The eddies in the boundary

Aborted and violent crossings of the Bangladesh-India border open Goutam Ghose's Sankhachil (Unbounded). A Bangladeshi journalist being given a tour of the border near the river Ichhamati by the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) meets an Indian boat, full of people, heading to a relative's home on the Bangladeshi side. The BGB commander firmly turns down their plaintive pleas to attend a family function, even as he has to tell the naive journalist, demanding to know why they were not arrested, that encounters such as these are far too common to be acted upon. In contrast, the next attempted crossing is at a fenced part of the border, in stealthy darkness. A group of teenage girls and a boy are being led to the metal fence clandestinely by a middleman and are shown climbing over on a ladder. When it is the boy's turn to jump across the fence, he is spotted by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) and, in what is depicted as an exchange of fire, torchlights and gunshots end the attempt. The barbed wire of the fence hangs heavy under the weight of his dead body, shedding metallic dewdrops, as a senior BSF officer fields questions from an irate press. He tells them impatiently that the BSF are not robots; those concerned will be tried in their internal martial court, and that this complex, porous border is a "forced LOC", controlling which is an absurd task.

We are at once reminded of the death of Felani Khatun in January 2011, a Bangladeshi girl working in Delhi, shot as she tried to cross the fence on the way back to her home in Kurigram district. The killing evoked widespread condemnation in Bangladesh, largely in nationalist terms, and brought censure from human-rights defenders in India and across the world. It also brought about a discussion of the nature of violence along this ostensibly "friendly" border. In 2013, a BSF martial court acquitted the young constable who shot her; a retrial in 2015, hidden from public view, ordered due to official disapproval of this verdict at the highest bilateral levels upheld the acquittal.