From conduit to centrality: repositioning Northeast India in Thailand-India bilateral relations and regional policies

1 Introduction

India and Thailand have historically shared a cordial bilateral relationship and continue to do so in contemporary times (Ministry of External Affairs, 2025a, 2025b; The Government Public Relations Department, 2025). This bilateral relationship however stems from historical and cultural ties that date back over 2000 years (Ghosh, 2017) when Indian emperor Ashoka dispatched pilgrims to Suvarnabhumi (Jaiherm, 2025) for the promotion of teachings of Buddha. This has been further reinforced by cultural interactions, as the tenets of Hinduism are reflected in Thai architecture, sculpture, dance, drama, and literature (Coedès, 1968; Singh, 2022), along with linguistic connections between the two nations, such as the impact of Pali and Sanskrit on Thai (Panyajirathiwat, 2023). India and Thailand formalized their diplomatic ties in 1947 following India’s independence. However, the bilateral relations in the subsequent decades remained distant and subdued, despite their cordiality (Charoenpacharaporn, 2023), as domestic politics and sporadic geopolitical tensions confronted the Cold War international system. Nevertheless, a pivot occurred in the 1990s when India initiated the Look East Policy in 1991 under P. V. Narashimha Rao, which aimed to enhance economic engagements with Southeast Asia and was further supported by India’s liberalization and globalization policies. Likewise, Thailand’s Look West Policy in 1997 supplemented this Indian position (Ministry of External Affairs, 2025a, 2025b). In this framework, Northeast India holds a pivotal position, especially with the rechristening of the Look East Policy of India as “Act East Policy” in 2014 to infuse a sense of active urgency in New Delhi’s search for economic partners in Southeast Asia.

The Northeast Region of India comprising of eight predominantly hilly states is crucial to the success of India’s Act East Policy. Likewise, India is a crucial strategic and economic partner for Thailand in the Asian region and vice-versa. However, conventional studies and policy documents especially from New Delhi have frequently positioned Northeast India as a “conduit” or “corridor” to India’s economic prosperity via Act East Policy with a political semantics rooted in the centrality of New Delhi, and not the Northeast (see among others Sebastian et al., 2024; Bhattacharya, 2024; Bajpaee, 2023; Das, 2022; Patgiri and Gogoi, 2022; Barua, 2020; Deka, 2026). In addition, despite a historical linkage between Thailand and India, the former also remains at the fringe of India’s regional policy, being seen as a corridor to the ASEAN region and not as a centrality in its own right. Thailand has thus largely figured in India’s strategic thinking as a land bridge to mainland Southeast Asia despite its elevation to the status of “strategic partners” (Ministry of External Affairs, 2025a, 2025b), with New Delhi’s engagement driven primarily by connectivity to ASEAN.

This article contests the conventional narratives of Northeast India and Thailand as mere conduits or corridors in economic and strategic frameworks and argues for positioning them as crucial centralities in framing both political and economic interests for India and Thailand. Based on cross-national field studies marked by interviews with key informants, secondary data and autoethnographic insights of the investigators, the article then highlights the challenges in centralizing the Northeast India in Thai-India relations and also, Thailand in India’s outlook towards the ASEAN. It concludes by providing policy suggestions to ameliorate the same and tide over such challenges.

2 Methods and materials

This article is primarily informed by cross-national field studies conducted by Thai and Indian investigators in the counterparts’ countries from November 2025 to January 2026. Indian investigators visited Thailand in November 2025 while the primary investigator from Thailand visited India in January 2026. Key informant sampling was used for the study (Tremblay, 1957), wherein individuals who have specialized knowledge about Thai-India relations were interviewed. Indian investigators interviewed a total of 11 informants, consisting of experts, stakeholders and a government official for policy insights and the current scenario of Thai-India relations, with a specific focus on Northeast India. In India, the Thai investigator interacted with 10 informants, interacting with government officials and private stakeholders from the key states, including Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh. Also held panel meets and discussions at three universities with a total of 185 participants, who provided insights on the subject matter. Since this was an exploratory qualitative study, no sample size was determined beforehand. We employed the concept of “data saturation” (Guest et al., 2006; Saunders et al., 2018) to keep on collecting data until no new themes or information emerge. Access was negotiated to the key informants and participants with the help of the researchers’ own academic connections in their respective home countries. Informed consent was administered and proper mechanisms were deployed to ensure that ethical issues, if any were mitigated, including but not limited to anonymization of key informants. In addition, the investigators’ own autoethnographic experiences of being Indian and Thai, also were factored in the research process. These primary insights from the field were supplemented by secondary resources.

3 Theorizing relational centrality beyond the conduit paradigm

Conventional narratives position Northeast India as a “conduit” or passageway to India’s wider engagement with Southeast Asian region including Thailand (Patgiri and Gogoi, 2022; Barua, 2020; Deka, 2026; Baruah, 2004), thereby framing the NorthEast borderlands as strictly instrumental to the nation’s economic development (McDuie-Ra, 2025). For instance, Sanjib Baruah notes Northeast India as a borderland with ambiguous positionality, de-emphasized as a core driver in policy despite its strategic “bridge” potential. This narrative rooted in the postcolonial semantics of exclusion (Baruah, 1999), and a consequent entanglement with the idea of developmentalism through trade (Baruah, 2003), while seeing it only through the lens of security (Baruah, 2007), portrays the Northeast as a “border” region that will come to develop with the eventual operation and success of India’s Act East Policy and border trade. Conversely, Thailand is often under-recognized in India’s regional strategy concerning ASEAN in comparison to other ASEAN nations.

Such a view of Northeast India as a “conduit” comes with certain problems that has wide repercussions for the success of Thai-India relations and India’s Act east policy. Bilateral relations between India and Thailand, and relevant economic policies such as the Act East Policy continue to be driven a narrative that is largely determined and decided by language of New Delhi. This top-down framing frequently overlooks the ground-level realities and problems of Northeast India, thereby problematizing the idea of development itself (Patgiri and Gogoi, 2022; Barua, 2020; Baruah, 2003). For one, there seems to be a misguided approach, a spillover of the idea of postcolonial developmentalism, that development of NorthEast India is assured with the increase in trade and co-operation with neighboring foreign countries such as Myanmar and Thailand, while overlooking the initial political, social and cultural barriers that hamper such economic cooperation to materialize in the first place (Patgiri and Hazarika, 2023).

Constructivist and sociological approaches to international relations converge on the proposition that economic exchange and bilateral cooperation are embedded within socially constituted structures of identity, meaning, and trust rather than being determined solely by material incentives. From a constructivist perspective, shared civilizational narratives, collective memories, and historically sedimented identities shape state preferences and expectations, enabling forms of cooperation that lower uncertainty and stabilize interaction over time (Wendt, 1999). Cultural Proximity Theory similarly posits that cultural familiarity operates as an informal institutional mechanism, reducing transaction costs by facilitating mutual intelligibility, normative alignment, and predictability in cross-border economic relations (Straubhaar, 1991; Straubhaar, 2021). Ethnic Network Theory further extends this logic by demonstrating how transnational ethnic and cultural networks function as trust-substituting structures, embedding trade and investment flows within dense social relations that mitigate informational asymmetries and enforcement risks (Rauch and Trindade, 2002). The literature on diaspora diplomacy reinforces these claims by conceptualizing culturally affiliated populations as non-state intermediaries whose symbolic, social, and economic capital can be mobilized to deepen bilateral engagement beyond formal diplomatic channels (Gamlen et al., 2013). In the context of Northeast India and Thailand, this intrinsic strength as relational assets anchored in ethnic and cultural networks provides pre-existing channels for comprehensive mutual benefits.

Northeast India and Thailand share a closer historical tie rooted in ethnicity and race that predates the ties highlighted above, which has been the focal point of the cultural base forming Thai-India relations since the consummation of bilateral relationships between the two. For instance, The Tai Ahom and Tai Khamti people in Northeast India share deep cultural and linguistic roots with Thailand’s Tai peoples (like Shan and Thai), stemming from ancient Tai migrations, with shared heritage seen in Buddhism, traditions (like Songkran festival), food, and language family (Kra-Dai), despite centuries of separation and unique regional developments (Morey, 2004; Daniels, 2000). The Meitei people in Manipur, also sometimes referred to as Tai Kassay or Tai Moy, share similar linkages with the Thai people (Rajkumar, 2023). Thai migrants built one of the longest contiguous dynasties in Assam, the Ahom dynasty. Footing on this convergence, reorienting the policy approach by centralizing the Northeast of India in Thai-India relations, we argue, is the need of the hour and a gamechanger that would come with economic and strategic benefits for both Thailand and India.

While constructivism, cultural proximity theory, ethnic network theory, and diaspora diplomacy each illuminate particular mechanisms through which cross-border cooperation emerges, none individually captures the broader transformation that we subsequently advocate in this article. Existing scholarship on borderlands has demonstrated that peripheral regions are capable of exercising agency despite their marginal location (Scott, 2009; Sohn, 2014), while paradiplomacy literature highlights the growing international role of subnational actors (Keating, 1999; Cornago, 2010). Likewise, scholarship on sub regionalism has emphasized the importance of cross-border cooperation in generating new regional spaces (Söderbaum, 2016). Yet these approaches generally assume the geopolitical position of border regions rather than explaining how such regions seek to redefine that position itself. We use the concept of relational centrality to refer to the process through which actors located at the geopolitical margins acquire strategic significance through the cultivation and institutionalization of social, cultural, economic, and political networks. Drawing on relational understandings of space (Massey, 2005), this centrality is conceived not as a fixed geographical condition but as an outcome of social relations. A region becomes central not because it occupies the physical centre of a map, but because it becomes indispensable to the flows, exchanges, and interactions that connect multiple actors. The theoretical traditions discussed above can be understood as complementary mechanisms through which relational centrality is produced. Constructivist processes generate shared identities and expectations that facilitate cooperation (Wendt, 1999). Cultural proximity creates familiarity and reduces uncertainty (Straubhaar, 1991). Ethnic networks provide trust-based channels for economic exchange (Rauch and Trindade, 2002), while diaspora diplomacy extends these connections beyond territorial boundaries (Gamlen et al., 2013). Together, these mechanisms enable peripheral regions to convert cultural and social resources into strategic influence. In the context of India–Thailand relations, relational centrality thus implies moving beyond a conception of Northeast India as a transit corridor linking mainland India to Southeast Asia. Instead, the region can be understood as a socially embedded node whose historical, ethnic, cultural, and diasporic connections constitute assets capable of generating economic cooperation, political trust, and long-term regional integration. The significance of Northeast India therefore lies not merely in its location between India and Southeast Asia, but in its capacity to function as a centre of relations connecting them.

It is worth situating this reconceptualization against the wider body of Act East Policy scholarship that has already called for greater recognition of Northeast India’s agency, whether through the lens of paradiplomacy (Deka, 2026), critiques of the policy’s developmental logic (Bhattacharya, 2024; Patgiri and Gogoi, 2022), or arguments against an infrastructure-first reading of the region (Barua, 2020). These interventions are largely normative. They argue that the region should be accorded greater priority within India’s foreign policy calculus. Relational centrality departs from this literature not by repeating the demand for recognition but by specifying the mechanism through which such recognition could be substantiated. Where paradiplomacy scholarship treats centrality as a function of formal institutional or administrative capacity conferred from above, relational centrality treats it as an emergent property of horizontal, non-state networks that can exist independently of, and often prior to, such formal recognition. This distinction also opens the framework to empirical assessment rather than leaving it a purely normative claim. Rrelational centrality can, in principle, be tracked through indicators such as the density and durability of cross-border kinship and trade ties, the frequency and institutionalization of diaspora-linked exchange in education, religion, and tourism, and the extent to which ethnic and cultural affinity is actively invoked as a resource in policy discourse and everyday economic practice, rather than remaining latent or unrecognized. The initiatives documented in our fieldwork and discussed in the sections that follow, including university exchange partnerships, religious tourism circuits, and high-level diplomatic visits, offer preliminary, if still uneven and under-institutionalized, evidence that such processes are already underway. We do not claim that relational centrality is, at present, fully realized. We treat it instead as an emergent condition that existing social ties make possible, and whose consolidation is contingent on the political and institutional conditions discussed below.

Northeast India is very rich in natural resources that offer huge potential for economic growth and regional development. Potential for trade and investments in key sectors like tourism, agriculture, herbal medicinal plants, hydropower, and food processing through joint ventures based on competitive advantages would be a mutual benefit of the two countries. Additionally, collaborative institutional capacity building that involves Northeast India, which has a large human resource repository, requires skills and marketing; Thailand, being an expert in this field, could serve as a valuable partner in this cooperation. However, the issue of infrastructure and connectivity, which are the backbone of any interactions, remained critical. Initiatives like the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway, the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Project, the Mekong-India Economic Corridor, and others are in abeyance. Despite the region’s considerable strategic importance, the interactions between Northeast India and Thailand have remained relatively limited. There have been significant gaps in connectivity and infrastructure, limited levels of trade and investment, and, most importantly, the economic condition of the northeast has largely remained unchanged.

Therefore, we contended that instead of the capital-centric method of assessing abstract connectivity and trade volumes arising from Delhi, centralizing the Northeast of India in Thai-India relations enable the utilization of local social capital that has been historically linked to Tai culture through informal rules of conduct such as kinship ties. This allows for building trust, increasing predictability, and lowering transaction costs and risks associated with trade (Wendt, 1999; Straubhaar, 1991; Rauch and Trindade, 2002). Due to their intrinsic strength as relational assets, the Northeast region and Thailand will benefit from the establishment of strong trading patterns that are capable of adapting to changes in demand from local users. Moreover, ethnic and cultural networks anchored in Northeast India provide pre-existing channels for market information, contract enforcement, and dispute resolution, thereby facilitating trade expansion not merely in volume but in depth and complexity. From an ethnic network perspective, such embedded exchanges are more likely to produce sustained economic interdependence and sub-regional value chains linking Northeast India with Thailand via Myanmar, rather than episodic or elite-driven engagement mediated exclusively through metropolitan centres (Rauch and Trindade, 2002). Diaspora diplomacy further amplifies these advantages by positioning Northeast India as a node of people-to-people diplomacy, capable of institutionalizing educational exchanges, religious tourism, labour mobility, and sub-national cooperation frameworks that extend beyond the remit of formal state diplomacy (Gamlen et al., 2013). In contrast, a New Delhi–centric policy lens risks reproducing a thin form of engagement characterized by infrastructural connectivity without social embeddedness, generating trade that is spatially bypassing, economically extractive, and politically fragile. Centralizing Northeast India thus reframes the India–Thailand relationship from a corridor-based geopolitical project into a socially grounded regional partnership capable of producing more robust trade, diversified economic linkages, and durable bilateral cooperation. Centralizing Northeast India within the India–Thailand relationship would thus entail a reconfiguration of policy rationality itself: from viewing the region as a mere spatial conduit to recognizing it as a relational space in which identity, culture, and historical affinity operate as productive forces capable of generating trust, reducing friction, and sustaining durable bilateral economic ties. This comes with its own challenges, which we highlight in the next section.

4 Challenges: securitization and the fragility of centrality

There are, however, several challenges to this envisioned task of centralizing the Northeast of India in Thai-India relations. From our study, we found the following challenges. Firstly, there is a lack of awareness on both Indian and Thai sides about the ethnic and cultural connections between the two regions. This lack of awareness has been permeated due to the separation by national borders as well as the lack of a conscious engagement with the ethnic histories of the region’s groups. Secondly, the Northeast region of India continues to be administered and seen through a lens of security that hampers India’s comprehensive engagement with neighboring countries such as Thailand through Myanmar. As Baruah argues, this enduring securitized governance framework has rendered the region an “exceptional” space within India’s political imagination, where development and foreign policy initiatives are subordinated to concerns of internal order and sovereignty (Baruah, 2007). The operation and periodic suspension of people-to-people connective mechanisms rooted in cultural and ethnic frameworks such as the India–Myanmar Free Movement Regime (FMR) illustrates this tension. While the FMR was conceived to facilitate cross-border mobility and cultural exchange among historically connected border communities, it has repeatedly been constrained by security anxieties, thereby undermining trust, disrupting everyday economic practices, and limiting India’s ability to engage meaningfully with neighboring countries through socially embedded regional interactions (Wangpan and Saikia, 2025; Oinam, 2022). Thirdly, peace and stability in the Northeast region of India remains elusive in several key areas such as Manipur. Fueled by a postcolonial approach rooted in economic developmentalism, holistic addressal of cultural and social issues in the region remain lacking, which in turn sustains political and ethnic instability in the region, which in turn dissuades Thai-India economic relations. Beyond the borders of India, fourthly, the political instability in Myanmar remains the most vexing problem in Thai-India relations and in centralizing NorthEast India in the process. Instability in Myanmar has blockaded the functioning of the IMT Trilateral Highway from India to Thailand (Brij, 2025; Kasturi, 2025), while the portion of the highway on Thailand has been completed, as per records and as physically verified by the investigators by travelling from Bangkok to Mae Sot by the same highway. Thailand has been repeatedly calling for peace and stability in Myanmar and a resumption of activities for the construction of the highway. A key informant revealed that clashes between the junta and other groups in Myanmar, results in large scale destruction of transport infrastructure such as crucial bridges on the highway, which significantly increases transport costs and time due to unavoidable detours. It has also created several spillover effects such as illegal immigration in Manipur resulting in political instability in the region (Bhattacharya, 2023; Saisin et al., 2023) and issues of public order near the border in the Tak province of Thailand (Rahmadita and Shiddiqy, 2025; Khaosod, 2025) that has led to intermittently closed borders between Myanmar and Thailand and the closure of Mae Sot to tourists¹, which has impacted economic activities to a great extent.

Read together, these challenges indicate that relational centrality cannot be assumed to follow automatically from the presence of shared ethnic, cultural, and historical ties. Chronic instability, whether the securitized governance of the Northeast, recurring ethnic conflict as in Manipur, or the protracted crisis in Myanmar, constrains the very networks of kinship, trade, and mobility through which relational centrality is meant to be produced and sustained. Instability, in this sense, does not merely act as an external obstacle to an otherwise self-evident centrality. It actively qualifies, and at present limits, the extent to which relational centrality can be said to be empirically realized rather than normatively aspired to. Relational centrality is thus a contested and emergent condition rather than an accomplished fact. The social and cultural resources identified above constitute the raw material for centrality, but their conversion into durable strategic significance is contingent on the political stabilization discussed in the policy suggestions that follow. This qualification is analytically necessary rather than merely cautionary, for it clarifies that the case for centralizing Northeast India and Thailand describes a differently structured future toward which both existing social ties and future policy choices must jointly work, rather than a fully settled present.

5 Policy pathways for institutionalizing relational centrality

These challenges, however, can be overcome with a concerted joint effort of New Delhi and Bangkok, to recognize the centrality of Northeast India in Thai-India relations and also Thailand in India’s regional policy framework. Firstly, there needs to be concerted efforts from both sides to raise awareness of the ethnic connections between the Northeast of India and Thailand. Several initiatives have been made in the past in this regard, at the diplomatic level from Bangkok as well as by private stakeholders. For instance, Thailand’s princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn visited Manipur and attended the official tourism festival in 2018, to an unprecedented welcome by the officials and the public (Leivon, 2018). In the realm of education, several universities such as Manipur University of Culture (TOI, 2024), Tezpur University (India Today NE, 2025) & Gauhati University, (n.d.) have been undertaking cross-national student and faculty exchange programmes with Thai universities such as Phranakhon Rajabhat University, Silpakorn University and Thammasat University. Such efforts need to be scaled up and reciprocated by both sides. Efforts to promote educational cooperation have continued steadily. In October 2024, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand brought 12 leading universities to engage in discussions on collaboration with universities and various educational institutions across North East India. Relatedly, an integrated tourism circuit from Thailand via North East India, especially Guwahati to Bhutan, incorporating the ethnic as well as religious connections of Buddhism will be a key initiative in supporting robust cross-country tourism. This requires sufficient engagements at a trilateral level involving India, Thailand and Bhutan to ease out immigration and other norms.

Secondly, there is a need to rethink New Delhi’s postcolonial paradigm of dealing with the Northeast through the lens of security and developmentalism. Economic cooperation and trade with neighbors and Thailand cannot come to fruition until a significant level of socio-political stability and also economic development in the region has been achieved beforehand (Baruah, 2004). It is unwise to continue with the postcolonial mindset that economic development via external trade would unquestionably bring stability and development for the region. All the while, a robust decentralized but united political apparatus needs to be developed in Northeast India to act as an agentic force for political and socio-economic reforms in the region to further develop the region’s relationship with Thailand. This requires leveraging already existing setups such as the Northeastern Council setup in 1971. Thirdly, India and Thailand must take concerted efforts to bring peace and stability in Myanmar, a country sandwiched between them. This comes with its own challenges. Engaging more proactively with the current junta government would evidently ruffle feathers within the international community, potentially inviting economic sanctions and diplomatic censure that could complicate broader regional and multilateral engagements. However, a combined, concerted effort that may also be continual of the current “walking the tightrope” is required that will bring peace and stability to Myanmar. One approach that many parties believe to be feasible is to encourage and support Myanmar through ASEAN mechanisms. Given that both Thailand and Myanmar are ASEAN member states, and considering Thailand’s relatively substantive role within the organization, this avenue appears, at least in principle, to offer a plausible and attractive option for Thai foreign policy.

Nevertheless, a closer examination reveals that promoting peace and stability in Myanmar through ASEAN mechanisms is far from straightforward. This difficulty stems largely from ASEAN’s own institutional nature and operational practices, which do not readily lend themselves to such an approach. Traditionally, ASEAN member states adhere to a core principle in their conduct of policy: non-interference in the internal affairs of fellow members. This principle constitutes one of ASEAN’s three foundational norms and has served as a long-standing operational code since the organization’s inception. Moreover, beneath the veneer of regional cohesion lies a profound diversity among member states: across political systems, languages, ethnic compositions, religions, and levels of economic development. These structural differences mean that each member state pursues its own national interests, which are often divergent and, at times, conflicting. Consequently, the principle of consensus-based decision-making—another fundamental norm of ASEAN—becomes exceedingly difficult to realize in practice.

For these reasons, expecting Thailand to drive the Myanmar peace agenda through ASEAN should not be seen as an easy or automatic undertaking, given the multiple constraints outlined above. This, however, does not imply that ASEAN is incapable of addressing the Myanmar issue. On the contrary, when viewed against the backdrop of evolving international conditions and ASEAN’s own shifting trajectory, such engagement remains possible. Since 1976, ASEAN has increasingly supplemented its original political and security orientation with a stronger emphasis on economic cooperation. Coupled with the post–Cold War easing of international tensions, this shift gave rise to the notion of “constructive engagement” in ASEAN’s external relations and eventually facilitated the admission of former communist states such as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia into the organization. ASEAN’s evolution—from an entity initially established to counter communist influence, particularly that of the Soviet Union, to one that opened trade and cooperation with these former adversaries and ultimately welcomed them as members—demonstrates that the organization is capable of recalibrating its stance when shared economic interests are at stake. This precedent suggests that mobilizing ASEAN attention toward peace and stability in Myanmar is feasible, provided that regional economic interests are effectively framed as the primary driver of policy action.

In this context, what Thailand and India should pursue jointly is a coordinated effort to consult and persuade ASEAN member states of the tangible, shared benefits of the Trilateral Highway project—whether in terms of trade, geopolitics, or broader regional relations. At present, India already serves as a dialogue partner of ASEAN within the ASEAN+6 framework. Yet this framework alone may be insufficient to underscore the strategic importance of the proposed cooperation and the mutual gains that ASEAN and India stand to reap from deeper regional integration. Opening more direct channels of negotiation and cooperation between India and ASEAN, especially by India initiation, would therefore represent a crucial step toward creating the political momentum necessary to advance peace and stability in Myanmar in the most expeditious manner.

Meanwhile, since trade is mainly routed through Myanmar via the IMT highway, some short-term measures such as leveraging air cargo transport may also be explored. However, air connectivity between Thailand and Northeast India remains extremely underdeveloped with a single direct flight connecting the region from Guwahati to Bangkok. A suggestion that was found during the fieldwork from the key informants was for trade to be routed through Bangladesh via Rayong seaport and then to the NorthEast India and mainland India, but it seems unlikely now due to the decay in Indo-Bangladesh bilateral relations. However, such developments at a bilateral level must also be understood in the wider context of regional and international developments in the region. Multilateral platforms such as BIMSTEC must be leveraged for both geopolitical as well as economic purposes including bringing peace and stability in Myanmar. In addition, stability in Myanmar and strengthening of Thai-India relations has to be considered in relation with the two countries’ positionality vis-à-vis China (Seethi, 2025). For Thailand, a stronger presence of India is paramount for diversification of its own economic interests, which will allow Bangkok to exercise strategic autonomy in matters of trade, commerce and geopolitical affairs. This is even more so important, given the United States’ retreat from the region including presence in Thailand (Marciel, 2024) following Trump’s America First policy to focus on home. For India, retaining Thailand as a economic and geostrategic partner is crucial to checking the Chinese advance in the region, given India’s troubled bilateral relationship with China, and its worries rooted in encirclement such as is evident in the “string of pearls” theory (Dixon, 2014).

6 Conclusion

This article has highlighted that the prevailing policy and academic narrative concerning Thai-India relations has constricted both North-East India and Thailand into an instrumentally defined conduit that under-recognized the importance of North-East India or Thailand as centrally positioned and actively involved in their reciprocal interests. The article illustrates the limitations to the depth and sustainability of bilateral engagement that has occurred to date as well as the lack of recognition of the lived experience, historical context, and subsequent agency of North-East India and Thailand within this region. Thus, the article calls for a re-conceptualization of the Thai-India relationship from a merely peripheral connection to a much more meaningful and genuine central relationship between the two countries.

In order to affect this repositioning of North-East India from a corridor to an actual participant actor in the Thai-India relationship, we must move away from thinking about infrastructure-led connectivity and cross-border trade as the only solutions for economic development and stability. The qualitative findings of the international fieldwork that was conducted illustrate that without addressing socio-political stability; recognition of culture; and local people’s involvement with these economic initiatives before implementing these initiatives under the Act East Policy, these initiatives will likely continue to be extractive, inequitable, and potentially stagnant economic activities. Similarly, insight into Thailand’s positioning in India, and as part of India’s view on her SEA region, demonstrates a lack of recognition of Thailand’s regional aspirations and historical ties beyond being a gateway to ASEAN. Centrality is, therefore, relational rather than geographic; it is a product of agency and reciprocity and embedded in a shared, strategic imagination.

The article also speaks to the fact that the historic ethnic and cultural ties between NE India and Thailand represent a largely untapped resource for deepening cooperation between these two countries. The presence of these ties—e.g., through common linguistic families, shared migratory paths, similar religious practices, and cultural traditions—creates significant opportunities to help minimize frictions between political or economic players and build trust and sustain long-term, cooperative relationships. Due to the marginalization of these historical connections in the official discourse of both countries, many of the opportunities for people-to-people diplomacy and the culturally embedded economic partnerships to grow that emerged in the past were missed. To maximize the bilateral relationship and create an inclusive, regional-based foreign policy, it will be necessary for both NE India and Thailand to recognize and institutionalize their shared historical ties.

The article also recognizes that structural problems, especially in north-eastern India and Myanmar due to instability, affect the ability of both countries to reach their level of centrality. These structural issues show that only looking at economic or connection-focused solutions will not help to overcome them, and that to be successful both countries need to engage politically with each other on a bilateral and multilateral basis. Both BIMSTEC and interim pragmatic solutions will be able to assist Thailand and India in navigating through an environment of is a continually changing geopolitical landscape and to promote growth within their respective relationships at this time. Additionally, both countries’ strategic considerations relative to China demonstrate that they are now likely to be required to build on one another for children, not just for trade items.

In conclusion, moving from being a conduit of trade to becoming more closely aligned with centrality is a conceptual shift in the way we think about region, space and border in relation to Thailand-India bilateral relations. Both Thailand and Northeast India should be viewed not just as passive intermediaries but as pivotal areas historically and regionally with continued strategic significance and socio-economic significance. It is therefore important to fundamentally change the way that both countries think about Thailand-India relations, not only for the purposes of their bilateral relationship, but also for the broader India-Southeast Asia relationship and Thailand’s relationship with the new Asian regional geopolitical order. This will enable Thailand and India to create a long-term, mutually beneficial framework with which to support and enhance their bilateral relationship.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Yasmin Sattar, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand

Reviewed by: Chinglen Laishram, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India

Shibashis Chatterjee, Jadavpur University, India

Piyanat Soikham, Ubon Ratchathani University, Thailand

Footnotes

There may be some misunderstanding regarding the situation in Tak Province. Hence the need to clarify. The border remains open for local people to cross to the other side. In addition, Mae Sot is allowed for Thai tourists or other visitors. However, certain restrictions have been imposed on specific nationalities due to the high risk that Mae Sot could be used as a transit route to Myanmar for engaging in illegal activities, such as cybercrime or online scams, involving individuals who enter both voluntarily and through deception. Even for foreigners from countries listed under these restrictions, entry into Mae Sot may still be permitted if they are picked up by a local resident at the police checkpoint, complete the required registration form for entry into Mae Sot, and are accompanied by a local guarantor.