Iman Mitra Twenty years after the launch of the Look East Policy in 1994, Narendra Modi, the newly elected prime minister of India, announces at the 2014 India-ASEAN summit that there has been a shift in the approach of the policy, at least externally. The new phase in its life is being called ‘Act East’ which is supposed to usher in a new age of development, industrialization and trade in the country. One may argue that this act of renaming – a shift from the calmness of envisioning to the virtuosity of enacting – is only a rhetorical ploy to divert people’s attention from the policy’s ineffectiveness in the last twenty years. Others will say that it is in continuation with the neoliberal orientation of the first phase where the ‘ideological’ standings of India’s foreign policy were compromised to cater to demands of ‘national self-interest’, ultimately leading to protection of private interests and promotion of big capital and militarisation under the banner of pragmatic politics. There is, however, another way to look at this shift, that is, in terms of India’s changing relationship with Asian power blocs and regional conglomerates like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). The picture becomes clear when we see how India has changed its assessment of ASEAN in the last two decades. Since its inception in the 1960s, ASEAN was viewed as the USA’s stratagem to control Southeast Asia. With the dismantling of the Soviet Russia and end of Cold War, this negative assessment turned into a desperate attempt to gain confidence of the ASEAN countries in the early nineteen-nineties when the then Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao announced the Look East Policy and sent economic missions to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea with the message that India was having its own perestroika of sorts. Though the missions got warm reception, the trade relations did not improve to a satisfactory level. India in 2014 has been the ninth largest trading partner with ASEAN (67 billion US dollars of total trade) where as China is still its largest trading partner (366 billion US dollars of total trade in 2015). One reason of this lacklustre growth is the poor physical infrastructure of connectivity between India and ASEAN countries. The announcement of the Act East Policy at the ASEAN-India Summit of 2014 is therefore quite significant as both parties agree on the need for infrastructure development and increase of mobility and connectivity in this region. The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) was formed in 1997 with this sentiment in mind. In 2007, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) conducted a study titled the ‘BIMSTEC Transport Infrastructure and Logistics Study’ which was endorsed in a BIMSTEC Ministerial Meeting in 2009. A ‘Technical Assistance Consultant’s Report’ included in the study recommends upgrading all international roads on the BIMSTEC corridors to Asian Highway Class I by 2020, developing a coordinated regional road development programme, upgrading border link roads, connecting landlocked countries like Bhutan and Nepal with railways and solving the problem of restricted draught and limited navigation of large vessels in ports in the northern part of the Bay (Chittagong, Kolkata and Haldia) by constructing deep water ports. Consequently, many projects are underway to overcome the bottlenecks in transport infrastructure with financial and technical support from ADB and the World Bank. Such projects include building of cross-border infrastructure between India and Thailand, construction of port-based SEZs in Myanmar, and planning of an India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway linking Moreh (India) with MaeSot (Thailand). ADB appears as a selfless, benevolent funder to all regional blocs. However, the revamping of logistical infrastructure in South and Southeast Asia is crucial to its conceptualisation of a ‘seamless’ Asia as an integrated infrastructural project, which is effecting a curious politics of ‘regional’ development and logistical manoeuvring. During the Cold War, the regions like South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Central Asia played their respective roles as lackeys of the American or the Soviet camp, or, tried to remain unattached like India, but finally leaned on either of the two. In early nineteen-nineties, the same regional blocs transformed themselves into cogs of a huge infrastructural machine whose formation and sustenance is coterminous with increasing physical and virtual connectivity between the same regions. This conception of the continent – breakable into regional conglomerates but also presentable as a seamless unity when needed – is impossible today without taking the question of infrastructure as its organising principle. Similarly, infrastructure in this context is defined as a political entity whose blueprint is drawn in the interplay of global capital and local aspirations as reflected in the shift in national policies like the one from the Look East to the Act East. It is to be seen how this recognition will lead to changes in international relations in coming days, especially with formation of the Asian Infrastructural Bank (AIB) with China’s active support. Iman Mitra is Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta The article is an outcome of the research project titled ‘Social Mapping of Logistics, Infrastructure and India’s Look East Policy’ conducted by Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS)