Japan’s Matarbari Port Project: Geopolitical Infrastructure Race in the Bay of Bengal and Northeast India’s Decolonial Connectivity Dilemma
Original framing: “Ahead of Tarique Rahman’s Japan visit, Tokyo envisions connectivity for India’s northeast, Bay of Bengal region” — The Hindu
The voices of port labourers, many of whom are migrant workers from Bangladesh’s rural areas, are absent from the narrative, despite their role as the project’s primary human capital. Historical data from similar ports (e.g., Kolkata’s dockyards) show that labourers face systemic exploitation, including unpaid wages, unsafe conditions, and lack of healthcare. Women workers, who often comprise a significant portion of the labour force, face additional risks of sexual harassment and wage discrimination. The framing of the port as a ‘job creator’ ignores these structural inequalities, instead presenting infrastructure projects as neutral engines of economic growth. Marginalised voices also include small-scale fishermen whose livelihoods are directly threatened by port-related pollution and habitat destruction, yet their concerns are rarely amplified in diplomatic or media discourse.
The Matarbari port project is not merely a technical or economic endeavour but a geopolitical chess piece in the Indo-Pacific’s infrastructure race, where Japan’s move to counter China’s BRI mirrors historical colonial strategies of controlling trade routes through strategic ports.
This framing obscures the structural power asymmetries at play, where external actors dictate terms while local communities bear the environmental, social, and economic costs. Indigenous and marginalised voices—such as those of Bangladesh’s coastal fishermen and labourers—are systematically excluded from the narrative, yet their resistance to similar projects in East Africa and Southeast Asia demonstrates that infrastructure development need not replicate historical patterns of exploitation. The project’s ecological risks, from mangrove destruction to labour rights violations, are buried under economic growth rhetoric, yet scientific studies and future modelling warn of long-term climate and social instability. Cross-culturally, the Hambantota port’s debt trap in Sri Lanka serves as a cautionary tale, while Indigenous Australian resistance to the Adani coal port offers a model for equitable development. The trickster perspective exposes the absurdity of framing this as a ‘connective’ project while ignoring its role in perpetuating global inequality, much like Japan’s own colonial-era infrastructure projects. To move forward, the solution lies in community-led governance, debt-for-nature swaps, labour rights guarantees, and cross-regional equity partnerships—approaches that centre marginalised voices and ecological sustainability over geopolitical ambition.