January 2, 2002
With Wrath and Wire, India Builds a Great Wall
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
URSERY BORDER SECURITY FORCE POST, Jammu and Kashmir, Jan. 1 The
partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, an enduring symbol of
longing and loss, is being enshrined here in concertina wire.
On the India-Pakistan border, along a strip of land pocked with elephant grass, the Indian Border Security Force is erecting a barbed wire fence, laced with concertina wire. Overlooking the border, like giraffes with bright eyes, stand 25-foot-tall floodlights. All night long they wash the thatched-hut villages nearby with their hot white glow.
The point of this ambitious and wildly expensive project is not to keep out illegal immigrants, or even to stanch the illegal traffic of gold, liquor and dried fruits across the border that had been, until recently, a source of bounty for villagers on both sides.
This fence is India's effort to keep out what it says are terrorists trained and backed by Pakistan to wrest control of Kashmir, the valley just to the north that has been the subject of two of the three wars between India and Pakistan. (India says that the gunmen who stormed the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13 were from groups involved in the guerrilla effort in Kashmir, backed by Pakistan, a charge Pakistan vehemently denies.)
When completed Border Security officials say it could be as early as the end of 2003 the fence will stretch across much of the Indian side of the roughly 1,800-mile border with Pakistan, except the mountains and marshes where it is impossible to erect one.
Those spotted trying to cross from Pakistan to India are shot and killed. Last year, 87 people suffered such a fate and several guns were seized, border officials said.
One mile of fence costs 3.2 million Indian rupees, or $68,000, a lot for a country where many villagers live on a dollar a day. Laborers from villages near and far pumped up by motivational speeches about one's duties for Mother India do the construction work. They carry out their job on this perilous chunk of border interrupted by spurts of gunfire between Indian and Pakistani forces.
"No matter the cost, it's for our national interest," said Vijay Raman, the chief of the border force in the southern part of this state. "This is a physical barrier to check infiltration."
But nature sometimes rebels against Mr. Raman's designs. In Rajasthan, the sprawling Indian desert state that shares the largest stretch of border with Pakistan, shifting sand dunes obscure the fence from time to time, or a fierce sandstorm smothers entire sections of barbed wire. (Border guards there supplement the fence with patrols on camelback.)
In Gujarat, the border is so marshy that the Border Security Force has not yet figured out how to erect a proper fence. In Punjab, weeds sprout every day beneath the fence; border guards have to crawl through the wire and pluck out the underbrush. Given the lessons from Punjab, a concrete bed has been built under the barbed wire fence in Jammu.
Of course, before the violent division of the subcontinent in 1947, such a fence was unthinkable. There was no this side and that side. The people who lived in this area were kinfolk and friends. They spoke the same tongue. They ate the same chapatis.
They still speak the same tongue and break the same bread, though they are now citizens of enemy nations on the precipice of war and if they happen to live on the border, they bear the brunt of gunfire across dividing lines.
The border fence, along with the land mines that have been planted during the last two weeks, have swallowed up acres of fertile farmland here in Jammu. Many villagers said they had not seen a penny for their land. Mr. Raman said they would ultimately be compensated.
There is arguably no more powerful a symbol of souring relations between the two nations than the border fence, and never more so than today when travel links have been frozen and diplomats have been called back. The last direct flights between Pakistan and India left today, and trains and buses had already stopped running between them.
Border officials here say it was different only a few years ago. They would hunt in each other's territory. They would conduct joint border patrols to inspect the condition of the pickets that mark the border. During Eid and Diwali, the biggest holidays of the year for Muslims and Hindus in these parts, they would exchange sweets and greetings. The holidays passed this year in November and December without such pleasantries.
Before the fence was built, animals that strayed across the border became subjects of border diplomacy. If a Pakistani farmer's cow crossed into Indian territory, say, a flag would be raised by the Border Security Force, a meeting between two sides convened and the offending bovine returned to its owner, recalled Sukhjinder Singh Sandhu, the commander of the Border Security Force's 39th Battalion, which controls this part of the Jammu stretch.
If a wild boar migrated from India into Pakistan, instructions would be dispatched to come get the unmentionable animal. (Pakistani Muslims will not touch a pig, or even speak its name, so border guards there would invite border guards here to come recover the "hunt.")
The animals are no longer able to stray hither and thither, thanks to the fence. Today, only birds, like the black partridge native to this land, can fly freely over the border.