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Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) occupied a unique place in the Indian federal structure as encoded in Article 370 of the Indian constitution. Incorporating Art. 370 in Indian Constitution reflected the recognition of the unique history and circumstances of J&K's accession to India. However, the article proved a roadblock in the Indian state's march to dictate and structure the politics of the state subservient to the perceived national interest, hence the unfailing attempts to gradually dilute it culminating in its total abrogation recently. The paper attempts at deconstructing the Indian state's preoccupation with weakening Art. 370 by arguing that it represented the project of extending homogenization with the ultimate objective of exercising maximum control in a security-sensitive border state. The paper contends that the efforts at homogenization proved counterproductive; it far from bringing stability has caused more political fragility in the state, thus feeding the very dynamics that it has been seeking to contain. In conclusion, the paper offers deepening federalization as the likely pacifier for the festering conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The India-Bangladesh boundary is one of the most vulnerable and most problematic borders in the World. The Indian Border Security Force (BSF) tortures, abducts or opens fire on Bangladesh civilians residing around the border at every opportunity. From time to time, BSF officers enter the territory of Bangladesh illegally and break into house in villages in the border region and carry out attacks. These engagments are viewed as a major threat to Bangladesh border security and security and safety of residents in the border area. Although all neighboring countries have some sort of problems with legal or illegal crossings, practices up to the level of massacre have not been recorded. These systematic and predetermined activities of Indian officials are considered violation humane treatment according to the UN 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as other national and international regulations. In this study, security problems that constitute serious violations of human rights on the Bangladesh-India border are discussed. The leading causes of the killing of Bangladeshi citizens living in or crossing the border are by BSF officers are emphasized, and the impact of these border killings on bilateral relations is examined. Considering that the events are also serious violations of human rihgts, the possibility for an international solution is proposed unless the problem is resolved through bilateral negotiations. As the study is concerned with the practices between the two countries that are in violations of clear provisions of international law, the analyses are carried out through case study method with a specific emphasis on content analysis. Thus, despite the use of figures, the inferences are based on qualitative research method. In this regard, that the violations of law are shadowed by political relations in which India has an upper hand in every aspect is the main subject of this study. This article aims at revealing the legal bases of these violations, emphasizing constructive solutions through bilateral negotiations and thereby filling an important gap especially in the Turkish literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drone is the latest entrant in the ever-volatile India-Pakistan cross-border terrorism imbroglio. According to media reports, the use of the drones to send payloads, weapons, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has substantially increased in the last two years. This technology has been a boon for the terrorist outfits based in Pakistan which are using Chinese drones to drop payloads and plan terrorist attacks in Indian cities. This article discusses how the drone is emerging as a new frontier of warfare; drone development in India and Pakistan; emerging instances of cross-border terrorism via drones; security implications therein and also possible solutions which lie ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Glanders is a transmissible zoonotic disease caused by Burkholderia mallei that infects equids and humans. No glanders cases in equids were reported so far in Nepal. Case presentation: Following suspected glanders in animals with clinical signs in different regions in Nepal, serum samples were tested by CFT, ELISA and Luminex® tests. Two horses and a mule tested positive for glanders by all tests, while two other equids only tested positive by ELISA and Luminex®. Analysis of swabs and pus samples by a PCR system targeting B. mallei confirmed the presence of the bacterium in the samples collected from the 3 equids that yielded positive results in all serological tests. Genotyping of the three PCR positive samples with a SNP-based method identified a genotype closely related to the B. mallei strains circulating in India. Conclusion: Confirmation of glanders cases underscores the need of implementing a surveillance program in Nepal and a strict control of the animal movement across the borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration has taken place throughout human history and continues to do so in the 21st century. In many recent instances, states that are destination of migration flows framed migration as a security issue, i.e. a threat to their citizens' livelihood, safety, and cultural identity. Discourses that securitize migration, thus criminalising immigrants, are not unique to the US and the EU, nor to South-North migration: they pertain to South-South migration as well. This article draws attention to a case of migration and border securitisation from the global South: the one concerning India-bound informal migration originating from Bangladesh. This, incidentally, is also the country of origin of large numbers of migrants that have made their way to Europe during the last decade. This article asks what are the consequences of a securitized approach in the framing and managing of borders and migration, and whether such consequences are worth or at all affordable to the countries involved in the securitisation. The article assesses the potential impact that securitized discourses have on Indo-Bangladeshi relations, as well as on the domestic politics of India and Bangladesh. It reviews the processes of the securitisation of the India-Bangladesh border and the criminalisation of the Bangladeshi migrants in India's contemporary domestic politics with reference to recent (2019-2021) events and current affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's regional lines, both land and ocean, experience the ill effects of assorted physical, ethnic and social inconsistencies. While the state plays a significant part in getting war boondocks, the populaces along regional peripheries, as well, can assume a significant part in getting our inclinations. Individuals living around there are the main fixing towards a protected and safe line region. This would involve reconceptualising the idea of line monitoring to powerful boundary the board, where neighborhood individuals turned into the focal point of gravity, everything being equal. The line monitoring powers need to develop available resources to standard the neighborhood populace in the administration of the line regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders on the Indian subcontinent are notable for the distinct lack of cross-border cooperation. Among the most intractable border dyads in the world, it is as volatile as it is securitised. Instead of facilitating trade and movement, both sides pursue a border policy to create a strong barrier. The puzzle that informs this article is the extent to which the bilateral border relationship is characterised by political animosity, despite a shared history and culture that the conventional approach to security communities would posit as enablers of coordination and cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I critically review the literature on the Bangladesh-India borderlands to raise a couple of questions: What are the major themes and issues on the Bangladesh-India border? What are the research prospects on the border issues between the two states? Bangladesh and India share a common border of 4096 km, with a range of cross-border issues determining their bilateral relationship and cooperation. Several border issues have not only clouded these relations but have also led to the exchange of fire between the two countries' border security forces over disputed territory. This contribution broadly reviews Bangladesh-India cross-border issues and specifically calls attention to Bangladesh-India cross-border relations in the realm of comparative border research, which will expand our socio-political, economic, geographic and cultural understandings of bordering practices and border policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Border Area Development Programme was initiated in the year 1986–87, to strengthen India's security by ensuring developed and secure borders. Initially, the programme was implemented in the western border states to facilitate deployment of the Border Security Force. Later, the geographical and functional scope of the programme was widened to include eastern and northern sectors of India's borders and as well as socio-economic aspects such as education, health, agriculture and other allied sectors. But, it is difficult to say that the implementation has been uniform in all the sectors. While the programme on the Western front along the India–Pakistan border has been fairly successful, it is yet to achieve its stated objectives on the Eastern front. Using an analytical framework, the article examines three aspects of BADP: Its context and concept; identifying challenges that hinder the Programme's effectiveness; and certain policy prescriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's militarization of its border with Bangladesh has grown alongside a paranoia around the figure of the "infiltrator" made synonymous with the "Bangladeshi illegal migrant." Set in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, where ethnic, racial, and linguistic markers do not allow for an easy distinction to be made between the Bengali members of two nation‐states, this article focuses on the paradoxes of documentary citizenship. Residents of these highly surveilled borderlands, as well as a variety of state actors, find that simply possessing identity documents is inadequate amid forgery and deception. The possibility of detection—detectability—of the illegal migrant materializes in India's eastern borderlands across three distinct modes of policing: the interceptive, the judicial‐determinative, and the certificatory. Through an ethnographic exploration of these modes of policing, this article sheds light on the political economy of migrant illegality and reimagines detectability, the infinite and promissory search for the impostor within, as the engine that drives the state. Detectability raises new questions beyond the fetishization of documents and the production and navigation of il/legibility. [borders, migrant illegality, policing, documents, South Asia] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has 15106 km of land borders and a coastline of about 7516 km. Only 5 out of 29 Indian states have no international border or coastal line. Those long borders are shared with seven countries - China, Pakistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Such extensive and porous borders that run through different kinds of terrains--mountains, hills, plains valleys, forests, desert, and swamps -- sometimes are difficult to monitor, especially with different territorial disputes and security troubles still exist in large parts of Indian borders. Because of these artificially created boundaries that engendered many territorial disputes and left large areas porous for a variety of irregular and illegal cross-border activities, India has erected different types of barriers along its national borders. In addition to security aspects, border fencing has also political reasons closely related to the way in which these international borders were drawn. The paper discusses the complicated characteristics of India's borders with its neighboring countries, deals with the Indian strategy of fencing borders with some its neighbors and shows whether the fortification and militarization of the Indian borders by building fences and other security measures has succeeded or failed to achieve the designed goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India and Bangladesh are interrelated in geopolitical relations but their core objectives are different. While geopolitical compulsions introduce the never-ending challenges of proximity to the two parties, including crucial issues of security, migration and resource sharing, Bangladesh is yet to form its own identity in which the perceived image of India figures predominantly, and the attitudes and expectations they develop towards each other shape the pattern of bilateral interactions between the two countries. Solutions to a number of vexed problems remain elusive and irritants in relations out-number gestures of goodwill. While the warmth in relations has frequently fluctuated with the change of regimes, a sustained pattern of uneasiness and mistrust persists. Analysed at three levels of geopolitics, attitudinal effects and functional exchanges, India–Bangladesh relations appear as a reflection of normal big country–small country power relations where policies are formulated on the basis of the primary principle of self-help but are further shaded by the quest for transforming itself into a nation-state by Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the impact of the events of 11 September 2001 on the practice of border security in the United States, India and Israel. It argues that the discourse of the global war on terror shifted the perception of border fencing from the anachronistic imagery of the Berlin Wall to that of a modern and essential way to secure the future of civilisation and freedom. The hardening of the border, in turn, legitimates and exacerbates exclusionary practices within each state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address the multiple forms and layers of porosity that give borderlands, such as the Bengal borderland, their distinctive nature as zones of contestation. Cross-border interactions continue to be an integral feature of everyday life in the Bengal borderland despite increasing militarisation and regulation by the Indian government in the last decade. Criminalization of local cross-border flows has driven them underground - while organized cross-border crimes (smuggling and trafficking) enjoy considerable attention, the breadth and depth of informal cross-border interactions in the quotidian lives of borderlanders remain understudied. What is the significance of such daily cross-border transactions? How do they feed into the local perceptions of the state policies of border control? How do they relate to larger organized flows of smuggling and trafficking? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the border district of North 24 Parganas in West Bengal, India, this paper critically examines the rationales and practices of such informal 'illegal' cross-border interactions and problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state as it is contested in the realities of the borderland. Such a focus also enables a construction of the social history of those people in whose worlds an international border appeared in the monsoon of 1947, thus relating the present configurations of porosity to the regional unity that existed in the pre-Partition past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how expansive new security projects have gained both legitimacy and immediacy as part of the ‘global war on terror’ by analysing the process that led to the fencing and securitising of the border between India and Bangladesh. The framing of the ‘enemy other’ in the global war on terror relies on two crucial shifts from previous geopolitical boundary narratives. First, the enemy other is described as not only being violent but also as outside the boundaries of modernity. Second, the enemy other is represented as posing a global and interconnected threat that is no longer limited by geography. These two shifts are used to justify the new preventative responses of pre-emptive military action abroad and the securitisation of the borders of the state. This article argues that in India the good and evil framing of the global war on terror was mapped onto longstanding communal distinctions between Hindus and Muslims. In the process, Pakistan, Bangladesh and increasingly Muslims generally are described as violent, irrational and a threat to the security of the Indian state. These changes led to a profound shift in the borderlands of the Indian state of West Bengal, where fencing and securitising the border with Bangladesh was previously resisted, but now is deemed essential. The article concludes that the framing of the war on terror as a global and interconnected problem has allowed sovereign states to consolidate power and move substantially closer to the territorial ideal of a closed and bounded container of an orderly population by attempting to lock down political borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indo-Nepal border is an open border, which has facilitated close social, cultural, and economic exchanges and led to a special relationship between the two countries. However, in recent times, the increasing mis-use of the borders by terrorists, political activists, anti-social elements, etc. has led to the demand for the closure of the border from the Indian side. The paper posits that a closed border is not beneficial for both the countries as the social and political costs involved in such a border are immense. Therefore, the paper suggests the "middle path" of a regulated open border should be adopted as a policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The India-Bangladesh border has been described as the 'problem area of tomorrow'. The problems include illegal migration, smuggling, and transborder movement of insurgents, which are serious threats to the security of the country. India shares its longest border with Bangladesh, but this border is not attentively managed. This article analyses the problems arising along this border and reviews the recommendations of a report by the Group of Ministers on Border Management and the measures undertaken by the government to tackle the problems. This article also suggests additional measures and implores the Indian Government to adopt a pragmatic and people-sensitive approach to improve border management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rivers have long been convenient yet troublesome borders. Inherently itinerant, rivers routinely defy cartographic depictions of borders as static, territorially bounded formations. Such dynamism poses material and conceptual challenges to state regulatory activities, resulting in increasingly heterodox attempts to fix waterbodies through various securitizing mechanisms. I examine the dialectical relationship between rivers and borders through the concept of the river-border complex. I ask how the Ganges River shapes the form and function of the Indo-Bangladeshi border and how, in turn, bordering practices in India regulate flows along the river, which comprises 129 km of India's border with Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records, in-person interviews, and river data, I find that the border and efforts to secure it mediate many flows along the river. The study corroborates previous work within critical border studies that securitizing cross-border flows has the perverse effect of generating greater insecurity in adjoining countries. Crucially, historical analysis of sediment, information, and human flows reveals how international rivers also determine patterns and processes of circulation and thereby warrant reconceptualization as border infrastructures, rather than as merely being subject to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the paramilitary forces in India. A rapid increase in paramilitary forces is gauged from the fact that from 1966-1977, expenditure on the centrally controlled forces increased from $26.5 million to $375 million. Paramilitary forces' total number has risen to nearly one-third of the strength of India's armed forces. As of 1979, central paramilitary forces in the country include the Central Reserve Police (CRP), Border Security Force (BSF), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), Coast Guard and Assam Rifles.

The author argues on India's trilateral cooperation with China and Nepal. He says that the cooperation gives China as strong economic presence in a country viewed by India as strategic. He states that Nepal's interest in the cooperation is its effort to follow policy of equidistance which aim is to distance itself from India. He argues that it does not make strategic sense for India to involve in a trilateral mechanism with China, and mentions India's border problem with China.