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Paper short abstract:

Our article is on connective infrastructures (roads and highways). The road in Manipur state of Northeast India is the symbol of developmental hope, epitomizes state's governmentality, nonetheless it also emerges as a central locale of politics.

Paper long abstract:

Roads are bitumen covered concrete metaphors of modernity and development, and they materially represent fantasies, collective hopes, and aspirations of futures. They symbolize movement, connectivity, transactions and transportation, the agency of humans in the built environment, and eminently are key to understanding governmentality. Our article is about Manipur's connective infrastructures, and it focuses on internal roads, and a border highway that connects Imphal (Manipur's capital city) to Dimapur of Nagaland, North-east India. We explain the infrastructural deficit within Manipur and decision-making about them being influenced by a hill-valley socio-ecological ethnic distributional conflict. The road links and is part of the development route. To illustrate our argument, we provide an ethnographic account of a recent truck journey undertaken between Dimapur and Imphal in 2018, and this enables us to understand routinized corruption and the collusion of state and non-state actors therein. The road is the symbol of hope, and a developmental desire, and epitomizes state's governmentality and developmental project of progress, nonetheless it also gets transformed into the central locale of political protest, ethnic conflict, as ethnic groups appropriate it forcibly to erect blockades and organize protests in its arterial space. The roads and highways spatially produce and reproduce (il)legality, (il)legibility, and (il)legitimacy of the Indian state. Our ethnographic research unpacks and invokes the multivalence of roads.