India's Look East Policy: Imagining a New Geography of India's Northeast

In: India quarterly: a journal of international affairs, Volume 66, Issue 4, p. 343-358

Abstract

This article seeks to find out how the new policy thinking, namely, the 'Look East' apparently intended to deliver India's Northeast from its presently landlocked and peripheral status produces new geopolitical imaginaries that are not necessarily bound by the limits set forth by it. The article is more about the gaze that India's 'Look East' casts particularly on the Northeast and how it constitutes and imagines into existence a space that extends beyond the region. The new geopolitical imagination set off by the new policy thinking envisages a space that apparently refuses to be bound by the present geography of the Northeast as much as it promises to spread across the international borders to the countries of Southeast Asia through such frontline states as Myanmar and Bangladesh. I propose to call this imagined space—the extended Northeast—and argue that the way the space is imagined in official circles sets in motion many new imaginaries. The extended Northeast as being officially imagined now has therefore a mnemonic effect insofar as it offers a significant cue to the alternative modalities of imagining the Northeast.