Borders As Walls

Nandita Haksar

The Indian government has decided to construct a 100-kilometre-long smart fence along the Indo-Myanmar border. The project is a part of the Narendra Modi government’s plan to completely seal India’s borders with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The smart fence allows the security forces to maintain the surveillance system through a monitor sitting inside their control rooms. Alarms go off as soon as there is any infiltration attempt.

This move is in consonance with the worldwide trend to militarise international boundaries. While on the one hand, the international community speaks of a world without borders, more and more borders are being fortified to control the freedom of movement of people. In an article titled The Idea of A Borderless World, Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, argues that the “capacity to decide who can move, who can settle where and under what conditions is increasingly becoming the core of political struggles.”

According to a report entitled A Walled World Towards Global Apartheid brought out in November 2020 by the Transnational Institute, over the last 50 years, 63 border walls have been built worldwide, leading to the growing militarisation of borders. In a table ranking countries by border walls built between 1968 and 2018, Israel has built six walls and India comes next with three border walls covering 6,540 kilometres across 43 per cent of its borders.

The report states the ‘drive and profiting from this surge in wall building is an entire Border Industrial Complex. This industry has reinforced a narrative in which migration and other political and/ or humanitarian challenges at the border are primarily framed as a security problem, where the frontier can never be secure enough, and for which its latest military and security technologies are always the solution.’

According to the report, ‘India could well be described as an Asian fortress. Since 1992, it has built walls along its entire border with Pakistan, and had already begun to do so in 1989 along the border with Bangladesh. In 2003, it also built a barrier along a large section of its border with Myanmar. Of India’s seven shared borders (Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and a few kilometres with Afghanistan), three have barriers along almost the entire border.’

The main reasons given by successive Indian governments for these walls are to prevent immigration from Bangladesh, terrorism and the territorial dispute over Kashmir with Pakistan, and the entry of militants and narcotics across the border with Myanmar.

India and Myanmar formalised their borders with various agreements, and it has been estimated that over 400 of the 1,643-km border has been enclosed, with new reinforcements being made in 2017, in part to prevent the entry of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who a