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Preface
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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Summary
The first time I ever heard of chhitmahals goes back to my early childhood, yet I clearly remember it. It was during one of the visits to my maternal grandparents’ house in a village in Lalmonirhat district. At one edge of the village lay Singimari River marking the international border between Bangladesh and India. Freshwater dolphins were regularly sighted in that river which, as a child, was a source of immense joy to me. Moreover, the unknown land called India on the other side of the river remained an irresistible fascination. Thus, every time my family went to my grandparents’ place, we walked along that river. During one such walk along the Bangladeshi bank of the river, where India lay across the other bank, my mother mentioned of Bangladeshi chhitmahals that were located over “there.” Although I was old enough to comprehend that countries “end” at one point and “start” from the other, I could not make sense of chhitmahals at that time. My mother explained to me that it was not just India beyond that river but also “Bangladesh was inside” India. This struck me. Although I eventually visited some of the Indian chhitmahals inside Bangladesh while growing up, nothing special about them grabbed my attention except their “weird” status as India inside Bangladesh. It was during the final year of my undergraduate studies at the University of Dhaka that I became interested again in the enclaves – this time, however, through an academic gaze. I was required to write an undergraduate thesis, ideally drawing on empirical research, as partial fulfillment of the degree. As I was in quest of a unique topic, one of my professors, Mahmuda Khatun, brought the enclaves to my attention both because she knew I came from Rangpur where all the enclaves were located and because the enclaves were in many ways “unique.” She even gave me a copy of Willem van Schendel's The Bengal Borderland which I read a number of times. I visited Dahagram–Angorpota in 2009 to conduct fieldwork for my undergraduate research monograph. This was the only Bangladeshi enclave connected to Bangladesh through a piece of land leased from India known as the Tin Bigha Corridor.
Index
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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Contents
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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2 - From “sensitive” to “symbolic” spaces
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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Summary
After a long rickshaw journey along zigzagging dirt paths, my research assistant, Morshed, and I finally arrived at one of the former Indian enclaves in Bangladesh. To be sure, I asked a man in a small shop selling cigarettes, “Is this the enclave of Kotvajni?” Unable to mask his irritation, he replied, “No, this is the former enclave of Kotvajni. This is now Bangladesh.” He placed extra emphasis on the word ‘former’ when he answered. With a smile on my face and a small nod of my head, I said, “Thank you,” feeling a little ashamed of my inauspicious arrival in the former enclave. Yet I was also excited to learn about this new chapter in the lives of the residents who had finally achieved the exchange of the border enclaves after almost seventy years of uncertainty and de facto statelessness.
Even during the many decades when they existed as enclaves, territorially surrounded by India or Bangladesh, they had no apparent marker to distinguish them from their surroundings. They had neither fences nor border guards to control or monitor the flow of people. People in the enclaves were not “different” by any measure from their neighbors beyond their status and lack of papers. Pillars or markers that were used to mark their boundaries either disappeared or remained hidden in the rice field. One needed prior knowledge of where exactly to look for or how to locate them. This made it even more difficult to distinguish the enclaves from their surroundings. Yet for almost seventy years, from 1947 until 2015, residents of enclaves like Kotvajni were not considered Bangladeshis, and these small pockets of land were not territories of Bangladesh. Officially at least, they had been Indian nationals living in Indian territories, effectively cut off from the mainland of India, and vice versa. These were essentially “stateless spaces” because they were not administered by the surrounding state, and the home state did not maintain any connection with them (Jones, 2009b; Shewly, 2013a).
Although these territories and their residents never received any care from their home states, they never lost significance in the territorial and nationalistic discourses of Bangladesh and India, which played a role in delaying the seemingly obvious solution of a territorial swap.
List of figures
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References
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Introduction: Remnants, nations, and the sovereign
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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Summary
On the night of September 28, 2014, Selina, an expectant young woman and a mother of two, was brutally murdered in front of her six-year-old son by four men, one of whom was later found to be her husband. While her neighbors discovered the deceased woman the next morning and informed the authorities of it immediately, her lifeless body remained on the crime scene for the next two days (Daily Ittefaq, 2014). Selina was a resident of India's Islampur enclave inside Bangladesh. Since she was an Indian enclave dweller, neither the crime scene nor Selina's body was under the official jurisdiction of the state of Bangladesh. Furthermore, the unique territorial oddities of the enclave prevented the Indian police from intervening, because the enclave was inside Bangladesh, another sovereign state, where the Indian police lacked authority. For the Indian police to have entered Bangladesh in an official capacity, they would have required complicated bureaucratic arrangements. Local residents and political figures pressed the Bangladesh police to consider it from a “humanitarian perspective.” Only then was Selina's body taken and preserved in a morgue in the Bangladeshi district of Lalmonirhat. After several meetings, concerned authorities across borders – that is, the Bangladeshi police, the Indian police, and the respective border security forces, the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) and Border Security Force (BSF) of India – arranged for a team of Indian police to investigate the crime scene inside Bangladesh. Selina's body was taken to India for an autopsy. It took eighteen days for Selina's body to be handed back to her family and friends for her funeral.
Only a few years later, the situation for the residents of the enclaves was significantly transformed. In another former Indian enclave of Dasiar Chhara, located inside Kurigram district of Bangladesh, I met Nuruddin1 during my ethnographic fieldwork in 2017. Dasiar Chhara was then merged with regular Bangladeshi territories and was undergoing numerous state-making processes as part of a successful territorial swap between India and Bangladesh. I was taking a walk and having a casual chat with Nuruddin, a twenty-seven-year-old man, who was enthusiastically showing me how things had changed in Dasiar Chhara after it officially became part of Bangladesh.
Epilogue
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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As a phrase, sovereign atonement brings two concepts – “sovereign” and “atonement” – together, which is perhaps not the first combination that comes to mind when we think of them individually, not least because they are rarely discussed on the same page due to their treatment predominantly by two distinct domains of knowledge: politics and theology. However, the idea of the sovereign is primarily discussed in close relation to power and violence, in sharp contrast with an image of an apologetic and amending body atoning for its past deeds. It is therefore unsurprising that the phrase appears unorthodox or even “weird” on first reading. Nonetheless, throughout the book, I have demonstrated that atonement can be used productively in relation to the sovereign to further unlock the everyday state, power, territory, governance, violence, citizenship, and belonging in novel ways. It does so not just by offering a lens through which to examine these issues more deeply but also by providing a foundation on which they are cross-examined against each other. In this epilogue, I undertake precisely this task: teasing out how sovereign atonement, both as a lens and as a framework, coherently binds the book through an inquiry into the issues that have been discussed in their specificity across the chapters in thick ethnographic detail. In doing so, I start by taking a step back. First, I discuss the meaning of the “sovereign” the book has used. I then shed light on the nature of “atonement” to clarify precisely in what sense I have used the term throughout. Finally, I delve into a discussion of how the merging of these two concepts – that is, sovereign atonement – pans out across the book.
Sovereignty's meaning has been discussed in a range of ways and contexts. Yet Stephen Krasner identifies four major applications of the term (Krasner, 1999). These are international legal sovereignty, Westphalian sovereignty, domestic sovereignty, and interdependence sovereignty. According to Krasner, international legal sovereignty refers to the practices that allow one territorial entity to recognize another through formal juridical independence. Westphalian sovereignty is generally used to describe a political organization of territories based on the inclusion and exclusion of actors who have the power to exercise authority within the territory in question.
Acknowledgments
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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Frontmatter
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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1 - Sovereign atonement
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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The “problem” for the Bangladeshi state regarding the newly gained enclave residents and territories was twofold: First, there was the problem of legibility – that is, creating a condition that would enable the state to intervene to an extent so the former enclaves became easily “readable” to it by employing numerous “standardization” mechanisms (Scott, 1998). Second, there was the problem of “governmentality” (Foucault, 2007) – that is, an institutional ensemble that would permit the exercise of governmental power with compartmentalized governing apparatuses to manage the enclave residents and territories. Since the enclaves were not under the formal jurisdiction of the state of Bangladesh until they were exchanged, they were neither legible nor governable. However, as they were handed back to the host state, creating legible state spaces and governing the population gained paramount importance (Ferdoush, 2021a). Yet what makes this highly suggestive and equally interesting is how they were brought under the schemes of legibility and governmentality because of the enclaves’ unique history and status. A range of actors, including journalists, academics, state elites, and politicians, have always justified this uniqueness as exceptional. The exceptional rhetoric gained traction because it fit the zone of indistinction between the inside–outside, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) identifies, and because it allowed an ease of explanation for state territories that did not fit the postcolonial territorial norm – that is, to be located within the nation's geo-body (Winichakul, 1994). The exception therefore holds the key to our reading of the former enclaves, even after they were exchanged and made part of regular state spaces. It concurrently unpacks the mechanisms and the rationale behind selectively privileging one group of the population over others. The very nature of the exception thus provides an answer to a crucial question: why and how does the sovereign bring the same population it once excluded under its protection and onto which it projected violence?
The “exceptional turn” in political geography, with Agamben's retake on Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign being the one “who decides on the state of exception” (Agamben, 1998, p. 11), complicated by bio-power, bare lives, and in/exclusion within or from the law, has produced an impressive body of scholarship (Hopkins, 2019; Mountz, 2013).
6 - Refusal and tolerance
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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It was in early July 2015, just a few days before the official exchange of the enclaves, that I was able to meet Sohel Aziz. Sohel was one of the last chairpersons of the soon-to-be extinct enclave councils. In his early forties, Sohel rode a new motorcycle and dressed particularly well – a white shirt tucked into black pants held firmly by a black leather belt matched with shiny black shoes, all visible indicators of his well-to-do financial situation and higher social status. Curious but unsurprised, I started my conversation with Sohel. From the outset he was open and straightforward about himself, perhaps both because the enclaves were going to be exchanged soon and because of his privileged position as a well-connected local leader. At one point, Sohel proudly mentioned that although he was from the enclave and had a house there, he lived with his entire family in another house he owned in “mainland” Bangladesh. He also had a Bangladeshi passport, which he used for travel abroad. I responded to his candor by asking him directly how he had made this happen. There was a brief hesitation accompanied by a shy smile this time, as he assumed I was aware of such arrangements and did not expect me to ask the question to his face. Nevertheless, he soon picked up the pace again:
You know! My family had money. Also, we had relatives living in Bangladesh. So we bought a plot of land beside them and built a house there. That was about twenty or thirty years ago. I used that address to go to school and to get a Bangladeshi passport. But we never left the enclave. We have everything here.
However, Sohel's was not a unique case. This was common across all the enclaves. Anyone who could afford a piece of land or “manage” an address in “mainland” Bangladesh did it for numerous practical reasons (Ferdoush, 2019a) – for example, to go to school, access health facilities, and eventually get a Bangladeshi passport. These arrangements were not foreign to the state officials either; many were aware but chose not to dig more deeply, sometimes from a purely humanitarian consideration and sometimes because they benefited financially from these arrangements.
Appendix: A note on methods
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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Sovereign Atonement builds primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in phases during 2015, 2017, and 2018, supplemented by secondary sources from archives and online platforms. During 2015, I conducted pre-dissertation fieldwork in June and July, when both Bangladesh and India were preparing to exchange the enclaves, and their residents were preparing either to move or to stay. In the span of these two months, I interviewed thirteen enclave residents in four former enclaves under Panchagarh district in Bangladesh. I also interviewed two mid-level state bureaucrats then posted in Panchagarh. This fieldwork phase was crucial to comprehend the preparation of both the Bangladeshi state to exchange the enclaves and the former enclave residents who were preparing either to leave or to stay. This was also the phase when I was able to locate and interview several residents who had decided to opt for Indian citizenship and move to India. I conducted twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork from June 2017 to May 2018 in the newly merged former enclave of Bangladesh, during which I stayed in and around eight of the biggest enclaves across three districts in Bangladesh: Kurigram, Lalmonirhat, and Panchagarh. I also visited numerous other small enclaves all over the region. This period produced fifty-seven in-depth interviews with former enclave residents who became Bangladeshi citizens. I interviewed ten regular Bangladeshi citizens who lived in the vicinity of the former enclaves and saw them before and after the exchange. This phase further involved twenty-two in-depth interviews with government officials at different hierarchies, from the UNO to clerical staff in various state offices. I also conducted six focus group discussions (FGDs). All the interviews were conducted in Bengali, and I transcribed them with the help of my research assistant. The interviews were semi-structured; I used a checklist to guide the conversation. The average interview lasted about 43 minutes. Although most of my participants permitted an audio-recording of the conversation, a few, especially the government officials, did not allow it. In such cases my research assistant, Morshed, and I took meticulous notes. Although I use insights from those interviews, I do not quote them directly anywhere in the book. I spent my downtime and the months of June and July in 2018 conducting archival research in the Central Library of Dhaka University, the Central Public Library in Dhaka, the National Archives of Bangladesh, and the Rangpur Public Library in Bangladesh.
3 - Land and citizenship as technologies of territory
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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The first time I had ever been to the enclaves was in the early 2000s, not for academic purposes but out of curiosity, as I kept hearing about these “weird” pockets of Indian land located inside Bangladesh. Access was easier for me because I was born and raised in the northern region of Bangladesh, which hosted all these enclaves. I also had friends and relatives living closer to the enclaves. My first visit to the enclaves in an academic capacity was between 2009 and 2010 as a final-year bachelor's degree student doing my undergraduate capstone thesis. My next visit was in 2015 to undertake summer research for my doctoral dissertation. All these trips were before the enclaves were exchanged and accepted as regular Bangladeshi territories. By the time I started my year-long fieldwork in 2017–2018, I therefore already had preconceived ideas about the enclaves. Of course, many changed. However, there were a few scenarios that immediately grabbed my attention, both because they were not what I had expected and because they were surprisingly similar across the enclaves. Many marketplaces and public gathering spaces were renamed. Furthermore, there was a mushrooming of schools, madrasas (educational institutions following an Islamic curriculum), and youth and sports clubs. They all shared some characteristics. These were primarily makeshift structures made with tin and bamboo, often incomplete, with no or insufficient furniture and locked from the outside. However, they all had a signpost describing their names, types, and the year they were founded. The signposts and the patched-together structures they represented immediately “spoke” to my internal “geographer.” They were all founded in 2015 or 2016, just after the enclaves were absorbed as regular Bangladeshi territories. Most of the names were strategically chosen to signify a strong sense of belonging to the state of Bangladesh and drew from either the first PM of the country, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, or one of his family members assassinated in a military coup in 1975. They were supposed to be emotionally appealing to the then Bangladeshi PM, Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujib – one of the two surviving family members from the coup. For example, the most common to come up were Sheikh Russel followed by Sheikh Fazilatunnesa, the PM's youngest brother – a toddler when assassinated – and her mother, respectively, as demonstrated in Figure 3.1.
4 - Everyday governance: Ambiguity, accountability, and abundance
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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One of the most powerful and popular narratives among a range of actors, including state officials, politicians, journalists, and former enclave residents, was that “the state was absent” in the enclaves and that they were therefore spaces where no rules applied. The exchange and the merger of the enclaves heightened the spirit of the residents, as these enabled the state to “enter” these spaces. As the state “entered” these spaces, part of the excitement the former enclave residents shared also concerned the everyday “sightings of the state” – that is, to be able to experience the presence of the state in their mundane lives and interact with it (Corbridge et al., 2005, p. 9). For the Bangladeshi state, entering these spaces meant bringing the once “anarchic” spaces under its rules of governance and thus to pacify – to borrow from Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, and René Véron – the “scarcity of the state” in these spaces (Corbridge et al., 2005, p. 33). As part of my quest to unearth the “everyday local state” (Pill and Guarneros-Meza, 2020) in the former enclaves, I was therefore interested in exploring both how state sighting happened in the enclaves and, by extension, how the state of Bangladesh dealt with its “scarcity” – how the state asserted its presence in the enclaves.
However, as I embarked on this journey, it quickly became apparent that I needed to first decide how to “capture” the state in this particular context. Was it the abstract idea of an all-encompassing entity that now claimed sovereign control over these spaces? Was it the amalgamation of all the laws and rules that were now being applied to these people and spaces? Was it the formal jurisdiction of state officials and the state offices in their daily lives? Was it the daily faceoff between the enclave residents and the state officials? Was it all of these, some of these, or none of these? These questions are not new but keep challenging those who study the state. I was no exception.
In his classical study on the difficulties of reading the state, Philip Abrams contends that the state itself is the mask that prevents us from digging more deeply into its actions as they are (Abrams, 1988). Instead of decoding the abstract idea of a “state,” Abrams therefore calls for a deeper analysis of the “systems” that bring a state into being.
5 - Infrastructure, belonging, and the state
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush, University of Eastern Finland
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It was the beginning of my fieldwork in Dasiar Chhara toward the end of 2017. I was supposed to meet my contact in Dasiar Chhara in the morning. He had told me to come to Rashmela Bazaar. As I was still unfamiliar with the routes to the enclave from Fulbari and unaware of the best means of transportation (which I later discovered was rented motorbikes), I rented a rickshaw. However, before renting the rickshaw, I wanted to make sure that the rickshaw puller knew how to get there. So I asked several of them, and no one had ever heard of the place. Then there was a smart one who said, “Oh! you want to go to the Ashermela Bazaar?” Immediately realizing my urban elitist mistake, I nodded. In northern Bangladeshi dialect, “r” is often replaced by “a,” and pronunciations are slightly distorted compared to standard Bangla. Rashmela Bazaar was therefore known locally as “Ashermela Bazaar.” However, the smart rickshaw puller proved too smart. He had deceived me when I hired him, as shortly after starting our ride, I realized he did not know how to get to Ashermela. He had a vague idea about which direction to head in. So, after a few minutes, he started asking random people on the road for directions. I was inevitably late in reaching my destination. When I finally arrived, my contact had already left as he had something else to take care of. But he asked me to wait at one of the tea stalls and promised he would be back soon. As I was sipping a steaming cup of tea sweetened with an inordinate amount of sugar and condensed milk, a tall skinny young guy approached me. He introduced himself as Rony and said he lived nearby. He asked me what I was doing there. A little cautious at first, I told Rony that I was a researcher and was waiting to meet my contact with whom I hoped to explore the former enclave and learn more about the people and their lives. Rony immediately got interested and moved himself closer to where I was sitting, ordering a cup of tea for himself too. We started the first of our many conversations that followed that morning.
Sovereign Atonement
- Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border
- Md Azmeary Ferdoush
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The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host state territories in 2015. Sovereign Atonement focuses on the protracted territorial exchange and experiences of the newly accepted Bangladeshi citizens. It grapples with one broad question: why did the state assume an active role in smoothing the once excluded population's experiences into their inclusion within the sovereign project? The book dives deep into an ethnographic and historical reading of the everyday state, land and territory, informality, (non)state actors, and performance of sovereignty. Furthermore, it troubles the often taken-for-granted understanding of exception, governance, and citizenship. As such, Ferdoush offers a retake on the two seemingly contradictory concepts -'sovereign' and 'atonement'- to demonstrate that bridged together these concepts as sovereign atonement enables a novel way of appreciating geopolitical narratives, political geographies, and nationalistic discourse in South Asia and beyond.
Section III - Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
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- Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond
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Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
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The migration ‘crisis’ of the mid-2010s featured many familiar stories: Syrians fleeing the war that destroyed their homes; Central Americans escaping gang violence to find safety in the north; Eritreans fleeing a totalitarian regime that prohibits emigration; hundreds of thousands of Rohingya crossing into Bangladesh from Myanmar; and migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa leaving the lingering poverty of colonial exploitation to search for better opportunities elsewhere. This book seeks to broaden and deepen the story of migration in the twenty-first century by focusing on the experiences of the people from South Asia who have played a significant role in global migrations, but received less attention in academic and media accounts. Despite the international media's focus on people from Syria, people from Afghanistan make up the largest group stranded along the route through the Balkans after the closure of borders and construction of walls in 2015. In 2016, Pakistanis were the second largest group of refugees in Serbia (United Nations, High Commissioner for Refugees 2016). In the Middle East, people from South Asia make up the vast majority of the workers building skyscrapers, artificial islands, and stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. In the first half of 2017, the largest single group crossing the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy were not from the Middle East or Africa, but Bangladesh (Dearden 2017).
Indeed, if you look for it, the Bangladeshi population is visible in all of the major cities of Italy. In Rome, Bangladeshi men dominate the area around the Colosseum, selling selfie sticks, bottled water, and souvenirs to tourists. In Florence, many of the small convenience stores are run by Bangladeshis, as are the majority of the stalls selling leather goods and football jerseys at the Mercato San Lorenzo. In Milan, an Italian colleague noted that she had assumed that there were many Indian migrants, but many had turned out to be from Bangladesh. Even before the current wave of migration, Bangladeshis already made up the second largest non- European population in Italy (after Nigerians), with over 142,000 people living there with status. This population has tripled in just the past seven years and is projected to increase to 232,000 by 2030. It is also estimated that, as of 2009, at least 11,000 additional Bangladeshis were living in Italy without any legal status (Blangiardo 2009).
Frontmatter
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