Something similar could be said of another anomaly of the Indo–Bangladesh border, namely the chars. These are mid-river mudbanks deposited principally by the flood-prone waters of the wide Brahmaputra. A quarter of a million people live on chars; the riverine soil can be very fertile and the river itself is rich in fish. But they do so at the risk not only of inundation but of involuntary migration; for such is the landscaping power of the monsoon-swollen flood that chars may shift. If the centre of the current happens to be the recognised border – as it is for several hundred kilometres – a char that was in Bangladesh one year may well end up in India the next (or vice versa).
‘[M]ost of the islands vehemently either move forward or backward across the international riverine border,’ complains an observer concerned with the problems of policing these errant landmasses.2 Though still at the same address, several thousand people may suddenly find themselves unaccredited immigrants in a different country. Border markers get washed away, rivers change course. In some areas the painful business of border negotiation and demarcation, a process that was supposedly concluded soon after Partition in the late 1940s, is still being repeated every year.
In 2006 the Indian authorities, spurred on by the prospect of cross-border infiltrators bent on terrorism, began ring-fencing Bangladesh (not forgetting its enclaves). The new fence has steel stanchions and razor wire and is actually two fences, so creating a caged corridor along which laundry can be hung out to dry. The fence stands three metres high, and when completed will be around 2,500 kilometres long. But its march is halted by every river and, as per a previous agreement not to construct contentious facilities on the border itself, it runs a hundred to a thousand metres behind the actual line of demarcation. Thus ‘a huge quantum of precious Indian land is becoming a no-man’s land’, complains one politician. Within this strip lie villages, farmland and uncounted residents. One quite short stretch of the fence is reported as having alienated, or ‘practically disowned’, 149 villages and 90,000 people. Indian citizens are being rendered stateless and their property worthless. The issue has been raised in the Indian Parliament and aired in the press, but without eliciting any promise of compensation or resettlement.3
All this is in striking contrast to the nearby border between India and Nepal. Here there are no fences, no patrols and minimal formalities. It is an ‘open border’. Although Nepal never came under direct British rule – and was therefore unaffected by Partition – an agreement had been reached whereby people and goods might cross at will. This still stands, albeit often amended. Immigrants from India already make up a substantial percentage of Nepal’s population, while Nepalis settled in India constitute an overall majority in parts of the Indian state of West Bengal. A Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) represents the latter’s interests. Demanding the recognition of Gorkhali, Nepal’s main language, as one of India’s official languages – and so qualifying its speakers for the educational and job opportunities that go with recognition – the GNLF strives, not without occasional violence, for an autonomous enclave within West Bengal or even a separate Nepali state within the Republic of India. Migration, in other words, is here an accepted phenomenon. National identity (‘Nepali-ness’) is being officially downgraded to a linguistic identity (‘Gorkhali-ness’), which is something that can be accommodated within the accepted limits of protest and concession afforded to India’s other language groups.
Language remains a contentious issue throughout polyglot South Asia, but in modern India its explosive potential has been steadily tamed by concessions and circumstance. It plays no part in the plight of the enclave-dwellers and the migrants along the Indo–Bangladesh border; all of them speak Bengali, whether Indians, Bangladeshis or not exactly either. The same goes for Tamil-speakers flitting between Sri Lanka and south India. In both cases a shared language in fact serves as a camouflage, making the detection of illegal or undesirable incomers that much more difficult.
Other markers of identity prove less amenable. Beyond the Nepali concentrations in northern West Bengal, and beyond the enclaves and chars along the Indo–Bangladesh border, a tendon of Indian territory tugs at a knotted fist of mainly ethnic discontent in the remote hills along the Burmese border. By one reckoning India’s cluster of states in the far ‘north-east’ is plagued by over a hundred insurgency groups, most of them pressing their grievances on the grounds of disadvantaged ethnicity: ‘Manipur tops the list [for the number] of militias with 35, Assam is second with 34 and Tripura has 30; Nagaland has four and Meghalaya checks in with three militias.’4 At any given moment these groups vary greatly in terms of support, objectives and militancy. But with India, Bangladesh, Burma (now Myanmar) and China all interested parties in the political jigsaw of South Asia’s north-eastern extremity, ethnic grievances invariably involve territorial disputes, and these readily translate into war-worthy issues involving international sovereignty.
National identities cannot here be taken for granted. Even where the borders are not themselves in dispute, the loyalties of those living on either side of them may be. Like the fickle ‘distributaries’ of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the very idea of the nation state is dissipated and frayed into complex strands of competing allegiances. A Naga, for instance, may subscribe to half a dozen identities.
I am from Khonoma village of the Angami tribe … Now within the village I belong to the Iralu clan. The Iralu clan belongs in turn to the Meyasetsu clan. The Meyasetsu clan in turn belongs to the still wider and larger clan called the Merhuma Khel. The Merhuma Khel is in turn one of three major Khels that make up Khonoma village. The Khonoma village in turn belongs to the Angami tribe and the Angami tribe belongs in turn to the Naga nation … [T]hese ethnic and national identities are precious to me. They in fact define my political existence as a man with a country to call his own. As such, I can never surrender this birthright to India or any other nation on earth.5
Statements like this from a Naga nationalist are dismissed by the Indian authorities as secessionist and totally unacceptable. The Bangladeshi authorities take exactly the same line with their own disaffected Chakma peoples. Both governments classify such communities as ‘tribal’ and attribute their recalcitrance to poor education, misguided leadership, discriminatory policies and foreign interference. Yet Mahatma Gandhi himself once assured the Nagas that if they did not wish to be part of India they would not be compelled to integrate with it; India would recognise their independence. To the apostle of non-violence, forcibly incorporating any disaffected group contradicted the whole idea of free association on which the modern Indian nation was founded.
This all raises a more fundamental question about whether the correlation between a nation and a state is not itself the problem. In South Asia as a whole, and particularly in the chaotic circumstances of the north-east, other cherished affiliations – of kinship, creed, locality, language, tribe, clan, profession and caste – may need to be factored into considerations of identity. The twinning of sovereignty with territory may need to be ‘unbundled’, and the very notions of political authority and territorial integrity may need re-examination.6
By dividing British-ruled South Asia into a mainly Muslim Pakistan and a mainly Hindu India, the Great Partition of 1947 severed – and sometimes pocked – not just the landmass of South Asia but its society, economy and infrastructure, and above all its two main religious communities. Religion was indeed the mentor of Partition. It provided the motivation for division, dictated the criteria for realising it and underwrote the zealotry that accompanied it. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Partition was principally about separating two competing belief systems. Doctrinal differences rarely entered into the debate at the time: religious parties, like the Jamaat-e-Islami of many orthodox Muslims or the Mahasabha of many nationalistic Hindus, in fact opposed territorial division. Even the prophets of Pakistan,