No Man’s Land Is No Woman’s Land Either: The Fraught Relationship Between Residents And The Border Security Force At The Indo-Bangladesh Border

Fieldnotes

No man’s land is no woman’s land either: The fraught relationship between residents and the Border Security Force at the Indo-Bangladesh Border

With a combination of direct testimonies and field observations, in this in-depth reportage Sukanya Roy looks at the challenges and abuses at the hands of the Border Security Forces that characterize the lives of those who live on the blurry border between India and Bangladesh.

By Sukanya Roy

February 11, 2021

The 4,095-kilometer-long border between India and Bangladesh is heavily militarized with 1,011 outposts of 82 battalions of India’s Border Security Force (BSF – Ministry of Home Affairs Annual Report 2018-19) dotting it. One of these outposts, where a BSF officer stands guard with an AK-47, is situated in the middle of overgrown fields next to Bithika Sarkar’s joint-family home in West Bengal’s Kaliyani village in the North 24 Parganas. The family’s fields line a distributary of the Ichamoti river, across which more fields are splayed. Amidst those, two watchtowers stand a few meters away from each other – one belonging to the BSF and one to the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) – vowing to overshadow the tall palm tree between them. The tree marks the beginning of Bangladeshi territory, in which the BGB tower is situated. The international border between India and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), drawn as a result…