development has been attacked within the region for failing to develop local enterprise and local capital and for not approaching the problem of development in Northeast India from a social perspective. The neoliberal foundations for the policy advocate the withdrawal of the state from market participation. However, this fails to meet the challenges of readying the people of the region for participation in the economic opportunities made available through the development of connectivity.

Although the creation of infrastructure has increased industrial investments into the region, critics have pointed to stagnation in development of the manufacturing sector and decried the LEP/AEP as a political instrument for enabling capitalist resources extraction from the region. Anthropologist Dolly Kikon, invoking Walther Benjamin’s study of material cultures, interprets the construction in the northeast as outcomes of pleasure needs of seeing broad and towering structures (Kikon 2018). But such reductionist view of the infrastructure constructions has a context. It has represented the concerns emanating from social groups in the region that fear that it might be reduced to being a transitional trade and traffic zone unless the impetus for developing infrastructure accompanies visions for social development.