Region: Mending our fences
We hear nice things about Southasian camaraderie emanating from South Block, and we believe them. As the SAARC summit rolls up in early August, we can expect to hear from all capitals, including New Delhi, about the importance of mending fences in the Subcontinent, and about promoting trade and people-to-people contact. And we will believe them.
But even as tentative movements are being made to relax visa regimes and expand the token rail transport that exists between India and Pakistan/Bangladesh, there is the awkward fact of the border fence that the Indian Home Ministry is constructing along the frontiers of the east and west. As the article on the India-Bangladesh border in this issue indicates, the fencing project is well on its way to completion, with only 1495 km left unfenced along the 4095 km-long India-Bangladesh border. On the western front, meanwhile, less than 100 km of the 2000 km that are planned for fencing remain to be sealed.
Try as we might, we are not able to correlate the fact of fence-building – with service roads, steel pylons, concertina- and barbed-wire, watchtowers and floodlights – with expressions of SAARC-era bonhomie. Curiously, this period of fence-building coincides with perhaps the most responsible period of bilateral relations in the northern half of the Subcontinent. While the India-Bangladesh relationship has always been relatively stable, that between India and Pakistan has survived all kinds of events that, in an earlier era, would have led to escalating tit-for-tat actions between Islamabad and New Delhi. And yet, the fence-building has gone on and on.
On the Pakistani side, these fences are supposed to be to deal with infiltration by militants; on the Bangladeshi side, for militancy and to check illegal migration. While some might say that it is in fact the construction of fences along the border that has resulted in less friction and more peace, we believe that the relative peace that is being experienced today is due to factors other than a wealth of fences.
Fence-building flies in the face of the historical movement of peoples of Southasia across the landscape, and creates a rigid frontier that is incongruous with both our past and present. The Nepal-India frontier is all the proof needed that an open border does not destroy sovereignties, even while allowing people to move freely between countries. A fence is easier to build than to dismantle, however. This is particularly important to remember given that the current spree is a essentially a rather primitive reaction by the central government in New Delhi to the populist ultra-nationalism in India, which tends to blame 'crossborder terrorism' for any and all ills. Incidentally, the fence is not being built with the support of either Dhaka or Islamabad, though the exercise may be tacitly supported by the establishments in both.
Those Indian policymakers who are slightly embarrassed by the fence-building ask other Southasians to take note of the fact that, anyway, the fence will not really work for its intended purpose: it cannot really prevent infiltration, because there remain too many ways for a determined militant or migrant to force a way through. That may well be, but it is more likely that this exercise proves the hypothesis that in the humongous machinery that is the Indian government, one hand (the Home Ministry) does not quite know what the other hand (the Foreign Ministry) is doing. It may be still more likely that the dynamics of the Home Ministry makes it wary and unsupportive of South Block's overtures to the neighbouring countries.
Whatever the reasons why these fences continue to be constructed during a time of unprecedented SAARC fence-mending (at least in the camaraderie sense), we believe that the exercise sends an improper message. Most notably, it is outright contradictory to India's insistence that it is working all out for the prospering of Southasian regionalism. If South Block truly believes in what it is saying, the Indian government should bring about some coordination, such that its Home Ministry stops the fence-building, on both sides, dead in its tracks.