'The India-Bangladesh Border Fence: Narratives and Political Possibilities', Journal of Borderlands Studies, vol. 29, 2014, pp. 81 - 94, (original) (raw)
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The India–Bangladesh Border Fence: Narratives and Political Possibilities
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2014
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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2009
This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the 'global war on terror' by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the 'enemy other' in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders.
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The Government of India decided to fence the entire India–Bangladesh border to prevent the illegal immigration from Bangladesh and to prevent the cross-border illegal and antisocial activities. Since the year 1986, the Government of India started the initiative to construct the border fencing in phase manner. The single wire border fencing which was created in the first phase has been replaced by the composite type of barbed wire border fencing a few years ago. Now the border fencing along the international border between India and Bangladesh has become a structural barrier for the Indian families living at the Country’s territorial edge. The families trapped in the geographical space between actual line of partition and the border fencing are living a restricted and deprived life within the limited land. This study is basically focused on the impact of the border fencing on the citizenship rights of the Indian fenced out families. This article will discuss how the defensive policie...
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This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of territory- making into a single analytic frame. Doing so provides a way to understand and think beyond the territorial impasses posed by nationalist framings of space—the inability to disentangle lived realities from affectively charged conceptualizations of the nation and its borders. The essay, instead, reframes territory as the relationality between broad spatial imaginaries and lived realities at the margins. Such a view allows for a conceptualization of the region that builds upwards from quotidian negotiations to challenge nationalist and communal geographies.
Antipode, 2022
Geographers, and particularly political geographers, have long been interested in questions around borders, boundaries, sovereignty, territory, and citizenship. The work on borders has evolved considerably within our discipline, with diverse methods and concepts used to analyse them. Scholars are attentive to the performativity and social production of borders, to their porosity, the practices of sovereignty outside the state, and the varied nature of borders and bordering across the world (Megoran 2012; Paasi et al. 2022). It is not only a violent site of state formation, but also a space where lives are lived, upended, and reshaped through shifts in social, political, cultural, and economic practices. Malini Sur's book, Jungle Passports, is a bold text that explores and expands on these themes through an exquisite biography and ethnography of the India-Bangladesh boundary along the Northeastern Indian states of Assam and Meghalaya. The partition of 1947 that