From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border by Farhana Ibrahim

Author:Farhana Ibrahim [Ibrahim, Farhana]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Political Science, Law Enforcement, History, Asia, South, General
ISBN: 9781501759550
Google: X-wcEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: CornellUP
Published: 2021-11-15T20:49:21+00:00

Exposing the “Illegal” Migrant

Police and media reports regularly report the arrest of “Bangladeshis” from Kutch; in these reports, there is little by way of contextualizing the “illegality” of border crossing or migration. Men apprehended in the border areas of the Rann who cannot provide a good enough reason for their presence are often declared to be “Bangladeshi” citizens. Police rely on intuitive sartorial and linguistic markers to “recognize” them in the absence of documentary evidence of their nationality. For instance, a news report titled “Bangladeshi Held from Kutch” mentions that the man arrested and sent to the Joint Interrogation Centre in Bhuj “has no documents on him. He was wearing a lungi, shirt and skull cap,” the lungi supposedly giving him away, as men in Kutch tend to wear shalwar kameez. It adds, “He is acting as if he is not able to speak.… Policemen say there are many Bangladeshis in this region and when they are caught, they pretend to be dumb” (Yusuf 2011, emphasis added). These media practices are also instructive and pedagogic in nature: they enumerate the practices of deception used by “illegal” border crossers, thus schooling the reading public how to “recognize” or “read” practices designated as “suspicious.” This includes imbuing general personality traits (such as a new bride’s “shyness”) or presumed disability (inability to speak) with suspicious intent, resignifying these as symptoms of illegality within a field of police practice (Garriott 2011). The newspaper-reading public is then complicit with the police in the identification of these traits as suspicious and as markers of illegal cross-border activity. Another report, titled “Exfiltration: The New Threat to Border Security” (Nair 2007), describes how there is a growing trend of Indian and Bangladeshi Muslims crossing the western border illegally to enter Pakistan from where they hope to go to the Middle East in search of employment. It describes some of the strategies they follow to escape detection: “posing as cattle grazers; some pretended to be mentally unstable when the security persons caught them loitering near the Great Rann of Kutch” (Nair 2007). Another reports, “the ‘foreigner’ catching ‘spree’ in the bordering [sic] Kutch district of Gujarat continued with the arrest of a Bangladeshi lady in Kharinadi area of Bhuj town late last evening” (Desh Gujarat 2015a). “Mental instability” is a frequently recurring trope in these stories (e.g., Desh Gujarat 2015b). Police reports emphasize that “mental instability” (usually referred to in scare quotes) and the inability to speak are ruses to get by without detection. It is significant that “mental instability” is thus marked out for evidence of criminal intent. In my travels across Muslim settlements across Banni, I discovered that due to generations of consanguineous marriages, it was not unusual to find occasional cases of mental illness that was likely the consequence of a highly in-bred population. This was more visible among some communities than others. However, this became resignified in police-speak to indicate a deliberate pantomime of mental illness/playing dumb to avoid having to speak and be caught.

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