We hear nice things about Southasian camaraderie emanating from South Block, and we believe them. As the SAARC summit rolls up in early August, we can expect to hear from all capitals, including New Delhi, about the importance of mending fences in the Subcontinent, and about promoting trade and people-to-people contact. And we will believe them.
But even as tentative movements are being made to relax visa regimes and expand the token rail transport that exists between India and Pakistan/Bangladesh, there is the awkward fact of the border fence that the Indian Home Ministry is constructing along the frontiers of the east and west. As the article on the India-Bangladesh border in this issue indicates, the fencing project is well on its way to completion, with only 1495 km left unfenced along the 4095 km-long India-Bangladesh border. On the western front, meanwhile, less than 100 km of the 2000 km that are planned for fencing remain to be sealed.
Try as we might, we are not able to correlate the fact of fence-building – with service roads, steel pylons, concertina- and barbed-wire, watchtowers and floodlights – with expressions of SAARC-era bonhomie. Curiously, this period of fence-building coincides with perhaps the most responsible period of bilateral relations in the northern half of the Subcontinent. While the India-Bangladesh relationship has always been relatively stable, that between India and Pakistan has survived all kinds of events that, in an earlier era, would have led to escalating tit-for-tat actions between Islamabad and New Delhi. And yet, the fence-building has gone on and on.
On the Pakistani side, these fences are supposed to be to deal with infiltration by militants; on the Bangladeshi side, for militancy and to check illegal migration. While some might say that it is in fact the construction of fences along the border that has resulted in less friction and more peace, we believe that the relative peace that is being experienced today is due to factors other than a wealth of fences.