PERSPECTIVES january 23, 2021 vol lVI no 4 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 38 Politicising Roads in Manipur Spatial and Temporal Relations of Infrastructure Raile Rocky Ziipao Roads across Manipur are ephemeral, foregrounding the politics behind their development as well as their spatial and temporal nature. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Manipur, this article analyses contemporaneous state practices of infrastructure and its sociopolitical processes, and offers evidence to understand their materialities, forms, and societal relations. The nexus between politicians, contractors, bureaucrats, insurgents and elites causes frequent suspension of road projects, setting a new form of contingent development practice in Manipur. The author acknowledges and appreciates the valuable suggestions by anonymous reviewers. Raile Rocky Ziipao (ziipao@hss.iitb.ac.in) teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. R oads entail (dis)connectivity, and circulation of goods, people, ideas, and social relations. Roads across Manipur are highly politicised and ephemeral, foregrounding the spatio- temporality of infrastructure, but this infrastructure also provides a basis to understand issues of access, inclusion and exclusion, equity and social justice, and state practices. Roads, especially highways, in Manipur are also a site of conflict and contestation. Various ethnic communities and civil society organisa- tions frequently block highways to draw attention to issues affecting their lives. In Manipur, as elsewhere in the North East, infrastructure projects are rarely completed on schedule. This has adversely affected the construction of National Highway 2 (NH-2), NH-37, NH-102 A and B, NH-155, and rural roads under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana ( PMGSY). Also, most of the rural roads constructed under the PMGSY are washed away by the monsoons. The long gestation period and corruption in infrastructure projects leading to cost inflation and suspension of projects midway points to the temporal dimension of infrastructure. Drawing on the case of Peruvian roads, Harvey and Knox (2012) suggested three promises of emancipatory modernity that roads seem to instantiate: the promise of speed and connectivity, the promise of political freedom and the promise of economic prosperity. Until recently, social scientists, apart from economists, paid scant attention to the study of infra- structure. Over the last decade, studies of infrastructure from a socio-anthropo- logical perspective, that is, ethnographies of infrastructure, have offered a new theoretical lens to understand their materiality and forms, relationship with society, power dynamics, authority, every- day politics, governance, exclusions, and social future, among others. 1 Since infra- structure projects can be suspended, dis- mantled, torn down, and removed, their spatio-temporality “needs to be theo- rized as its own condition of being” (Gupta 2015). The temporality of road infrastructure seeps into the fabric of everyday experiences while traversing on roads and highways filled with potholes and craters. Infrastructure development suffers from endemic monetary demands to contractors by both state and non- state actors, kidnapping and threatening labourers, and competing interests of varied contractors. This condenses and refracts the failure of infrastructural governance. Building on research on the social dynamics of infrastructure devel- opment in Manipur from 2013 to 2017, this article analyses road infrastructure from a spatio-temporal frame and argues that the nexus of politicians, contractors, bureaucrats, insurgents and elites drive the temporality of road infrastructure in Manipur. Infrastructure and Its Forms Over the last decade, studies of infra- structure have provided insights on the materiality and forms of infrastructure, its relationship with society, and its so- cial, political and economic dimensions. However, the fundamental question remains—what is infrastructure? In a seminal paper titled, “Steps towards an Ecology of Infrastructure,” Star and Ruhleder (1996) suggest that “Infra- structure is a fundamentally relational concept. It becomes infrastructure in relation to organised practices.” Hence, they suggest we ask, “when—not what is an infrastructure.” Infrastructure’s con- stitutive dimensions include its embed- dedness, transparency, reach and scope, being learned as part of a membership, conventions of practice or standards possessing an installed base, and becom- ing visible upon breakdown (Start and Ruhleder 1996: 113–14). The lack of maintenance and frequent blockade of highways and rural roads in Manipur resonate with this understanding of