India-Pakistan Border Infrastructure Everyday Spatialisation and its Effects Aswathy Chandragiri Madhurima Das

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.11| CHANDRAGIRI, DAS: INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 76 Aswathy Chandragiri, Madhurima Das India-Pakistan Border Infrastructure Everyday Spatialisation and its Effects ABSTRACT Borders intentionally create bounded territories in an attempt to comply with the spatial sovereignty nation states identify with. These spaces create barriers in the form of border fences, militarization, and low connectivity of road networks and the internet. A qualitative study conducted in two villages at the India-Pakistan border over a few months highlights the impact of border infrastructure on the lives of borderland people, particularly women. The research looks at the making of a border village and its impact on women inhabiting these spaces. Our study finds that the infrastructural edifice of border villages is restrictive and aids in constructing subjugated identities under the rationale of protection. The architecture and the patriarchal norms of the villages enforce strict control of women by men in the family due to lack of connectivity/mobility/accessibilities and by the armed forces through border fencing. CV Aswathy Chandragiri is a research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, India. Her PhD proposal is titled‘Constructing forms of masculinities in a border village at International Border.’ Her research interests are borders, migration, masculinities, and nation state. She completed her post-graduation in sociology from South Asian University, New Delhi. Dr. Madhurima Das is an Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, India. Dr. Das received her Postdoctoral degree from the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She completed her PhD at the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon. KEYWORDS Borders, Infrastructure, Gender, India, Punjab Aswathy Chandragiri, Madhurima Das,“India-Pakistan Border Infrastructure – Everyday Spatialisation and its Effects”, insightOut. Journal on Gender and Sexuality in STEM Collections and Cultures , 2(2024), 75–80, DOI: 10.60531/insightout.2024.2.11 DOI: 10.60531/insightout.2024.2.11 Published under license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.11| CHANDRAGIRI, DAS: INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 77 As women move to the fringes of the nation state, the space becomes narrower for them to interact and assert their agency. Background During the colonial era, the undivided Punjab region was mostly a British Indian province. As the area’s economy was dominated by agriculture, the natural population distribution depended on the ease of farming, like the fertility and arability of the land. 1 However, British India’s Partition into two countries – India and Pakistan – was conducted on the basis of religion. Moreover, Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who defined the boundaries, did not have sufficient knowledge of the geography, history, or cultural practices specific to India and, therefore, did not take into consideration the realities on the ground. This resulted in the largest mass migration known in the history of mankind, with more than ten million people Introduction relocating and more than one million people killed or missing. 2 Those who moved to India’s PunHow powerful is infrastructure in regulating our li- jab state set up their lives as refugees in the land ves? The banality of everydayness that surrounds allocated to them by the Indian government, which our spaces tends to mask the role of spatiality that depended on the size of the land they had owned in marks, controls, and manages our existence. Mag- what was now Pakistan. The problems at the new ponificently designed architecture often captures our litical borders did not end with the migration; rather, attention, evoking awe and admiration. Or if the- they continue to haunt the subcontinent to this day. re is a disruption in our daily lives due to a power Presently, the borders are heavily militarised and deoutage or water shortage, we think of urban plan- marcated with fences wherever possible. ning. Probably, when our favourite place, a park, or a lake is sold to the builders, we might protest and question the authorities. But a closer analysis of the Research Our research explored the changes in the architecture of a place will reveal the macro and infrastructure of the landscape when Punmicro level control infrastructure has on our subjecjab became a border state, and we analysed tive experiences. Our field study of Punjab, a state how the infrastructural changes affected situated at the India-Pakistan border, puts into perthe people’s lives. spective the effect of infrastructure on the lives of borderland inhabitants. We conducted ethnography in two border villages of Punjab, namely Mulakot and Audar. These villages 1 G. Krishan,“Demography of the Punjab(1849–1947)”, Journal of Punjab Studies, 11/1(2004), 77–92. https://punjab.global.ucsb.edu/ sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.gisp.d7_sp/files/sitefiles/journals/volume11/no1/6_krishan.pdf(accessed 14 May 2024). 2 D. Tripathi and S. Chaturvedi,“South Asia: Boundaries, Borders and Beyond”, Journal of Borderlands Studies , 35/2(2020, published online 2019), 173–181, https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2019.1669483.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.11| CHANDRAGIRI, DAS: INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 78 are located right next to the international border and, therefore, were considered ideal for the study. Sixty-five in-depth interviews were conducted and field notes were prepared. Interview transcripts were coded and themes were generated. The marginalisation and exclusion of people, especially women, due to infrastructural restrictions was a major theme that was discovered. Across the world, borders are synonymous with restrictions and bring to mind the imagery of walls, fences, and the military. In the Punjab borderlands after Partition, there was a slow and steady increase in restrictive infrastructure, which transformed the built environment into a bounded space. Here is a description of the border according to a villager: We have our fields. Then there are two roads and then their fields start. The roads are for patrolling by the BSF. They[Pakistan] also have a road where their guards patrol. There is 20-foot difference. It is a mud road. I think our road is 15 feet and theirs also is 15 feet. In between there are border pillars. – Kishan Das, male, 66, Mulakot The borders were guarded by the state-armed police battalion till 1965. After the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, a separate Border Security Force(BSF) was established under the Ministry of Home Affairs to guard India’s borders, which replaced the state-armed police. The BSF’s duty is to secure Indian borders during peacetime and to control cross-border movement. The powers of the BSF have changed with time. In Punjab, the jurisdiction of the BSF was initially up to 15 km from the international border. It was extended to 50 km by the central government in 2021. This was done in a bid to control smuggling. However, the increase in militarisation has led to tighter control of the population living at the borders. A part of the militarisation process is the infrastructure that is designed to support the securitisation-surveillance practices. Such a built environment gives primary importance to the protection of national territory, and it defines and gives meaning to what borders are. Borderlands are zones of violence with several power dynamics. 3 In the case of Punjab, borderland inhabitants have had to witness multiple Indo-Pakistani wars. The area of our field study was captured by Pakistan in the 1971 war. People fled with whatever belongings they could take. They returned after two years when the Indian army recaptured the territory. By then, the villages had been completely razed to the ground. According to a farmer from Mulakot, They didn’t let even one tree survive. There was not even one brick. They even took away cow dung. There was nothing left in the village. It was completely plain[laughing]. The only thing they left was the gurudwara. They took away everything else[laughing][…]. Only my granddad will know what they did[when they came back]. We have no clue[laughing], we were not even born. They would have made everything from scratch. – Balbir Singh, male, 30, Mulakot Thus began a new lease of life with people setting up their houses and preparing their farmlands. Then, in the 1980s, the Khalistan movement 4 gripped the state which led to a wave of violence that included bombings, abductions and selective assassinations. 3 J. Goodhand,“The Centrality of Margins: The Political Economy of Conflict and Development in Borderlands”, Working Paper 2, Borderlands , Brokers and Peacebuilding: War to Peace Transitions Viewed from the Margins (n.p., 2018), https://www.borderlandsasia.org/uploads/1579261490_The%20Centrality%20of%20the%20Margins.pdf(accessed 15 May 2024). 4 The Khalistan movement is a separatist movement seeking to create an independent homeland for Sikhs by carving out territories from India and Pakistan.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.11| CHANDRAGIRI, DAS: INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 79 The Indian government considered this movement a threat to the nation and used its military might to silence the dissenting voices. It was also found that the militant group had received support in the form of weapons and people from Pakistan. Consequently, the degree of securitisation increased in border areas to cut off Pakistani support by arresting crossborder movements. The Indian government started fencing the borders of Punjab in the 1980s with the help of the BSF. The Standard Operating Procedures regarding the border infrastructure between India and Pakistan entail a construction-free zone at the zero line. As such, the fence was erected a few metres away from the defined international border. However, Pakistan opposed the idea of a border fence and resorted to constant firing to stall the construction. As the fence was erected inside the Indian territory, it literally cut off farmers’ access to their fields near the border. Gates were installed at intervals for farmers to access their land. As a result, to cross the fence for farming, the farmers have to undergo elaborate security checks every day. They are given a special card and are required to write the names of all the labourers who are accompanying them to the farm on paper, which has to be signed by the sarpanch (the head of the village). Only those who have a valid Aadhar card 5 are permitted to cross the fence. Moreover, the gates are opened at specific times and are closed on Mondays. Due to the elaborate security apparatus, the farmers find that their everyday lives at the border have become riddled with multiple hassles. Villagers feel a sense of subordination to the military and to the infrastructural security apparatus. Another problem caused by the border landscape is the lack of development. Other than a few houses and a gurudwara, there are no other buildings in the villages. The other end of these villages has a small canal, and the border area is connected to the other side by a rickety bridge with broken railings. It is broad enough for one tractor to pass across. There have been instances of youngsters falling into the canal while riding their bikes. A villager mentioned that one person lost his life in this manner. There is an elementary school right next to this bridge attended mostly by the children of labourers. Indian borderlands lag in development as the state discourses view these areas solely through the lens of security parameters. The uncertainties associated with such areas lead to a gradual decline in development. For instance, a villager mentioned that Pul Kanjri, a place nearby, was a large city before India’s partition. However, after Partition, people abandoned the site and now the area is predominantly agrarian. It is bounded by border fences and lags behind in development like the other border villages in the area. In the 1980s, a need was felt to develop the border areas in a bid to arrest migration from the borderlands and to provide basic necessities to the borderland inhabitants. Therefore, the Border Area Development Programme was launched as a means to enhance national security through infrastructural development. While importance is given to the construction of roads for better border management, the government also focuses on healthcare, education, community development, et cetera. However, our field study found that the villages of Mulakot and Audar are highly underdeveloped areas, with no public transport provision, aggravating their isolation. Even though the architecture of the village poses several problems to all the villagers, our study found that there are specific gendered implications for bounded imageries of spatiality. 5 An identity card issued by the government of India.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.11| CHANDRAGIRI, DAS: INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER INFRASTRUCTURE_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 80 Infrastructure: gendered implications Due to the isolation of the borderland, many women find it hard to fulfil their fundamental needs, and there is a high degree of dependence on men to manage certain basic necessities. For instance, many girls are not able to receive higher education because the colleges are far away and there is no easy transport provision. Women depend on men for transport as there are no bus services in the region. Also, due to a lack of public spaces, women are almost invisible in civil spaces. Moreover, the curfew imposed every night further diminishes the spaces women occupy. We are not scared to go out, but[it’s] just that there are no requirements that occur for us to go out at night. It would have been about six months [ago] now,[since then] I have not gone out at all. – Raman Kaur, female, 45, Mulakot The traditional gendered division of labour, with men engaged in hard labour on farmlands and women engaged in unpaid household labour, is the way of life people in the village adhere to. The fence restricts women from going to the farmlands near the border. The village folks consider women accessing militarised, masculinised spaces to be against the existing gender norms. Women consider the place risky and do not venture to areas near the fence. Also, there are bureaucratic hurdles for women to cross the fence. If there is a need for women to go to the other side, BSF women are required to be called to check and frisk them. They have to come from another post and therefore it is a time-consuming process. Women consciously try to avoid everyday engagement with the military. Our study also found that the sarpanches(village heads) of both the villages are women but it is their husbands who hold authority at the grassroots. One of the sarpanches even mentioned that she had never interacted with the BSF to date. The sarpanch seats in these constituencies are reserved for women, and thus it is by virtue of their gender that they hold the position. However, their role in managing matters of village administration is very limited. One of the reasons for this is the restrictive nature of the border architecture and its related practices. Socio-spatial relations limit the opportunities for women to exercise their agency freely. Conclusion When areas of Punjab became a borderland, they witnessed an increase in restrictive infrastructure and developmental progress stalled. The threats attached to borderlands led to the adoption of bounded infrastructures and this set them in isolation. The politics of identity formation are directly related to the practices of production of space. As women move to the fringes of the nation state, the space becomes narrower for them to interact and assert their agency. This leads to the creation of subjugated identities, with women being mostly invisible in public spaces.