As India’s Act East horizon expands, older readings of alignment as favouritism begin to misfire.
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Back in 2006, during the National Agri Expo at 4th Mile, inaugurated by Sharad Pawar, a businessman asked a question that now reads less like curiosity and more like premonition: Could Dimapur become a warehouse and packaging hub for pulses moving into eastern India—including Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal? The product was Burmese pulses—globally prized and geographically proximate. The instinct was simple: place the node where movement converges. What was glimpsed then was not merely a business plan, but the early outline of a map beginning to think differently.
That map has now caught up with itself. As India’s Act East horizon expands, older readings of alignment as favouritism begin to misfire. What appears selective is, in fact, convergence—corridors aligning, access recalibrating, and continuity being engineered rather than assumed.
The shift is already underway. What appears as disorder is, in fact, reordering. This isn’t chaos—it’s structure revealing itself in real time. This is not instability. It is the reorganisation of power around connectivity.
The map of the East is no longer organised around fixed centres of power—it is reorganising itself around movement, corridors, and access.
The shift rests on a hybrid model—land and sea working in tandem. The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, running through Sittwe in Rakhine State into the Northeast, especially Mizoram, is not just infrastructure. It is intent made visible: alternatives over reliance and options over singularity.
In such a system, engagement cannot be selective. Geography and geopolitics compel breadth. Routes multiply, and with them, the necessity to engage across layers—state, borderland, corridor, coast. Movement does not wait for political comfort; it follows access.
Where the Siliguri Corridor—the “chicken’s neck”—resembles a vulnerability, this widening of routes functions as a built-in hedge, dispersing risk and ensuring that connectivity does not hinge on a single fragile passage.
Trade leads this transformation. It has no memory, only direction. It moves where friction is lowest and continuity is possible. Sentiment lingers. Movement decides. Connectivity rewrites relevance. Roads, ports, and transit lines activate spaces into value. Centres do not endure—they emerge, fade, and reappear with flow. Permanence gives way to function. Across the geographical spectrum, the reordering is becoming visible.
Historically, many communities favoured the hills especially the Naga tribes. Lowlands were associated with malaria, flooding, humidity, and difficult habitation, while Naga villages often occupied ridgelines for defence, visibility, and healthier climates. Geography once rewarded height.
Today, the logic has reversed. The lowlands once avoided are now where roads converge, railheads expand, markets gather, and logistics scale. What was once a burden has become a connective advantage.
This is one of the quiet reversals shaping the East. Hilltops once commanded security; lowlands now command movement. Earlier geography privileged refuge. Modern geography privileges access.
Across this terrain, ethnic and borderland realities are not external—they are embedded within the corridor itself. Engagement widens because it must. Stability is assembled along the route. What was once only alluded to is now visible: ethnic groups are gaining renewed prominence, not merely as identities, but as actors positioned along lines of movement. This also carries deeper demographic implications, as improved access creates conditions for organised settlement, market clustering, labour inflows, and future population growth around emerging nodes.
The outlines are already becoming visible: demography, over time, reshapes representation, bargaining power, and the practical grammar of democracy itself. What was once blurry and marginal can, through proximity, ease of flow, and concentration, become indispensable and unavoidable. This marks a major shift in both perception and trajectory. In many places, the old order has yielded to a new one not by proclamation, but by default—through the quiet logic of movement, accumulation, and access. Relevance follows proximity to corridors, not inherited hierarchy.
Within this network, Assam—and particularly Guwahati—settles into a new role: not as a centre of control, but as a springboard of movement. It does not hold the system; it feeds it.
The friction is real. Communities across the region, including Meiteis and Nagas, register a sense of marginalisation. Not necessarily because of preferential alignment, but because the system itself is shifting away from familiar anchors. The route once anchored through Dimapur, Kohima, and Senapati toward Moreh now finds a parallel through Silchar, Tipaimukh, and Churachandpur to the same gateway. The psychological map lags behind the network.
This is not a tipping point—it is a reordering already underway.
This is not strategic autonomy—it is the logic of connectivity asserting itself.
In this reordering, communities positioned along emerging corridors—notably Kuki-Zo groups—are finding increased strategic relevance, as proximity to routes begins to translate into leverage. Claims of land, inheritance, and identity are increasingly expressions of this reordering, not exceptions to it.
Old ways of thinking—often marked by certainty and quiet arrogance—struggle to interpret this shift. Engagement is no longer confined to familiar frameworks. It is widening—across terrains, across identities, across borders.
This outward push does not stop at the border. The approach looks beyond and into Myanmar and further east. That logic invites inclusivity. Not by design, but by necessity.
The language of preference belongs to an earlier grammar—when influence was concentrated and predictable. That grammar is thinning. A different lexicon is forming—distributed, adaptive, and often misunderstood.
What is unfolding is convergence and repositioning. The reordering continues—undaunted, and anchored by a more reliable India. In this emerging order, relevance belongs to those who move with the map, not those who remember it. The map is no longer being read. It is being rewritten.
Limhachan Kikon