Author: Anusha Garg and Glory Saikia

ABSTRACT

India’s Act East Policy has increasingly repositioned Northeast India from a peripheral frontier into a strategic gateway linking India to Southeast Asia. This paper argues that this transformation is best understood as a narrative shift with uneven material consequences. Rather than treating Act East as a straightforward success story of connectivity-led regional integration, the paper examines the gap between policy rhetoric and actual outcomes. It develops a causal argument linking policy narrative, infrastructure strategy and regional integration outcomes. The central claim is that the gateway narrative has legitimised infrastructure-led initiatives such as the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project and BIMSTEC connectivity frameworks, but these initiatives remain constrained by domestic political economy conditions, governance fragmentation, conflict legacies and regional instability. The paper therefore situates India’s Act East Policy within a hybrid model of South-South regional integration, where the language of partnership and mutual benefit coexists with India’s leadership role and uneven implementation. Northeast India emerges as both the symbolic anchor of India’s eastward strategy and the site where the limits of infrastructure-led regionalism become most visible.