Nirash Barman is unable to cultivate his plot of land that now falls between the India-Bangladesh border and the fence that India has built on its side because of several restrictions placed by the Border Security Force. To compensate and manage his household expenses, he started growing ganja, or cannabis, just by his house. After a few years of successful farming, he caught the attention of the BSF and the police, who raided his home, burned down his fields, and have now subjected his rural neighborhood to stringent surveillance.
Hashan Ali had few livelihood options growing up in a landless family in another village along the same border. He alternated between working on construction sites in northern India and carrying out various smuggling activities in the border villages, each with their own risks and hardships. As Bengali-speaking Muslims face more and more hostility across India over suspicions of being “infiltrators”, Ali chose to return to his village and work in the difficult cattle business.
These are but two common stories of the struggles of borderland residents to make meaningful lives in India’s eastern borderlands, as they come up against the reality of border areas being governed exclusively – and narrowly – in national security terms.
In my recently published book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023/Yoda Press 2024), I trace the social and economic costs of militarised bordering by examining lived realities as they unfold in connected ways across India and Bangladesh over generations.
What makes “good” border security policy and practice? This question, being debated once again with the announcement of the Vibrant Villages Programme, which aims for “comprehensive development” of villages on India’s border with China, has been a recurring one. The programme uncannily echoes the response of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government to the Sino-Indian war in 1962, in which welfare programmes were rolled out in much the same border villages that are being targeted today.
That response ended up being the genesis of the Border Area Development Programme, formally established in the Indian government’s Seventh Plan (1985-90), which provides border districts with additional funds for “critical infrastructure.” However, developmental plans that are reactive in this manner and guided by national security interests have a very limited and paternalistic understanding of people’s welfare and concerns, and are disconnected from borderland residents’ lived experiences and expectations.
Nowhere is this clearer than the “friendly” border that India and Bangladesh share. A 4,096-km-long border that twists through distinct geographical and socio-cultural areas, it regularly appears in parliamentary debates and commission reports focused on security threats (infiltration, smuggling) and security infrastructure (border fence, floodlighting, the Border Security Force as human fence). The stated goal of most government policies is to saturate India’s eastern borderlands with border security infrastructure such that there is one border outpost every 3.5 km.
The Border Security Force, raised in 1965, and deployed along India’s borders with Bangladesh and Pakistan, is the face of the central Indian government in everyday life in these borderlands. Upgraded infrastructure – better fencing, watchtowers, more floodlighting, night sensors, roads for the Border Security Force – does not necessarily result in either robust border security or meaningful development in the borderlands. Indeed, over a decade of ethnographic research in these borderlands, I have found that such a border security regime might directly come in conflict with people’s interests, as the policies neglect residents, perceive them as criminals, or make their lives, lands and aspirations subservient to the abstract mandates of national security.
Three arenas in which this plays out most acutely with damaging consequences are the agrarian economy, cross-border kinship, and civil-military relations.
Nothing makes the impact of border security on economic life in an agrarian region clearer than the devaluation of land. As the border fence has been constructed and reconstructed since the early 1990s, it has led to the loss of cultivable land, often without adequate compensation in West Bengal and lower Assam. Moreover, one of the least visible but pernicious long-term effects of militarised bordering has been the driving down of land prices, worsening conditions of agrarian distress.
Numerous prohibitions on farming in the several hundreds of acres of land that fall between the border and India’s fence – such as what crops can be grown, restricted timings to access and irrigate fields, laborious checks of identity documents and commodities – make farming even more difficult and discouraging for the small and marginal farmers, predominantly Bengali Muslim and Rajbangsi, who live in these agrarian borderlands. Rajbangshis are the most numerous Scheduled Caste group in the state of West Bengal, while Muslims are 30% of West Bengal’s population. Both groups are in the majority in the borderland district of Cooch Behar in north Bengal, where my long-term ethnographic research is based.
Moreover, militarised border security practices have been a death knell for once-thriving rural markets in these regions. New roads prioritise connections between Border Security Force border outposts and along the border fence, often sidelining existing rural paths that were more likely to serve local needs. For locals, access to the new roads is usually restricted after dark, and official as well as unofficial curfews have perpetuated an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, severely affecting rural economies and social life.
As everyday mobilities within the Indian borderlands have become the target of surveillance by the Border Security Force, militarised bordering affects social life. Practically every family in the borderlands of northern Bengal have kin on the other side of the border. As I show in my book, counterintuitively, cross-border marriages continued after Partition. This stemmed not from ignorance or defiance of the border but as a response to a series of wars, displacement, and political uncertainties. People invested in cross-border kinship as a crucial form of social and material support amid such turbulence. Cross-border mobility within the borderlands was thus envisaged as a part of this postcolonial remaking of lifeworlds, in the decades after 1947. As a result, much of the risky, clandestine border-crossing is undertaken by women on either side visiting family, during weddings and births, or to celebrate festivals and rituals together.
An older infrastructure of connection, the India-Bangladesh passport – a special travel document allowing movement only between the two countries, launched in the flush of friendship following the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 – was discontinued in 2013. This passport could be obtained at any district headquarter, making the bureaucratic requirements of “legitimate” cross-border travel more accessible and affordable. As national security policies harden across this officially “friendly” border, kinship relations bear the biggest burden: pitting family against national identity and forcing people to choose whom to stay loyal to among their intimate relations.
Finally, the relations of the Border Security Force with borderland residents in Bengal are fractured. In the everyday practice of border security, Bengali borderland residents, predominantly Muslim and lower caste, are suspected to be clandestine migrants or smugglers, and their cross-border relations are criminalised. Long-standing border policies and practices that prioritise infrastructure and militarised ideas of closed borders over socioeconomic welfare and enduring cross-border cultural lives have structurally created an oppositional relation between local residents and the Border Security Force.
For example, to aid in their mandate of stopping smuggling, the Force has established a range of surveillance and policing practices across Indian border villages. Within the Border Security Force’s patrolling areas, a distance that could extend up to 15 kilometres from the border, residents are questioned and frisked on their daily journeys from field to market, school to home, and even between each other’s homes.
An elaborate system of permissions governs the transportation of local goods – whether that is harvested crops going from the border fields to markets or goods for household use such as cycles, medicines and building materials that are brought into border villages from outside markets. Locals line up outside border outposts to obtain these permissions from the Border Security Force, introducing a tense relationship of power with frictions, where national security interests trump civilian authorities and locals experience severely curtailed rights and feel like “second-class citizens” in their own lands.
While human rights groups have detailed the killings by the Border Security Force as they police this border, I argue in my book that it is this much wider spectrum of less spectacular instances of violence that is the texture of militarisation in these agrarian borderlands. This structural antagonism makes official postings in the Bengal borderlands hard for the Force too, even if it is a “friendly” border. Personnel across all ranks describe it as one of the most tense and treacherous postings they have experienced. In this larger context of antagonism and accumulated resentment, efforts toward “civic action” through Border Security Force outreach schemes, such as free medical camps or the distribution of school supplies, appear insincere and paltry.
A border security framework that pits the welfare and wellbeing of borderland peoples against national security interests is unsustainable and counterproductive. Rather than viewing the border as an unpeopled space that simply needs ever-expanding security infrastructure, which in turn is to be guarded as sacrosanct in a manner that sees the presence of locals as a hindrance, it must be reimagined as a historically and socioeconomically connected space, to be valued on its own terms.
Top-down developmental visions in which border residents matter only for national security reasons, and in which they are taken to be passive and needy recipients of aid and nationalist paedagogy could not be more untrue or counterproductive. No amount of infrastructure can produce wellbeing and feelings of patriotism when border security policies and practices actively devalue and criminalize people on their own lands, in their livelihoods, and the homes and relations they have been living in for generations. Most of all, can a border be “friendly” if cross-border socioeconomic relations of ordinary residents with each other are criminalised and curtailed?
Sahana Ghosh is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press 2023; Yoda Press 2024), traces the making of national borderlands from a connected region in northern Bengal, and tells the story of how militarised bordering affects social relations, agrarian economy, gendered mobilities, and citizenship through the lives of borderland residents.
This article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.
