The India-Bangladesh Border Fence: Narratives and Political Possibilities

The fencing of the India-Bangladesh border mirrors Scott's understanding of "final enclosure" wherein "distance-demolishing technologies" and "modern conceptions of sovereignty" converge to demarcate firm boundaries of territory from previously ambiguous space (Scott, J. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia, 11. New Haven: Yale University Press). This paper examines the different narratives surrounding the fence at the national level in India and in the borderland itself, focussing on the state of Meghalaya. These narratives reveal the ways the border fence is discussed and understood and the political positions taken on the fence in these different spaces. In examining these I present two key findings. The first is that the border fence is narrated and politicized differently at the national level and in the borderland. The second is that within the borderlands there is not a singular "borderland narrative" of the fence but several, reflecting dominant political positions already entrenched and new ways of articulating insecurity being brought by fence construction; though the former is more prominent than the latter.