Drawn Lines

For years, India’s eastern frontier has been a study in political evasiveness. While past governments spoke of illegal immigration and border security, their actions rarely matched their rhetoric. That era now appears to be definitively ending.

With the BJP now in power across the states adjoining Bangladesh, India’s political message is now unmistakable. For the newly installed BJP government in West Bengal under Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, border management is no longer a peripheral issue but a top governing priority.

The recent transfer of land for fencing in the strategically vital Chicken’s Neck corridor, the acceleration of long-pending infrastructure projects and the renewed emphasis on identifying and deporting illegal immigrants signal a fundamental shift in policy.

Every sovereign state possesses the right and has the obligation to know who enters its territory and who remains within it. That is particularly true in eastern India, where concerns about illegal immigration from Bangladesh have shaped political discourse for decades. For long, entire political careers were built on this issue.

For years, the issue was entangled in the politics of appeasement. The erstwhile Mamata Banerjee-led TMC government had repeatedly prioritising vote-bank considerations over robust border management, dismissing concerns about infiltration as politically motivated. The new administration under Suvendu Adhikari has chosen a markedly different course. By accelerating fencing projects, facilitating security infrastructure and backing stricter enforcement, it has made clear that border security is a core responsibility of the state.

The importance of the Chicken’s Neck corridor alone justifies heightened vigilance. Barely 22 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, this strip of land links the Indian mainland to the eight northeastern states. Any security planner examining a map of India immediately understands its significance.

Nor is border fencing some extraordinary measure. Around the world, nations erect barriers to combat illegal migration, trafficking and smuggling. A fence is not a declaration of hostility but an assertion of jurisdiction. Countries have borders precisely because they are expected to regulate movement across them.

This is why any future attempt by Bangladesh to internationalise the issue - whether through multilateral forums or appeals to international bodies - would be deeply misguided. No principle of international law grants one country the authority to veto how another secures its frontier.

If individuals identified through due process as Bangladeshi nationals are being repatriated, why should Bangladesh object to receiving them?

Credit must go to the central government and the new administration in West Bengal for treating border security as a matter of governance rather than a slogan.

Borders are expressions of statehood itself. A nation unwilling to secure them invites infiltration, smuggling and lawlessness. A nation unwilling to acknowledge them ultimately erodes the very meaning of citizenship. The effort currently underway to fence the Indo-Bangladesh border is the long-overdue assertion of our state’s most elementary duty: to decide who may enter its territory and who may not.