Recalibrating Act East from the Northeast India: Connectivity, Geopolitics and Frontier Governance

India’s Act East Policy is anchored in a spatial imagination that situates the Northeast as the country’s natural land bridge to Southeast Asia. Strategic maps extend corridors across the eastern frontier, diplomatic discourse foregrounds regional linkages, and infrastructure planning proceeds on the assumption that connectivity can be stabilised through linear routes. Yet the terrain through which these routes must function is neither neutral nor uniformly governable. The Northeast is not an empty transit surface waiting to be activated by infrastructure. It is a governed frontier where circulation is continuously shaped by administrative negotiation, security management, and historically layered patterns of mobility.