Seite
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.