A decade ago, I led a group of Bangladeshi, Indian and Nepali journalists on a tour dubbed 'From Mountain to Delta'. The idea was to travel from Nepal to north Bihar and Bangladesh, in an attempt to bridge differences in popular perceptions in each of these countries as to who was responsible for the annual floods that take place downstream. A water expert in Patna observed that along the Nepal-India border, villagers did not really know how to define their own nationality; for my part, I thought that this was exactly as it should be. Cartographers are hardly capable of resolving such issues. For an Indian – the quintessential Big Brother in this scenario – a trip to a bordering country certainly serves as a reminder that there is a neighbour out there with whom we have much in common – language, religion, cuisine, culture, attire and most of all, a shared identity.
In India, fellow Southasians are often seen as 'terrorists' or, at best, scroungers who want to live off the land. When some 50 Southasian journalists assembled in Bombay after the conclusion of three field trips for the Mountain to Delta project, we visited nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a contested site between naturalists and human-rights activists, locked in combat over the eviction of some 300,000 squatters in the park.
To our astonishment, some of these squatters were from Nepal.
But it is the Bangladeshi, for some reason, that conjures up the greatest anxiety in the fevered imagination of Indians. During the 1992-1993 communal riots, following the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, there were widespread rumours that Bangladeshis were responsible for fomenting the riots, despite the obvious fact that it was the handiwork of homegrown militant outfits. Working at the Bombay edition of the Times of India at the time, I assigned several reporters to attempt to trace the 'camps' where these Bangladeshis supposedly lived, but none could find any evidence: these camps simply did not exist. Perhaps Pakistanis might have claimed the distinction of being enemy number one, if they had been able to cross the border more easily.