Asian Journal of Social Science 45 (2017) 749–778 brill.com/ajss Between Fear and Hope at the Bangladesh-Assam Border Éva Rozália Hölzle Bielefeld University Abstract This paper is about the inhabitants of a small village in Bangladesh, which lies on the border with the Indian state of Assam. Due to an Indo-Bangladesh agreement, inhab- itants are confronted with losing their agricultural lands. In addition, since 2010, the Border Security Force of India (bsf) impedes residents in approaching their gardens, an action that has led to repeated confrontations between the bsf and the villagers. Both threats instigate high levels of fear among the residents. However, their hopes are also high. How can we explain equally high levels of fear and hope among the residents? I suggest that the simultaneous surfacing of fear and hope sheds light on “bipolar” state practices on the ground (i.e., at the same time targeting and protecting lives), as well as the entanglement of the existential and the political (i.e., vulnerability and a demand for recognition) in the everyday lives of the residents. Keywords fear – hope – violence – democracy – borderland – Bangladesh – Assam Introduction The village, Nolikhai, is located in the Greater Sylhet of Bangladesh on the border with Assam (see Figure 1). The majority of the residents are Pnar and War Khasis. They earn a subsistence income from betel leaf (pan) production. While their houses are in Bangladesh, their agricultural lands lie on a 300-acre- stretch of territory in no man’s land, that is, between Bangladesh and India. The villagers have not had official land titles over their area of residence or the farmlands since the colonial period. They have been leasing the land from a © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/15685314-04506007Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 05:40:22PM via free access 750 hölzle privately-owned tea estate since the 1920s. Because of the border, their lives have always been volatile. However, their problems related to tenancy have become more acute in the last five years. In 2011, Bangladesh and India inked a land boundary agreement (lba) to solve territorial conflicts along the border. According to the lba, the official border will be realigned in the direction of the Nolikhai residential area, that is, a few meters “inside” Bangladesh, in the near future. This means that while the villagers’ residential area will remain in Bangladesh, their agricultural lands will become part of Assam territory. The execution of the lba, therefore, threatens the residents with the loss of their farmlands and their livelihoods.This is, however, just one part of their problem. Since the erection of a barbwire fence in 2010, the Border Security Force of India (bsf) has restricted the villagers from entering their gardens. Therefore, it has become increasingly difficult for residents to cultivate pan without risking verbal or physical confrontations with the bsf.1 Both of these threats, the loss of farmlands and the confrontations with border guards on a daily basis, has instigated high levels of fear among the villagers. Yet, the outcome of the lba is uncertain. Moreover, the Bangladeshi state not only allows voices that question the legitimacy of the lba, but also occasionally provides protection for the inhabitants from the bsf, through the Border Guards Bangladesh (bgb). Consequently, the villagers’ daily lives are affected by high levels of fear and hope. The latter materialises through a particular language of dissidence, as well as demands directed towards the Bangladeshi state. How can we make sense of the equally high levels of fear and hope among the residents of Nolikhai? In answering this question, I will do so with two argumentative steps. First, I suggest that the simultaneous appearance of fear and hope shed light on “bipolar” (Singh, 2015:44) state practices on the ground. By “bipolar”, I mean that the state as a guardian, permitting dissident voices to arise, as well as a source of arbitrary power, targeting and denying the same lives that it intends to protect, coexist in contemporary democracies. As Butler argues, being targeted and protected are not two separate alternatives that can be mutually excluded, even if they are actually antithetical: “targeting and protecting are practices that belong to the same rationale of power” (2015:144). Such contradictory state practices represent not the exception, but rather the norm under democratic 1 The violent activities of the bsf are well documented by Bangladeshi media and human rights organisations (see Human Rights Watch, 2010). One of the most publicised cases was the 2011 killing of Felani Khatun, a 15-year-old girl, who was shot dead by the bsf when crossing the Bangladesh-India border, and whose body was left hanging on the barbed wire fence (see also Cons, 2016:14–15). Asian Journal of SocialDownloaded Science from 45 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 749–778 05:40:22PM via free access between fear and hope at the bangladesh-assam border 751 rule. Moreover, the introduction of democracy does not necessarily mean an interruption to former political practices that came to the fore during colonial- ism. The land politics of the contemporary Bangladeshi state, along its national margins, are continuations of older colonial practices of state formation, based for instance on demands for legal land papers. Yet, land title is just one possible “inscription device”. As Li (2014) writes, the axe, the spade, the plough and—I would add—the historical continuation of occupation represent other ways of carving entitlements into land. Such alternatives claims were rejected during British colonial rule and continue to be disregarded by the Bangladeshi state, thereby enabling legal (i.e., denying land rights) and physical abuses (i.e., allow- ing intimidation by bsf). Second, fear is revealed in Nolikhai through a heightened sense of vulnera- bility, materialised through physical exposure, and through the potential col- lapse of material and social conditions that sustain life. The inhabitants’ hope, in contrast, stands for searching for viable possibilities, but also a move away from an increasingly marginalised position and towards a demand for recogni- tion. The concomitant surfacing of fear and hope discloses that existential and political matters represent not separate, but two entangled realms of the social world. That such emotional intensities and contradictions emerge exactly at nation-state margins is not accidental. As Cons (2016:7) recently argued, bor- derlands are best understood as “sensitive spaces”. Such spaces are charac- terised by ambiguities, exhibiting insecurities over “fragility and instability […] of national territory”, while investing effort to rule out such exposures by “asserting jurisdiction over and control of space”. Borderlands as sensitive spaces accumulate intense uncertainties, from both the state, as well as its inhabitants. This paper contributes empirically to the expanding literature that refuses to see democracy and violence as antithetical (see Basu and Roy, 2007; Das, 2008; Bauman, 1995; Das and Poole, 2004; Spencer, 2007). Rather than viewing them as contradictory, I build upon the theoretical consideration that democracy widens the space for the proliferation of violence in different geographical and social contexts (see Pfaff-Czarnecka and Gerharz in this volume, Singh 2015, Butler 2015). Simultaneously, my understanding of democracy is informed by recent anthropological conceptualisations (Michelutti, 2008; Spencer, 2007; Pfaff-Czarnecka, 2008; Paley, 2008) that depart from normative and macro- oriented theories.The anthropology of democracy pays attention to the actions and ideas of local stakeholders instead of focusing on formal institutions, and views democracy as an unfinished, nonlinear political practice that has contradictory and unanticipated outcomes in the local context. Asian Journal of Social Science 45 (2017) 749–778 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 05:40:22PM via free access 752 hölzle figure 1 Map of Bangladesh and north-east India source: http://mdoner.gov.in/sites/default/files/silo4_content/ ne/ne_region.jpg Additionally, this paper builds on borderland literature in which the ambi- guities and ambivalences of political life on the ground have come to play a central role. This has resulted in a detailed body of knowledge about bor- derlands as contested spaces with their own dynamics (see van Schendel, 2005; Banerjee, 2010) and contributed to understanding the “state” not as a “fixed object” (Asad, 2004:279), but as a series of procedures that “oscillate between the rational mode and the magical mode of being”: Between legi- bility and illegibility (Das, 2004:225). It has also explored the ways in which spatial and social marginality intersect with each other along the peripheries (Cons, 2012; Middleton, 2013). As I hope to show, Nolikhai, too, is located at the margin of the nation-state in a tension-filled zone, emerging from oscillations between risk and adventure, danger and safety, control and defiance, fear and hope. Asian Journal of SocialDownloaded Science from 45 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 749–778 05:40:22PM via free access between fear and hope at the bangladesh-assam border 753 The arguments in this paper are built upon a corpus of data gathered between 2010 and 2016. This data was used in a study that analyses struggles over land, in the context of land dispossession in north-eastern Bangladesh, from the perspective of small-scale indigenous farmers, who had already lost or are threatened with losing their lands in the future. In the analysis below, I will use individual and group discussions conducted with the affected farm- ers from Nolikhai, as well as my own observations collected during six different stays in the village. The analysis is structured into four sections. Given that the notion of the border and its transformation occupy a significant role in the local history of Nolikhai, Section 2 reflects briefly on the historical formation of the Sylhet- Meghalaya-Assam border.