Divided Bodies Crossing the India-Bangladesh Border

There has been a global proliferation in high security barriers, xenophobia and the deep suspicion of Muslim migrants. The overlap of migration, politics, and national security requires us to shift attention to the actual experiences of migrants if we are not to be trapped in the prison of ideologies and legalities. It is especially critical to recognise that the spectrum of everyday mobility, political violence, and territorialities merit to be investigated in one analytic frame.

Malini Sur (arimali@nus.edu.sg) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the anthropology of borders, violence and militarisation in south Asia.

In September 2013, a United Nations (UN) population factsheet reported that Asia hosted the second highest number of international migrants (after Europe) and the highest number of refugees.¹ Derived from population censuses and registers, representative household surveys and other UN records, the statistics indicated that migration among developing states of the South was higher than migration from such states to the North. In underscoring that nine out of 10 refugees were located within a small cohort of developing states such as Jordan, Palestine and Pakistan, the report echoed what Aristide Zolberg urged 30 years ago. Zolberg argued that the tensions produced by the disintegration and decline of imperial states, along with the emergence of new postcolonial states in the mid-20th century were refugee-producing processes and explained the high circulation of refugees among developing regions (1983: 36-37).
Closer to south Asia’s borders, Joya Chatterji in her recent historiography of the Bengali diaspora affirms Zolberg. She persuasively shows that the partition of the Indian subcontinent (August 1947) and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent Bengali nation state (1971) led to internal displacements and international migrations within the region at greater scales than from its devastated borders to Britain and other advanced economies (2013: 274). The India-Bangladesh border, a product of these political cartographies, is also relevant in the context of the UN international migration factsheet. This enumerated 3.2 million Bangladeshis residing in India. While Indian political parties quickly appropriated this number to affirm India’s worst paranoia of porous borders and “infiltrating” Bangladeshis, Bangladesh predictably rejected the figures. The release of the UN statistics in September 2013 coincided with strong civil society protests in Bangladesh over India’s “shoot to kill” policy and indiscriminate firings at the international boundary. The same month, Amiya Ghosh, an Indian border force constable who had shot 15-year-old Felani Khatun at the India-Bangladesh border three years ago, was acquitted. Felani’s body hung from India’s new border fence with Bangladesh, a project under construction that slowly and substantially re-configures the border landscape. The fence also runs through the heavily militarised north-east India that shares complicated boundaries with Bangladesh.
Given the global proliferation in high security barriers, xenophobia and the deep suspicion of Muslim migrants, and the overlap of migration, politics, and national security, there is an urgent need to shift attention to migrant empirics. It is especially critical to recognise that the spectrum of everyday mobility, political violence, and territorialities merit to be investigated in one analytic frame. Despite the prolific scholarship on the partition of the Indian subcontinent (1947) that engage with questions of violence, trauma, and agency (Das 1995; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Butalia 1999; Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003; Banerjee 2010), the vocabulary for narrating border-crossings as interweaving spaces of loss and abjection on the one hand and material and social possibilities on the other remains challenging. How do we write about people who cross borders without documentation, who experience state violence but also “work the border”? How do we engage with violence through the body that moves across borders as much as the body that is trapped in abjection and inertia? How do we condemn border violence in one voice in regions where maps and migration precariously divide states and militarise smaller regions, adding to multiple border predicaments?
I suggest that “divided bodies” may be useful as an analytic concept to engage with the sociopolitical and intellectual possibilities that derive from unscripted/unofficial border-crossings. Without necessarily denoting causality, it foregrounds that border-crossers fall back on the structural deficiencies of barriers from which the possibility of crossings emerge, while simultaneously they are also at the receiving end of state repression and violence. Divided bodies enable us to interrogate lumped and fragmented statistics, and fractured solidarities, even as they make us acknowledge the indelible grief and loss that structures migrant lives like Felani’s. In what follows, I will briefly engage with these themes along the border zone straddling north-east India and Bangladesh, which I research, and whose old and new maps deeply trouble me. To do so, I will return to Felani Khatun.
Missing Bodies, Missing Variables
Felani’s life circumstances were not exceptional. Like many adolescents in south Asia she had dropped out of school and would marry early. Given the region’s interconnected border zones, her adolescence in India would lead to early conjugality in Bangladesh. On a cold and foggy January morning in 2011, Felani was returning to Bangladesh to be married. She travelled along with her father, Nurul Islam, who resided in Assam, north-east India. Islam had paid money to border brokers for the journey (Odhikar 2011). If Indian border guards had not shot her, she would have added another number to the UN population data on international migration and to the undifferentiated statistics of Bangladeshis in India. But in her abrupt and violent killing, she exposes (inter alia) how the UN’s classification of “international” and “bilateral” erases differences that shape migratory regimes and their precarious outcomes.
Hilary Cunningham and Josiah Heyman have convincingly brought these distinctions to bear upon migration studies. The authors argue that since movement stands at the crossroads of power and resources, it shapes both mobility and enclosures. They further remind us that the opening and the shutting of border gates testify to questions of differential privileges and rights (2004: 293). While it hardly needs reinforcing that the life circumstances of Bangladeshis and Indians with advanced degrees stand apart from their lesser-privileged counterparts, it is clear that the outcomes of their border-crossings find different labels as “knowledge” and “labour” migrants. But in the UN’s computing of “international” and “bilateral” migrant stock on the basis of where people were born and have come to reside, we are left speculating about their affluence, deprivation and injuries. Furthermore, since the intellectual division of labour of computing migrants is premised on the living versus dead, international migrants like Felani Khatun who are tortured to death while crossing borders inform another set of statistics gathered by human rights organisations.
Though borders that divide states such as Bangladesh and India are legacies of shared pasts, migration figures and questions of legality lead explosive political debates. Bangladesh questioned the UN’s enumeration on grounds that it merely reproduced biased official Indian projections. But Indian estimates of unauthorised Bangladeshis are far higher, ranging from 10 to 20 million and lacking empirical basis.² Tellingly, apart from Indians imprisoned in Bangladesh, there is no discussion on unauthorised border-crossings from India to Bangladesh, despite the substantial numbers who travel for trade, shopping and maintaining kinship ties. On the one hand, the complexity of migration and everyday to and fro movement draws from and cements a deeply communal border and cross-border religious solidarities. On the other, the relative fluidity of this border zone ensures that those escaping political persecution and natural disasters or migrating for work (travelling without legal documentation) collapse in predicament and statistics.
India’s new border fence with Bangladesh is inserted in this unstable landscape. The fence effortlessly shape-shifts from a matrix of wires and metal pillars through which Indians and Bangladeshis enquire about divided families and gossip into a site of closure and suffering (Sur 2013: 81-82). An infrastructure of violence, the fence shapes migrant bodies, and reinstates Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson’s compelling formulation that in national cartographies impinging upon bodies, “border maps” are also “body maps” (1999: 129). Mutilated and dead bodies are disturbingly found along the fence, bodies that are increasingly photographed and digitally circulated.
New Images and Old Maps
Several images of Felani’s tortured body reached my email in 2011. Words that supported the images described in differing ways Felani’s journey from India to Bangladesh, cross-border firing, her injuries, post-mortem and burial. As digital images disrupted sequence and temporality, Felani surfaced in various frames:

A bleeding upside down female body on a fence; a body with hands and legs tied to bamboo poles; a horizontal body with a bullet to the chest; a dangling body and a ladder next to it; a partly stitched swollen body covered with a plastic sheet; a border guard looking away from the hanging body.

While Felani dried the ink on my pen for months, also because the location was my disturbingly familiar fieldwork site, it supported a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report that lay on my desk in early 2011. Released just a month before Felani’s journey and aptly entitled Trigger Happy, the report is an important contribution that underscores the excessive militarisation of the India-Bangladesh border. It highlights India’s indiscriminate use of force, torture and cross-border shootings. The estimate of Indian border guards shooting dead at least 1,000 undocumented travellers in the past decade was alarming.³ Felani’s post-mortem which revealed a bullet to her chest is condemnable and very unsettling, given the large number of two-way crossings at the India-Bangladesh border.⁴
The HRW figures were also distressing as they were partial. The study excluded approximately 1,880 km of the almost 4,096 km international boundary that cuts across north-east India and the foothills and plains of Bangladesh. Furthermore, in a very critical empirical oversight, it failed to investigate human rights abuses committed by Bangladeshi border guards. Precisely because political violence is extensive, and that both Indian and Bangladeshi border guards are known to use excessive force, Willem van Schendel named the India-Bangladesh border a “killer border” long before Felani’s gruesome end. Advancing that borders between “friendly states” generate extreme violence, the author calculated 2,428 cases of injury, abduction and killings within a short span of five years (1998-2002). This figure also included 92 cases of injury and deaths of Indian and Bangladeshi border guards at the hands of civilians (van Schendel 2005: 300-02).
In projecting border violence and militarisation as recent, escalating, and limited to the Indian side, we forget that what is today the India-Bangladesh border sits uncomfortably on a troubled zone. For over centuries, this region has been armed in various ways, even as those suspected as traitors and dissidents were disarmed. Here, rebels and militias have sought refuge, smaller territories have been coercively appended and heavily armed border guards and peasants have raided granaries and cattle. Village elders, as much as the archives, remind us that militias, police, dissidents, and border residents have enacted everyday territoriality along these political margins, even as they collaborated and made border vigilance as intensely a social as a political function (Sur 2012a: 72-80). One illustration of many territorial disputes and contradictions, the conflict of Boroibari (2011) makes it evident how old cartographies of movement, fortification, and violence shape aggressive postcolonial margins. Located very near to where Felani’s journey ended, Boroibari is a disputed territory that borders Bangladesh’s Kurigram district and Assam. In 2001, Indian and Bangladeshi border guards clashed over this territory in what border villagers still recount as the “war” that broke out, and in the same breath express gratitude for the rations that the soldiers left behind (Sur 2012a: 218-19).
Furthermore, the zone straddling north-east India and the foothills and plains of Bangladesh, that the HRW (2010) report excludes, is central to the overlap of state repression with border porosity. This convergence explains why in the same year and very close to where Felani Khatun was shot, India and Bangladesh officially sanctioned the first experimental border market.⁵ A legacy of old trade routes, in these weekly markets known as border haats bordering Meghalaya (India) and Kurigram (Bangladesh), transborder traders legally conduct business up to a maximum of $50 and officially travel without passports (Sur 2012b: 135-36). But again, along the same Kurigram district that also borders Assam, peasant migration and land settlement date back to contentious provincial colonial borders. Many like Nurul Islam have made Assam their home, even long after India and Bangladesh mutually consented to a legal cut-off date to end unauthorised migration (25 March 1971). For older settlers in this region and immigrants who have acquired Indian citizenship in Assam, frenzied drives for surveying and judicially trying “suspected Bangladeshis” add layers of ambiguities rather than fixing the boundaries between citizens and foreigners. Migration, land alienation and settlement quarrels unfortunately recur through gruesome violence such as in Nellie (1983) and Kokrajhar (2012) in Assam. These issues further complicate Assam’s external and internal borders; especially its political location as a state that has been under prolonged military scrutiny, and whose interests are marginalised in India (Baruah 1999).
Divided Citizens
Incidents of state repression at the India-Bangladesh border have brought about new forms of virtual protest, similar to the social media led anti-regime protests in Africa and west Asia. As India’s cross-border shootings featured in conventional diplomatic platforms, cyber warfare raged over Felani’s death. Bangladeshi and Indian digital activists posted and counter-posted on the internet. Appearing in early 2011 in “Yahoo Answers” under the label of “Government and Politics” and subcategory of “Military” the pseudonymous “Amak” protested about Felani’s killing as an illustration of Indian atrocities against Bangladeshis. While responses confirmed such atrocities, one counter-held that Bangladeshis entered India without legal authorisation. Meanwhile, Yahoo presented a summary of relevant questions which included “how does it feel to kill someone?”.
But cyber activism also included critical deletions, which do not preclude state surveillance. For instance, “Ajay1694” fleetingly surfaced in Wikipedia’s India Border Security Forces (BSFs) page in 2012. He requested the deletion of the section on Felani’s image and killing on grounds that it was non-verifiable. In his assertion that this image impaired friendly ties between neighbours, he unknowingly echoed Bangladesh’s initial disinclination to recognise Felani as a Bangladeshi citizenand official responses that asserted isolated cases should not impair Bangladesh-India relations.⁶ As “Ajay1694” disappeared so did Felani’s photograph. Images of Indian border guards and officers, and ammunitions, took precedence on the Wiki page. In January 2013, on the same day that Felani was shot, two groups known as “Bangladesh Grey Hat Hackers” and “Bangladesh Cyber Army” attacked 1,400 Indian websites (including intelligence websites) to protest her killing. In September 2013, with the acquittal of the BSF constable who fired at Felani, a new Wikipedia page entitled “Killing of Felani” surfaced and along with it new writings on virtual walls.
Felani’s so graphically photographed hanging body came to exemplify the geo-body of Bangladesh and its unequal relationship with India. This was made explicit in a poster pasted on the walls of Dhaka since 2011. The English title “Stop Border Killings” on the upper outer margin of the poster frames Felani’s hanging image. Two subtexts are scripted along the lower margins. While the first emphatically states “Felani does not hang Bangladesh hangs”, the second subtext ambiguously confers the authorship of the poster to the “public of Bangladesh” (both translated from Bengali). Bangladeshi activists ranging from cyber hackers and human rights organisations to religious and political interest groups ensured that Felani was recognised as a Bangladeshi citizen. Unlike digital images and texts that created and deleted evidence and left uneven trails, the poster condemning Felani’s killing took a concrete shape and form. However, its textual preciseness eroded Felani’s trans-border identity and ironically disrupted the momentum that her body gained in photographs.
No Impact on India
Wide-ranging protests in Bangladesh failed to have any durable impact in India. After a Bengali newspaper in Kolkata first published her hanging image, Felani significantly disappeared from Indian mainstream media.⁷ While Felani’s proximity to the international boundary encouraged Bangladeshi activists representing diverse interests to appropriate her as a Bangladeshi subject and refugee, it is precisely this closeness to what in India is largely considered as a site of national security and “Islamic terrorism” rather than a zone of cohabitation that has obliterated any claims to Felani as an Indian Muslim subject or even a Bangladeshi migrant whose killing merits protest. Furthermore, the in-between space that she occupied as neither an adult nor a child and neither a victim of human and sexual trafficking nor an innocent Bangladeshi “juvenile” who crossed borders by mistake meant that she slipped from Indian interventions that privilege recovery and repatriation. She was invisible to Indian child rights and women’s rights activists for whom violence is critical but nationally circumscribed engagements. If protests in Bangladesh took on bilateral colours as opposed to humanitarian ones, India’s silence affirmed the inequality of its relationship with Bangladesh and a lack of commitment to zero border killings promised earlier. Above all, it conveyed smug superiority and denial of Indian Felanis who cross borders without authorisation and labour under disconcerting conditions.
Unfortunately digital images and cyber activism assumed the same connotations as problematic statistics; they cemented old rivalries and denials. They shifted attention away from urgent issues of livelihood and “working the border”, even as they made us forget that even today, many angry teenagers march across the border for no other reason than angst against parents. Acts of claiming Felani Khatun as a Bangladeshi victim of Indian atrocities, and ignoring her as an Indian failed to account for her predicament as a shared and divided citizen of India and Bangladesh. They failed to reckon the conflicted narratives that border societies such as Indian and Bangladeshi enclave dwellers use to give meaning to their territorialities, life circumstances and dilemmas, even as they partake in paralegal activities (Cons 2013); predicaments and dilemmas of the kind that structure the lives of Nurul Islam and Felani Khatun. Even if India’s promised retrial of the Felani’s case leads to a conviction, it may not resolve questions of everyday travel and livelihood of border residents, trans-border and mobile communities such as fisher folk and coal miners (Samaddar 1999; Jones 2009; Gupta and Sharma 2008; Hussain 2013). Border residents’ dependence on predatory brokers and guards will persist till issues like decentralised passports, transborder cards and work permits for labour migrants, proposed long ago are tabled again.⁸
Conclusions
Felani Khatun’s tortured form connects many dots across geographies of violence. It links short and hurried walks through rice fields and forests that truncate India and Bangladesh with migrant burial grounds in scalding deserts that constitute significant parts of the US-Mexico border or the rough waters of the Mediterranean. Felani reminds us that the figures of those migrating under precarious conditions rises alongside legally protected travellers and compels us to recognise that scholarship and protests must engage with complicated and transnational lives that link home, workstations and trading hubs straddling border fences. Since the term “international migration” obscures critical distinctions and profiles migrants on the basis of living, dead, refugees and others, scholars and activists must read across distinct statistical slots to enable at least a superior compiling and reading of migration data. Added, rather than subtracted, they will inform us about the diversity of moving, settling, dying and grieving that shape migratory regimes.
Felani narrates south Asia’s complex games of territoriality and links Bangladesh’s troubled geography with Assam’s postcolonial history. As India and Bangladesh orchestrate joint parades (á la Wagah) along a border that was never a conventional war theatre (ironically to the tune of a rebel Bengali poet) we are reminded once again that this border rests on uneasy friendships. Sadly we are also compelled to acknowledge that activism often fails to cross constituencies and borders in south Asia. Till we expand our dissenting horizons and prevent more spectacles of old disputed maps, the eerie momentum that Felani’s body gains in singular photographs and posters will continue to sporadically haunt our collective conscience.