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Refugee Watch, No. 18
Editorial
We are living in turbulent times. The world’s largest national
security state continues its actions against all potential detractors
while millions get displaced. The situation reminds one of a comment
made by a Belgrade journalist about a decade ago. He said, “We are
living the dream of our nationalists come true.” A nationalist state’s
dream is perhaps to transform itself into a national security state.
When that transformation occurs it needs to create its other in the form
of an enemy alien. It needs an enemy to hate and it needs a terrain
where glorious wars of national retribution can be fought out. It also
needs flexibility because there are no permanent allies or antagonists.
Who better to teach us these lessons in realpolitik than the United
States that has mastered the art of creating a nameless enemy alien in
its war against terrorism? However, in this age of democracy to continue
wars against other peoples the state needs strategic allies. Hence the
United States renewed interest in India, a country that follows similar
political visions regionally. India has successfully transformed itself
into a national security state. The practitioners of national security
are continuously engaged in trying to protect territorial borders with
little visible regard for the human lives that inhabit those areas.
The LOC has now become suspect because the powers that be will
pressurise Pakistan only so much and no more. Thus a new border conflict
needs to be resurrected and a new enemy alien created. We see such a
course developing in the India-Bangladesh border today. Cross border
migration through the Indo-Bangladesh border is certainly not a new
phenomenon. When the new border came into existence in 1947 people
followed well-established practices of movement across the border. In
the post 1964 period, however, new immigrants from East Pakistan found
it more difficult to get rehabilitation in Indian soil. But in the early
seventies there was a shift in popular sentiments and refugees were
again welcomed with some reservations. After the creation of Bangladesh
the situation was transformed and the anti-foreigner movement in Assam
in the late seventies and early eighties made it problematic for
Bangladeshis to settle there but Bengal remained a safer proposition.
However in the last decade even that has changed. We see before us the
unfolding of a process whereby the Bengal-Bangladesh border is
consistently being militarised. As per the official estimate the number
of people killed in BSF firing in South Bengal districts bordering
Bangladesh more than doubled in the last one year. The victims are often
branded as infiltrators, ISI agents and smugglers. Even women and
children are not spared. The killing of a middle-aged woman by the BSF
sparked some debates.
Apart from often indiscriminate firings families trying to cross the
border find themselves stranded in no man’s land with both the BSF and
the BDR claiming that they do not belong to their part of the world for
want of legal papers. Our investigative report suggests that very few
people in the border areas have evidences of citizenship. Sometimes to
make a political statement they are rounded up by security forces of
either side and pushed to the no-man’s land as happened to 213 people,
largely snake charmers in Satgacchi in early February. An overwhelming
number of those stranded were children yet they were kept in bitter cold
and many of them became afflicted with respiratory tract infection. Both
India and Bangladesh have well-established laws of dealing with “aliens”
and are signatories to any number of international conventions against
torture of children and yet in practice hapless children in the borders
are consistently victimised.
That there is a political will in favour of branding those crossing the
Bengal-Bangladesh border as enemy alien is apparent from a number of
developments. September 11 no doubt has given legitimacy to that
political will. The border is increasingly being militarised. In any
standoff in the border between BSF and BDR women and children are
displaced and men kept behind for “war”. In Satgacchi while ‘women,
children and cattle” were evacuated men stayed behind. When interviewed
by a national newspaper these men said that they were merely waiting for
the nod from the BSF to “teach those Bangladeshis a lesson they won’t
forget in a hurry.” The national media is also proliferating how BDR is
arming the people on the other side. The leadership particularly from
the Indian side are allegedly taking a “tough stand” about illegal
migrants. Thus with the security forces and the local armed youth
standing eyeball-to-eyeball a violent skirmish seems imminent. Such a
skirmish will no doubt be utilised to mark future illegal migrants from
the same region as “unwanted migrants” and violent enemy alien. Already
incidents such as Satgacchi, Jamaldah etc. are being used as
justifications for deploying more security forces along the border.
There is an increasing stridency among practitioners of national
security to fence the borders. Hence we can conclude that we are well on
our way to constructing illegal migrants from the east as enemy alien.
Such a construction will no doubt be used to legitimise further the
already burgeoning defence budget. But how much that will stop cross
border migration is another question. As the snake charmers of Satgacchi
portrays threatened and hungry people will defy borders whether by
braving bullets or by melting into the darkness.
In this issues...
-
Refugee Update
- Other Region
- South Asia
-
Investigative Reports
Lives Delimited by Barbed Wires Report from Palestine/Isreal
-
Special Feature
Bangladesh State and the Refugee Phenomena
-
Reprint
Downwardly Mobile
-
Feature
Towards a Legal Regime for Refugee Protection in Pakistan
-
Feature Review
Truth Democracy and Margins
-
Perspective
Questing a Questionnaire
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