Memories of Connectivity in Northeast India: Contrasting Traditional Routes and New Alignments
Abstract
Northeast India is undergoing a huge transformation in connectivity and infrastructure development, and the pace has quickened in the past few years. The new alignments that have emerged as a result are, however, in sharp contrast with local community memories, traditional aspirations and worldviews of connectivity, largely, because of the national security-oriented nature of New Delhi’s connectivity calculus in the region. The unique ethnic, social and cultural milieu of Northeast India and community scale of connectivity aspirations and memories of sacred geography, when contrasted with New Delhi’s scale of national security and strategic geography, bring forward several contestations and limitations. This Issue Brief discusses community memories, imaginations and perceptions of various traditional connectivity routes in the light of the many connectivity projects being deployed to make Northeast India a continental corridor space connecting South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Keywords: community memories, connectivity, infrastructure, Northeast India, transboundary spaces
The memories and perceptions of connectivity infrastructure at the community scale across Northeast India in the present times oscillate between traditional routes and new alignments. Pilgrimage routes, trading routes, and migration routes are closely associated with identity formations and embedded deeply in the worldviews of the many communities that have inhabited and moved across these spaces over centuries. The new alignments created during the connectivity infrastructure rush in the past two decades highlight imageries of control, accumulation, and resource capture, while also rekindling the imaginations and aspirations of borderland communities to reclaim historical transboundary connections and establish new ones as well. The new alignments sit squarely at the scale where New Delhi looks at Northeast India through the lens of national security and strategic geography. Several such alignments have cut through and ruptured sacred forests and territories of ethnic communities such as the Karbis and Dimasas in the upland districts of Assam, the Lais and Maras of southern Mizoram, Naga communities in eastern Arunachal Pradesh, the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia communities of Meghalaya and Naga and Kuki-Zo communities in southern Manipur.
The Pangsau Pass, at the easternmost corner of Arunachal Pradesh leading into Myanmar, for instance, holds several layers of memories – as a traditional route of migration spread over centuries for many communities who inhabit Northeast India and as an active theater in World War II. The Stilwell Road, which passes through the Pangsau Pass and is now more popularly known for its namesake, the American general Joseph Stilwell, than for its storied migration histories. The road is often deployed and imagined as a potential corridor space to connect Northeast India to Kunming in southwest China through the state of Kachin in Myanmar, but New Delhi has since abandoned it, citing security concerns. This is an excellent example of how the nation-state scale of connectivity discourse and design dominate over the community scale of aspirational connectivity based on migration histories and a shared sense of belonging. The ruptures in the contiguities of the traditional routes occur within nation-state borders, and community aspirations of cultural connectivity with ethnic kin across the borders are scuttled in the name of national security, strategic corridor space orientation and hard borders.
The Kaladan project is an example of a new alignment, cutting through the pristine forests of south Mizoram to carve out a new strategic corridor space for New Delhi. The traditional routes through which communities in Mizoram envisioned their connectivity to Myanmar, such as the Aizawl-Champhai road, lie in relative disrepair. The Zokhawthar-Rih border crossing near Champhai, which lies northeast of the Kaladan project’s new alignment, is an important pilgrimage route for communities. When a Mizo person passes away in Mizoram, it is believed that their soul must first pass through the heart-shaped Rih Lake located just three kilometers from the India-Myanmar border inside Myanmar’s Chin state, considered as a sacred site in the Mizo-Chin worldview, and only then can it enter heaven (Levesque and Rahman 2008). The nation-state scale, however, prioritizes new alignments and bypasses the memories of connectivity through traditional routes.
The traditional Buddhist pilgrimage routes between eastern Bhutan and western Arunachal Pradesh in India hold significance in terms of trading and pilgrimage for local communities (Gohain 2020; Rahman 2020). Pilgrimage tourism between these two parts of Bhutan and India entails people from eastern Bhutan following circuitous routes – first traveling south toward Assam in India, then east within Assam, and then north in order to reach Bomdila, Dirang, and Tawang in western Arunachal Pradesh. The traditional pilgrimage route connecting these places via Zimithang, a simple west-to-east connection through the eastern Himalayan mountain passes, remains closed because it falls close to the tri-junction between Bhutan, India, and Tibet, a region with active land border disputes between China and India. New Delhi prefers to promote new internal connectivity alignments of the Trans-Arunachal Highway Project started in 2008 and the newly announced Arunachal Frontier Highway Project of 2024, connecting the western, central and eastern parts of Arunachal Pradesh for border security.
Connectivity Contested and Constrained
The maze of connectivity projects across Northeast India operates within an uncoordinated and inefficient institutional framework. The states of Northeast India are unable to stand together to gather and build the critical mass necessary to make sense of the many new corridor spaces being deployed in the region and demand that New Delhi open up the borders in a meaningful way. The effects of such fragmented infrastructure development, and weak institutional framework of coordination underline the inequality between the states in Northeast India. Politically, economically, and demographically powerful states such as Assam have the capacity to appropriate and absorb much of the infrastructural development benefits available to the region.
Contestations between corridor spaces spanning parts of Northeast India are stark – while the Kaladan project is backed by the central government, the Stilwell Road has been abandoned by the same government due to security concerns. The social infrastructure development within borderland states such as Manipur, meanwhile, is woefully inadequate and unequal, with a deficient and lopsided pattern and distribution of infrastructure, almost translating into a structural inequality (Ziipao 2020). The fencing of the entire India-Myanmar border, which is to be completed by 2035, has been contested, although selectively, by local communities across Northeast India, including Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram (Singh 2025). Such fencing would disrupt ethnic and familial ties on both sides of the border ensured by the Free Movement Regime, which allowed families living within 10 kilometres on either side of the international borderline, to move across without a visa or a passport. Some majority communities want a selective border fencing of the international borders. Mizoram advocates for its eastern border with Bangladesh to be fenced, and the western and southern borders with Myanmar to be open, due to local perceptions of threats from migration. But New Delhi has moved to fence Mizoram’s western and southern borders as well, owing to a different threat perception (Singh 2025). And in Manipur, given the ongoing ethnic conflict, the majority Meiteis want the border fenced with Myanmar but while the Kuki Ko and Naga groups oppose this.
Local communities note that the widening, improvement, and new alignments of road infrastructure, the construction of hydropower dams, oil and gas drilling, and natural resource mining activities often arrive along with news of increased hostilities with China at the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Infrastructure development and corridor spaces deployed thus shadow national strategic priorities and attempt to control and reorder physical features in Northeast India. The dilution of laws relating to forests, land, social and environmental impact assessments create additional jeopardies for local communities despite state claims that such infrastructure development is for local benefit.
Given an overwhelming sense of democratic deficit and unequal dynamics between the center and the states, many borderland communities see a direct link and pattern between resource capture, appropriation, and extraction on one hand, and infrastructure deployment by the state, on the other (Rahman 2014). The inability to participate in decision-making processes and structures to safeguard the forests, rivers, sacred landscapes, and community ways of life goes a long way toward reinforcing the inequalities and coupling effects that large-scale infrastructural transformation brings to the social realities of local communities. Even as they face hydropower dams threatening their forests, rivers, and livelihoods, with roads neatly tarmacked to transport large machinery to dam construction sites, these communities do not have access to basic social infrastructure of clean drinking water, sanitary toilets, primary education, and healthcare especially in far-flung rural areas of Northeast India, such as in Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland. It is this very disjuncture between the pace of hard physical infrastructure development and that of the soft social infrastructure requirements of local communities across Northeast India, which leads to “infrastructures of injustice” (Ziipao 2020).
The stretches of “chicken roads”, “goat roads” and “pig roads” between a World Bank-funded road and the Kaladan project corridor space in Mizoram are a distinct reminder of how disconnected the local communities are from the strategic imagination of this mega-infrastructure project that is shrouded in nationalistic symbolism but has struggled to take off since 2008. It is a set piece of a jigsaw puzzle of disjointed connectivity projects, which are being completed in parts, with parcels awarded to separate contractors and big chunks of these projects missing altogether. Such “pickled” infrastructure and connectivity projects (Rahman 2019) often fall into ruins.
The Kaladan project was meant to connect Northeast India with the Bay of Bengal, yet the political turmoil and ethnic conflicts across the borderlands have seriously jeopardized the viability of the connectivity corridor plans. The corridor route through Myanmar planned for the Kaladan project has seen ethnic conflict between the majority Rakhine community and minority Rohingya community since 2016 in the Arakan province of Myanmar. While there is talk of opening up India’s borders with Myanmar at various border crossings, there is also apprehension about an incoming migration of political refugees from the conflict-torn regions of Myanmar bordering Northeast India. This national security dilemma is the marker of New Delhi’s hard-border mindset, over the past decades, regarding the continental route from Northeast India to Southeast Asia via Myanmar.
Meanwhile, local community relations effectively look across the border, be it contested or otherwise, to take in both sides of the borderland (Evans 2013). Community ties help create, maintain, undermine, and even evade borders and challenge the idea of a national homeland which is sacrosanct and only determined and controlled by the nation-state (Diener and Hagen 2010). In the context of the Stilwell Road, for example, borderland communities in easternmost parts of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh question the closed borders with northern Myanmar, with whom they have social and cultural connections. The six Tai groups, which inhabit large parts of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, and especially the Tai-Khamti, Tai-Phakey, and Singpho communities, speak about their extended family connections across the border in Myanmar and their inability to cross these borders to visit them. The only route available with the Stilwell Road closed is via Kolkata and Thailand. The Arunachal Pradesh government, however, does not appear inclined to push for the Road’s opening, as it has to deal with a number of insurgent groups operating from the Naga dominated districts of Changlang, Tirap and Longding. While the section of the Road running from Ledo in Assam through Arunachal to the border has been upgraded, the road itself disintegrates the moment it crosses into Myanmar, and despite the apparent construction by the Myanmarese side of a border market, there appears little interest in upgrading connectivity to the border area.
Amidst these challenges, the Pangsau Pass Winter Festival – also supported by the Arunachal Pradesh government – demonstrates the strong cultural links across the region, with various tribes coming together and underlining the need to open such borders for more people-to-people contact. As an active migration route used over several centuries in the region, the sociocultural imagination of local ethnic communities of Northeast India for the Pangsau Pass route, it must be noted, predates the construction of the Stilwell Road.
Alternative Framings: Transboundary Spaces as Corridor Spaces
The perception of communities of Northeast India of the transboundary spaces that they inhabit come from various sources, primarily from memories of historical routes central to their lives and worldviews. The bioregion or ecoregion of Eastern Himalayas and the rolling Patkai hills have a rich history of trade and migration routes (Harris 2023), preceding nation-state borders and corridor spaces of Northeast India. Indeed, the whole of Northeast India is at the center of several historical migration routes encompassing what is now South Asia and Southeast Asia. Communities living along the major rivers of the region have moved as the course of the rivers have moved over decades and centuries – as has been in the case of the Brahmaputra in Assam – and have employed oral cultures and testimonies to pass on their perceptions, histories, and the imaginations of traditional routes and spaces (Chakrabarti and Lahiri 1986; Huber 2012).
The affinities to transboundary spaces based on memories and imaginations of traditional routes for communities in Northeast India is reflected in their aspirations for connectivity across the borderlines and nation-state boxes and containers that have come to determine the geographical context of such spaces. These must be juxtaposed with the materiality embedded in the corridor spaces and the associated infrastructure deployed by the modern nation-state under the garb of promoting sub-regionalism and regionalism. While the respective framings of the borderland communities and the nation-state intersect and overlap in terms of shared imaginations and aspirations, in the absence of a robust participatory decision-making and consultative process, the framing of the nation-state dominates and subsumes the specificities of alternative community worldviews.
The dominant narrative is one of ordering the borderland, where natural features such as mountains, hills, forests, and rivers can no longer serve by themselves as sovereignty markers, but have to be infrastructured, dammed, and mined to become effective sovereignty markers. Transboundary spaces need to be controlled and bordered first within the nation-state, only to be subsequently pierced and corridor spaces carved out by the dominant state-led processes. The ability and capacity to adapt to deal with environmental catastrophes such as disasters, floods, erosion, landslides have a very different context and meaning for local communities who live in such precarious environments, compared to governments making disaster relief and mitigation policies, sitting in far-away state and national capitals.
The materiality embedded in Northeast India within the nation-state box is deployed against the backdrop of aspirations and memories of connectivity of borderland communities, but is increasingly fragmented and disjointed, almost by design, which has allowed both the physicality of infrastructure and the memories of connectivity to fall to ruin. The overall sense in the region is of infrastructural chaos and futility, as the borderland communities cannot be trusted enough for the hard nation-state container to open up. The contiguities and linkages between borderland communities across nation-state borderlines thus are ruptured, and they have lived apart from each other over several decades, so much so that successive generations have no imagination of the other side of the borderland anymore. The oral histories of community migration are the only imaginations left.
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About the Author: Dr. Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman is Visiting Associate Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], and is available on X @mirzalibra10.