A Great Divide
The village of Panidhar is a cluster of 18 mud, brick and bamboo houses in a poor, wet corner of eastern India. Its problems will sound familiar to anyone who has traveled through the country's thick rural darkness. Panidhar's 195 residents live on rice and fish from the surrounding paddy fields and ponds; lucky children get vegetables and lentils, too, but few go to school. The brick factory across the Ichamati River sends boats to fetch a few of the young men; the rest have left for cities many miles away.
An accident of geography turns these ordinary lives into one of India's most surreal dramas. The border between India and Bangladesh, drawn in haste just before India's independence in 1947, snakes through Panidhar. It runs right in front of the modest, thatched-roof home of Fazlur Rehman, 50, the village's unofficial headman. His younger brother lives next door — in another country. "His child, my child are the same," Rehman says. But in Panidhar, the children violate international law every time they run around the small patch of mango and betel-nut trees. A few hundred meters away, Indian and Bangladeshi border guards patrol on each side.
Neither the children nor their parents can ignore the reality of the border — it's rushing up to meet them. Panidhar sits near Pillar No. 1, where the land border between the two countries begins. For the past 60 years, those markers were the only sign that there were two nations encompassed in this one village. But there is a new one nearby, made of steel, concrete and barbed wire. Like the U.S., Israel and other countries, India is constructing a massive frontier fence, hoping that it will act as a bulwark against what the government in New Delhi perceives to be problems and threats on the other side. When finished, the Indian fence along the 2,500-mile (4,100 km) border with its eastern neighbor will all but encircle Bangladesh.
India once welcomed refugees from Bangladesh. An estimated 4 million of them settled in India after the 1971 war that created its new neighbor. But their numbers have swelled to at least 10 million and a backlash has started. The fence, now two-thirds complete, was begun in earnest three years ago as a way to stop illegal migration and terrorist groups operating in the border areas. The siege of Mumbai — the most dramatic of more than a dozen deadly attacks on Indian cities in the past year — has turned the fence into a political imperative; it is presented as, literally, a concrete solution to India's border problems.
It isn't. "These are reflexive mechanisms of state," says Major General Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi. "It's not a source of strength." From terrorism to rural development to its troubled relationships with its neighbors, almost every challenge that India faces is played out in some way along the border. But instead of resolving them, it only throws them into relief. "Fencing can't stop anything," says Adilur Khan, head of a Bangladeshi human-rights group called Odhikar. "It's kind of building the Berlin Wall again."
Regulating the Flow
India's northeastern state of Assam shares only a short border with Bangladesh, but the sentiment there against Bangladeshi migration is more intense than anywhere else in India. Bengali-speaking Muslims, both Indian and Bangladeshi, were once brought in to work as seasonal labor, and they now account for more than 30% of the state's population. Their numbers have made them a significant political force and have generated a frustration that will sound familiar to any country dealing with a large influx of migrants from a poorer country. "They take all the jobs," says Shibshankar Chatterjee, a journalist who is writing a book on migration in the northeast. "They are very cheap labor."
Issuing temporary work permits is a nonstarter in Assam, where the growing population of Bengali-speaking Muslims — the euphemism for which is "demographic shift" — is seen as both a political and an economic threat to the ethnic Assamese majority, who are mostly Hindu. "There is a very substantial geographic belt in which the Assamese are rapidly becoming a minority," says V.R. Raghavan, an adviser at the Delhi Policy Group. "They want to retain their dominant position."
The result is a toxic mix of immigrant backlash, Islamophobia and militant separatism, says Uddipana Goswami, a social scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University who has written extensively about the northeast. Ethnic Assamese political parties and separatist groups like the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) have all taken up the anti-immigrant cause, as have other non-Muslim minorities. A series of bomb attacks in the state capital Guwahati on Oct. 30, 2008, killed more than 60 people, and local police say that militants agitating for an ethnic Bodo homeland, who have clashed violently with local Muslims, are to blame. In this environment, no one bothers to differentiate between the earlier, legal migrants from Bangladesh and newcomers. Says Goswami: "In Assam, if you're wearing a lungi or a beard, people say you're from Bangladesh."
The task of controlling both illegal migration into Assam — as well as militant groups such as ULFA that operate in the border areas — falls to the 160,000 troops of India's Border Security Force (BSF), half of whom guard the frontier with Bangladesh. At the biggest gateway between Assam and Bangladesh, a junction of the Brahmaputra River near a market town called Dhubri, the BSF's Water Wing patrols 24 hours a day by speedboat. Ferries carry laborers from the remote villages downstream to jobs in Dhubri, Guwahati or Siliguri, and each one is stopped by BSF guards, who check passengers' documents to prevent Bangladeshis from slipping through. "After sunset we don't permit boats to ply," says A.K. Hemram, commander of the battalion there. "Any boat will be considered as influx."
Scattered across the river like pebbles are tiny islands called chars — no more than the tops of sandbars churned up by the fierce currents. There are dozens of them, and with each monsoon season their boundaries change. Some disappear entirely. The people who live on them move from island to island, and the BSF officers make a point of knowing every person who lives in their territory. "We have to monitor the population," Hemram says. "If there are 10 houses on an island, and suddenly an 11th house appears, we have to find out, Whose is that 11th house? From where have you come?"
Incredibly, India is putting up fencing on the islands, too. On Masalabari, the most stable of the char islands, huge concrete cylinders that will form the base of a 53/4-mile (9.3 km) length of fence are lined up on the sand. The Central Public Works Department carried them out by boat during the summer monsoon, when water levels were high enough to transport heavy equipment, and they will eventually support the fencing that will separate the Indian side of the island from Bangladesh.
The fence has made a difference: there were about 4,900 arrests for illegal crossings last year, compared to more than 10,000 in 2005. But P.K. Mishra, inspector general of the BSF's Assam and Meghalaya Frontier, seems to know that he has an almost impossible task. He has visited the U.S.-Mexico border fence and seen how difficult controlling illegal migration is. "Even [though] they have all the technical equipment, they can't stop it," he says. "How can we?"
The Terror Equation
Outside of Assam, the debate over Bangladeshi migrants has been subsumed into India's larger struggle against terrorism. In a speech in Guwahati last September, L.K. Advani, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, connected the dots. "Assam as a whole is today fighting for survival," he told the crowd, who gathered as the season's monsoon floods were subsiding. "And the threat to its survival has come from a flood of another kind — the flood of illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. Now, India is facing not only the threat of infiltration, but also of terrorism from Bangladesh ... India is facing a new form of cross-border terrorism in the east, just as we have been facing it for the past three decades from Pakistan in the west."
For years Bangladeshi authorities denied any active jihadist movement within its borders. That stance changed in 2005 when a local jihadist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, took credit for an audacious attack in which bombs were detonated in about one hour in all but one of Bangladesh's 64 districts. The incident forced Bangladesh's leaders to acknowledge the country's internal terrorist threat. Indian intelligence and BSF officials say that Dhaka is not doing enough to stop Bangladeshi jihadist groups in the border areas from crossing into India. But the victory in Bangladesh's Dec. 29 general election of the secular Awami League, whose leader (and new Prime Minister) Sheikh Hasina has pledged to curb Islamic militancy, could mean new urgency on Dhaka's part.
The biggest threat, Indian intelligence sources say, comes from the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad Islamia (HuJI), which is believed to be part of a loose terror network that includes Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba, the chief suspect in last November's Mumbai attacks. "That is our No. 1 concern," says M.L. Kumawat, director general of the BSF. "Indigenous insurgent groups in Bangladesh have to be dealt with strongly so as not to allow them to use their soil to commit acts of violence in India." (Fencing on the Pakistan border has already made that area easier to patrol, the BSF says.) Mutual suspicion inhibits the one antiterrorism strategy that could make a real difference: cooperation between India and Bangladesh against their common threat. Intelligence and human-rights experts in Bangladesh and India say the two countries have not made any serious efforts to share intelligence. That's unlikely to change as long as insurgent groups from India's northeast find sanctuary in Bangladesh (a ULFA commander, Anup Chetia, has been in Bangladesh since completing a prison sentence there in 2005) — or as long as India continues its effort to wall off its smaller neighbor with concrete and barbed wire. "India carries the burden of being a local superpower," says D. Raghavan of the Delhi Policy Group. "We are seen as a bully."
On the ground, the prospects for cooperation are even worse. "Bangladesh is definitely a sanctuary for extremist groups," says a Bangladeshi human-rights researcher who has worked on the border. But the curfews, surveillance and other techniques of "border domination," as the BSF calls it, have had the effect of increasing sympathy among the border population for terrorists. The researcher adds: "India has alienated a large section of people who think that India is our enemy." The Bangladesh human-rights group Odhikar estimates that 62 Bangladeshis were killed by Indian border guards in 2008 — about one every six days. "Bangladesh and India are not in a situation where they should shoot each other's people," says Odhikar's Adilur Khan. "The Indian government should come to its senses."
Send in the Cows
One way to improve bilateral ties is to expand legal trade between the two countries and promote the development of the border areas, which would reduce the incentives for both smuggling and illegal migration. To do that, India would have to rethink one of its most deeply held beliefs: the sanctity of the cow.
In India, cows can't be exported for slaughter because orthodox Hindus revere them, but the animals are in great demand in mainly Muslim, meat-eating Bangladesh. An organized network of herders and trucks carries cows across the northern plains of India to cattle markets near the border, where they are dispatched to smugglers who try to sneak them over in ones and twos. The smugglers quickly learned how to get around the fence: the latest in smuggling technology involves a jury-rigged contraption of bamboo poles, iron hooks and old barbed wire used to haul small cows up and over the 10-ft.-high (3 m) fencing.
The BSF captured 70,000 cows last year — worth about $62 million in Bangladesh. "I'm sure that as many got across," says Ashish Mitra, a former director general of the BSF. "It's a losing battle. Cattle-smuggling is the biggest problem that we have." The absurdities of the ban on cattle exports are a constant source of frustration within the BSF. The cows that are seized are auctioned off at customs depots, and usually bought by the same smugglers, sometimes three or four times. Moving a cow from one end of India to the other is perfectly legal, but it becomes contraband as soon as it hits the border. Once over the fence, it's legal again and taxed by Bangladeshi authorities.
Privately, BSF officers admit that the ban makes little sense; dozens of Indian citizens are killed every year while trying to earn the fee of about $22 for getting a cow across. (The animals can eventually be sold for as much as $900 each.) Legalizing the trade would reduce the border violence and open a new stream of tax revenue. But few on the border expect that to happen in a majority-Hindu country. "Which government is going to allow the export of cows for slaughter?" Mitra asks. "That would just be political suicide."
Cows account for about half the illegal trade; Indian government rations of wheat, rice and sugar sold on the black market in Bangladesh, as well as cough syrup (used as an intoxicant across the border), account for the rest. Altogether, this informal trade is nearly as large as the formal trade, according to a 2006 study by the World Bank. Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, a researcher with the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) at the University of Dhaka, describes typical smugglers: "They are landless, most of them are female, sometimes divorced. They have no other choice." Criminalizing the trade makes this already poor border population vulnerable to abuse by trading agents and border guards. Academics who study informal border trade say the volume of smuggling would not be possible without the collusion of the BSF. "There will always be black sheep," says BSF chief Kumawat, "but it's not rampant." In interviews with sex workers in the town of Petrapole, many told Sikder that they started as smugglers and turned to prostitution to finance more smuggling or to get back released goods that had been seized.
No Sense of Place
Look under the surface of any issue on the border, and its central paradox soon becomes clear. Securing a border is an effort to draw a bright, clear line marking exactly where the state begins and ends. That was never an easy task in India, where the line meant to separate Hindu and Muslim villages nevertheless left millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims on both sides. Rather than settling the 60-year-old questions about who belongs to whom, fencing India's border has only resurrected them.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the enclaves of Cooch Behar. The story, as it was repeatedly told to me by various BSF officials, goes like this. The Raja of Cooch Behar and the Nawab of Rangpur, the rulers of two minor kingdoms that faced each other near the Teesta River, staked games of chess with plots of land. To settle their debts, they passed chits — pieces of paper representing the territory won or lost — back and forth. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the law lord who partitioned India, drew the 1947 border, Cooch Behar went to India and Rangpur to Bangladesh — including the people who lived on the two kings' 162 "chit mahals," or paper palaces. Their villages, caught on the wrong side of the border, are now small islands of India surrounded by Bangladesh or vice versa. Elsewhere in this same stretch of border are villages that simply refuse to accept the lines drawn by Radcliffe's pen. New Delhi backs those that want to stay in India, despite the legal claim of Bangladesh, and Dhaka does likewise. There are 1,696 acres (690 hectares) of these "adverse possessions," where India and Bangladesh effectively occupy each other's territory. That means 21 miles (34.5 km) of border that cannot be fenced, cannot be floodlit or gated and in many cases is simply not policed at all.
There is a poetic name for the population in these disputed areas: "nowhere people." As India and Bangladesh fight over the land they live on, their status remains in doubt. Despite sporadic diplomatic efforts — the most recent one last September — the two countries have never been able to agree on exchanging the territory or even just accepting the de facto border as it is. "For Bangladesh, every inch is important," particularly as it loses ground to rising sea levels, says Sreeradha Datta, a political scientist at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Bangladeshis in the area understandably bristle at the idea of being fenced in. "There are 17 companies of BSF here," says Mohammed Nazrul Islam, 37, a Bangladeshi who lives in one of the enclaves. "If the fencing is erected, in 20 or 30 years, then what will they do? Will they also build a wall?"
India, for its part, is unlikely to allow people in the disputed areas to simply choose a side. A referendum there would inevitably renew demands for the long-promised plebiscite in Kashmir. But political parties on the border have not been shy about using these residents to swell their vote banks. Subhasis Ghosh, the Cooch Behar official in charge of dispensing development funds, says he received 10,000 applications for voter ID cards last year and rejected 8,000 for dubious family and residency ties to his district. "A voter card is the most valuable thing in this area," he says. It makes sure that holders get at least a share of what they're entitled to: not just a vote but also access to rural employment schemes, monsoon relief, health clinics.
At a time when separatist movements and Maoist groups are calling on the poor and dispossessed to reject or undermine the Indian state, that simple lesson bears repeating. Nothing secures loyalty to a country as effectively as a share of its wealth. I asked Surumara Rai, who married into a home in an adverse possession, whether she feels part of India or Bangladesh. "Indian," she says proudly. One of her neighbors adds, "She's eating the food of the Indian government. Of course she feels Indian."
A Shifting Border
The word I hear most often to describe this boundary is porous. It twists through all kinds of terrain, from the mangroves on the western end through the fierce currents of the Brahmaputra River in the north to the thick jungles of the Chittagong Hill Tracts on the eastern side, all of which serve as natural barriers. At its most developed, the border looks like Petrapole, the channel for the vast majority of legal migration and one of the largest land crossings in Asia. More than 1,000 people pass through every day, most by bus and some on foot, along with about 400 commercial trucks. They walk through a metal gate several meters wide, accompanied by a bizarre set of rituals. The Indian bus lets its passengers off on one side of the checkpoint, and they board a bus owned by a partner company on the other. The luggage passes from the hands of Indian porters to their waiting Bangladeshi counterparts. The new train service linking Kolkata with Dhaka goes through Petrapole with a similar bit of theater. It spends five hours within one kilometer of the border, disgorging passengers and luggage and subjecting them to immigration and customs twice.
Like everywhere else on this border, mistrust lies just beneath what is meant to be an open exchange. In that way, Petrapole is no different from Panidhar. Here, the suspicion is out in the open. After dark, no one leaves their houses, or they risk getting stopped by the BSF, who have orders to shoot if threatened. On my way back to the main road with my BSF escorts, two men cross our paths. "They're Bangladeshi," one officer says. And they send them on their way. There's an unusual feature of the Ichamati River here: every six hours it changes course. Once, people moved across it freely. Now, only the water does.
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