South Asia

Boundaries, Borders and Beyond

Dhananjay Tripathi, Sanjay Chaturvedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000485509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Post-colonial and post-partition South Asia, one of the fastest-growing and yet one of the least integrated regions of the world, is marked by both optimism and pessimism. This intriguing dichotomy of strength and weakness, security and insecurity, hope and fear, connections and disconnects underpins South Asia's regionalism conundrum and gives birth to borders and boundaries – both material and mental – with a complex territoriality. The Janus-faced nature of South Asian borderlands – the inward nationalizing impulses entangled with the outward regional frontier-orientations – is a stark reminder that history of mobility in this eco-geographical region is much older than the history of territoriality and colonial cartography and ethnography. This collection of meticulously researched, theoretically informed, case studies from South Asia provides useful insights into bordering, ordering and othering narratives as practices and performances that are intricately entangled with identity politics and security discourses. It shows how a sharper focus on subterranean subregionalism(s), border communities, popular geopolitics of enmity, and transborder challenges to sustainability, could open up spaces for new multiple (re)imaginings of borders at diverse scales and sights including sub-urban neighbourhoods, school textbooks/cinema and trans-border conservation initiatives.

The chapters in this edited volume have been contributed by both renowned as well as young emerging scholars, looking into the borders and boundaries in South Asia. Each chapter offers new perspectives and insights into themes like trans-Himalayan borderlands, India-Pakistan physical and mental borders, Afghanistan-Pakistan border and numerous social boundaries that we see in everyday South Asia.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

Re-engaging the “International”: A Social History of the Trans-Himalayan Borderlands

Nimmi Kurian

ABSTRACT

The paper critically interrogates a central paradox in India’s emerging border discourse. Although a feel-good narrative of rethinking borders as bridges, it has been curiously resistant to step away from the reductionist logic of borders as barriers. The paper argues that this dualism can be traced to conflicting geopolitical and sociological notions of the international that have resulted in a range of contradictions and distortions at the borders. The paper will engage with the puzzle as to why the trans-Himalayan trader, historically the central protagonist has today become a rather forlorn metaphor of a conflicted discourse. It will draw inferences based on field observations in Dharchula, an ancient trading town in northern India located on the trans-Himalayan trading routes with Nepal and China. These offer interesting insights on how state power and regulation as well as new border alignments have affected everyday lives at the borders. The paper concludes by arguing for discursive cross-fertilizations as first steps towards recognizing the borderlands as the agentive sites that they are.

A Discursive Border is Crossed

At the core of Delhi’s “new” reading of the borders stands a liberal vision of borders as bridges. This in turn is part of a longer shift-in-the-making in Indian foreign policy and marks a subregional turn in Indian diplomacy towards the Asian neighborhood (Kurian 2014).¹ These shifts are bringing interesting methodological and conceptual insights that nudge a rethinking of the border region not as a passive location but as an actor with agency. The idea of subregionalism has gained increasing recognition in discourses of development and offers new insights to mainstream theories of regionalism. Subregional cooperation represents a novel extension of this larger idea, in that the unit of cooperation becomes the geographically proximate subregions within two or more countries as important sites of transnational cooperation.² While regional trading blocs and arrangements have been a common phenomenon, both the bilateral and the regional levels have tended to bypass the subregional level with its local governance particularities and stakeholders (Kurian 2016).

The paper identifies biases in the construction of borders in Indian IR and argues that the manner in which scholarship frames many of these questions has reduced the borderlands to virtually becoming research peripheries (Kurian 2010). Far from offering alternative imaginaries, IR has largely tended to faithfully mirror the “cartographic anxiety” of the state (Krishna 1994). The mainstream discourse has been structured to peripheralize these spaces and from this conceptual peg it has been but a small leap to micro managing and the parachuting problem solving models from a distant center. A privileging of the formal and intergovernmental scales coupled with a capital-centric notion of space has also left it virtually incapable of acknowledging the quotidian dynamism that characterizes the borderlands. It is this shortcoming that renders it intellectually inept at understanding how human geographies have reconstituted social and symbolic practice, transforming borderlands into multiple sites of interactions. Such linear narratives effectively rob the border of its rich and varied cultural, historical and social layers of identity. The geoeconomic and the geopolitical narratives have by and large tended to engage each other parenthetically, often with wary resignation. It is this tension at the heart of India’s subregional imaginary that the paper attempts to push and foreground.

A focus only on the formal is clearly inadequate for understanding the drivers of cross-border functional and institutional interdependence (Sohn, Reitel, and Walther 2009; Brunet-Jailly 2010; Blatter 2003; Perkmann and Sum 2000) Without connecting with the lives of the people who inhabit these physical spaces, Indian IR’s theoretical agendas will remain both unimaginative and irrelevant. If IR is to make itself relevant to borderlands, disciplinary IR will in turn need to find a viable interface with new discourses that are engaging with the international in imaginative ways, bringing fresh insights into its domain be it critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail 2000; Ó Tuathail and Dalby 1998) cultural geography (Jackson 1989; Mitchell 2000) political geography (Taylor 1994; Johnston 2001). The field of border research has also covered much ground over the decades, with itinerant inquiries stepping away from the reductionist logic of conceiving borders as territorial dividers and bringing with it a whole new lexicon of approaching these spaces as dynamic and socially constructed (Kurian 2014). Dissident writings that seriously interrogate spatial and territorial assumptions (Ashley and Walker 1990; Weldes et al. 1999; Booth 2005; Appadurai 2006; Varadarajan 2010; Jones 2011; Bilgin 2012) now overlap with inquiries in political geography, border studies, and ethnic theory on the state, identity and difference (Middleton 2013). Many of these cross-disciplinary insights can help to problematize disciplinary IR’s “fixed representation of territorial or structural space” and underline the spatial and socially constructed nature of borders (Agnew 1994, 55). These will in turn allow Indian IR to engage with themes of identity, culture and the like which have been relegated to its disciplinary borders. Doing so could also help it effectively address the charge of ahistoricism and also help find ways to make “past history continuous with present experience”.³ By doing so, it can also fundamentally redefine scale as a category of practice, as Brubaker and Cooper argue, define it as “categories of everyday experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors” as against “experience-distant categories used by social scientists” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 4).

Privileging only formal intergovernmental processes has also resulted in a highly distorted and partial understanding of the quotidian dynamism of the borderlands. The underlying power shifts and assumptions that such a cross-border remapping entails also remain subsumed in mainstream visions. These remappings are no impartial imaginaries and it will be pertinent to invoke William Callahan’s warning that these could well result in “a new set of borders-which would have a different logic of exclusion and inclusion, creating new centres and peripheries- rather than a borderless region” (Kurian 2014). IR as a discipline is likely to increasingly struggle with the contradictions of maintaining its analytical focus on relations between territorially bound sovereign states as it faces up to the overwhelming reality of social, economic and cultural flows that bear declining relevance to territory. Far from offering alternative imaginaries, mainstream IR has tended to faithfully mirrored the “cartographic anxiety” of the state. IR scholarship has often taken the cue from statist frames, disinterested in the everyday struggles and contestations of the borderlanders, preferring instead esoteric systemic battles. A politico-military reading of border landscapes is conspicuous by what it leaves out of its research remit; that there is also an anthropology, a history and a sociology of borders to negotiate (Lynch 1999). By presupposing the irrelevance of sub-systemic actors to state behavior, mainstream IR theory tends to flatten out differences and effectively block voices and representations from the margins.

Suboptimal Subregionalism

These dichotomies represent a classic instance of suboptimal subregionalism at work, a discourse with neither the capacity nor the incentive to operationalize what is a potential foreign policy innovation (Kurian 2015). These dichotomies have also made for a highly confused narrative rendering its political signaling contradictory and virtually unintelligible. For instance, while Prime Minister Modi’s Neighborhood First policy appeared to set the right tone with high-profile visits to South Asian capitals,⁴ the then Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian publicly argued that “regional economic integration in South Asia is not a first priority for India” (The Hindu, 2015). This doublespeak constitutes a classic instance of the paradoxes at the heart of India’s border discourse as well as explains the range of contradictions and distortions that one sees in India’s borderlands. While India’s Act East policy ostensibly builds a narrative of rethinking borders as bridges, there has been an almost pathological fear of open borders. For instance, India’s border fencing project is a stark metaphor of this conflicted discourse. The trade-off between border mobility and border security being struck has often strengthened the security state while eroding human security. A case in point is the fencing of a 10-km long stretch on the India-Myanmar border at the border town of Moreh, Manipur in India’s Northeast. Meant to ostensibly prevent militants from using the road to procure arms from international gunrunners, the fence has today resulted in a grave livelihood crisis and drastically disrupted the lives of villages situated along the border. After the construction of the fence, the border village of Muslim Basti today finds itself without any access to freshwater with the Lairok and Khujariok rivers now falling across the international border in Myanmar. Similarly, among the changes that India’s border wars with China in 1962 and with Pakistan in 1965 brought were a series of land use changes that came into effect almost immediately. In Garhwal Himalayas, following the war with China, 10% of all forest land was acquired by the government for defence purposes (Rangan 1996). These were further compounded by India’s Fourth Five Year Plan of 1969–1973 that effectively granted the State Forest Department rights over all forest and open lands owned by states (Rangan 1996). The most deleterious of these changes was the abrupt ending of border trade with Tibet, the mainstay of border communities without any viable alternatives to fall back on.

The effects of these dualisms can also be seen in the low intra-regional trade levels in South Asia when compared to East Asia. As per a recent study, South Asia’s intra-regional trade, one of the lowest in the world, accounted for a mere 5% of the region’s total trade compared to 50% for East Asia and the Pacific. (Asia Times 2018) India’s trade with South Asia makes for only 3% of its global trade. While India’s trade with the world accounts for $637 billion, its trade with South Asia makes for only $19.1 billion (Press Information Bureau 2018). An Indian exporter to Bangladesh has to reportedly obtain as many as 330 signatures on 17 documents at various stages, which includes cumbersome procedural requirements (De and Ghosh 2008).⁵ It is not surprising then that the reopening of traditional border markets or haats along the India-Bangladesh border after a gap of 40 years in 2011 has today ended up becoming an exercise in choreographed trade (Kurian 2016). Barter trade has been tightly regulated with a pre-selected list of vendors and vendees carrying out trade in a pre-selected list of goods and operating within a pre-demarcated radius of 5 kms on either side of the border. The discretionary powers wielded by agents of state have also sharpened several of these dichotomies at the borders. These agents of state or “petty sovereigns,” as Judith Butler calls them, wield enormous discretionary powers, “performing th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – South Asia: Boundaries, Borders and Beyond
• 1 Re-engaging the “International”: A Social History of the Trans-Himalayan Borderlands
• 2 Borders and Bordering Practices: A Case Study of Jaisalmer District on India–Pakistan Border
• 3 Portraying the “Other” in Textbooks and Movies: The Mental Borders and Their Implications for India–Pakistan Relations
• 4 Pakistan’s Border Policies and Security Dynamics along the Pakistan–Afghanistan Border
• 5 The Status of Durand Line under International Law: An International Law Approach to the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier Dispute
• 6 No Mountain Too High? Assessing the Trans-territoriality of the Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation Initiative
• 7 Analysis of a Parallel Informal Exchange Rate System in Indo-Bhutanese Border Towns
• 8 Gaining a Ghetto: The Resettlement of Partition-affected Bengalis in New Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park
• Index