Recently, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar made welcoming assurances about developing connectivity from and within the Northeast. This was followed closely by Union Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia’s remarks about improving the nature of rail and air connectivity to and within the region.
For a space plagued with lack of communication, troubling insurgency, and raging underdevelopment, these are enthusiastic trends.
In recent years, connectivity in the Northeast has been a popular issue in India’s foreign policy. The potential of the region is at the heart of India’s ‘Look East’ and ‘Act East’ policies, as it forms the crucial conduit between India and Southeast Asia. As a result, there is gradual financial attention, an increasing allocation of projects, and a larger promise for connectivity in the region at three levels: (a) trans-regionally between Northeast India and Southeast Asian states, (b) nationally between the Northeast and the rest of India, and (c) locally within the Northeast.
In spite of the potential and promise, the record of connectivity in the Northeast remains a complex issue and a story of missed opportunities.
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Dual challenge
The Northeast continues to suffer from meaningful and substantive connectivity projects that address the economic and social concerns of the space. This cannot be addressed unless there is a fundamental reconsideration of how India thinks about and assess connectivity projects. States often miss the point that connectivity is a means to a larger end and not the end in itself.
Such projects are often seen as agents of material and social development, but they do not have any independent standing unless we ask: whom we are connecting with and for what purpose? A connectivity project can be deemed successful only when it can connect meaningful stakeholders, not because of its engineering grandeur or volume of investment alone. Therefore, the assessment and success of a connectivity project depends on its sustenance, not its inception.
India has the dual challenge of negotiating security concerns on the ground and keeping the promise of connectivity alive. As the predominant security considerations override connectivity projects, meaningful projects are elusive.
Rather than these projects ushering in development and altering the ground rules, security issues tend to structure connectivity projects in turn. The crucial questions – whom to connect, for what, and how much to connect – are decided on security parameters and not economic adventurism and social experimentation. This often results in connectivity projects that are not coherent but haphazard.
The projects broadly depend on two tenets of economic and community gains. Connectivity corridors cannot be sustained if they are not economically profitable. Similarly, they do not add value if they are not legitimised by the community for social mobility. Unfortunately, the Northeast’s long history of insurgencies and its contentious borders with Myanmar, Bangladesh, and China embolden security narratives to downplay economic logic and community acceptability.
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Economic logic
How does the security factor impact the economic gains of connectivity projects? First, connectivity projects have to carefully skirt the borders and territorial concerns. It effectively means that economic corridors can only develop on State-mandated routes. Hard borders breed insecurity and the regulation of people and goods.
Even if there is an enhancement in border connectivity, the movement of troops rather than goods or civilians is the main objective. Security zones do not make good economic corridors.
Second, a conflict zone has limits, while economic networks depend upon the adventurism of bending boundaries, whether political or geographical. Economic stakeholders are unlikely to invest in a conflict space ridden with political and security restrictions.
Consider the case that sovereignty issues prevent Northeast India from tapping into the markets of South China. The Northeast also does not connect with emerging economies like Singapore and Malaysia, but not into Myanmar, another conflict zone. With both Bangladesh and Myanmar, India has difficult borders with complicated terrain and militarisation. These factors draw a steel ring around economic logic. Finally, security issues impose logistical delays that further weaken economic incentives. India’s initiatives, such as the trilateral highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, have recurrently failed deadlines.
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Community acceptability
Security perceptions have complicated the trust factor between the State and the community. This is a perfect catch-22 situation.
Northeast communities rightly feel alienated from the other states because of the State’s hard-handed security approach toward them. States find it difficult to trust and communicate with the communities because of long-drawn insurgencies. This manifests in several ways.
First, in the grand transregional designs of the government, the Northeast often comes across as a bridge to Southeast Asia. It gives the impression of a ‘fly-over’ approach where Northeast is used as a connecting cable but internally left unengaged. If the situation has to be altered, the State has to ask important questions – whether the local people feel attached to these projects, whether they are included or not, and whether they feel that it is significant.
Second, in a space where insider-outsider debates are very alive, a lack of engagement and proper communication with the community might also induce fears of migration. The Northeast has a delicate and volatile demography. The fear of commercialisation and connectivity might invoke destabilising perceptions of migration violating their space.
Finally, connectivity has to carefully tread the path of sustainable development. If not considered legitimate and included, people may consider interference to be an infringement on their environmental claims and rights.
India has to consider that its connectivity projects are backed by the hard logic of numbers and the soft support of the people. Unless the government can untangle the predominance of security and conduct a meaningful assessment of connectivity, projects are more likely to remain an artifact than an aid. The beginning of a connectivity project is not the end.
Udayan Das is an Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata.
(Edited by Tarannum Khan)