India’s neighbourhood policy seems to be devoid of any strategy to integrate national interests with the concerns of border regions like Northeast India. India’s security-centric approach prevented a cooperative relationship from emerging with its neighbours, while a deeper and intense engagement with them would have benefitted India and helped solve many of the problems that Northeast India is facing today. However, the recent move by India under the Act East Policy to cultivate a much closer relationship with its eastern neighbours is full of possibilities to make India’s neighbourhood policy more accommodative and sensitive towards the needs of Northeast India. In the light of this, the proposed article intends to examine the nature of India’s neighbourhood policy, to assess its implications for the Northeast and finally, to examine whether the recent transnational engagements can initiate development of the Northeast by relieving it from its peripheral and landlocked status.
The underdevelopment of Northeast India is quite often explained in terms of economic isolation primarily on account of its geographical peripherality. To address this challenge, a new imagination, through the Look (Act) East Policy has been proposed. This approach, makes India’s Northeast the centre of a unified economic, physical and social space through its integration with the trans-border neighbouring regions. In this article, an attempt has been made to examine the logic of developing an ‘extended Northeast’ and how it has been sought to be realized. The article argues that the actualization of this proposed integrated space is ridden with serious difficulties and the internal fragmentation of Northeast India and the exceptional rules and administrative arrangement that are in place in the region along with the geopolitical compulsion of India may act as significant barriers in this regard. And most importantly there are apprehensions that the proposed integrated space may lead to the appropriation of resources of the Northeast by the corporate houses without benefiting the people of the region.
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