This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Bangladesh War of Independence of 1971, an event that reshaped the political and geographic borders of South Asia. While Bangladesh won independence, the Pakistani state was defeated militarily and ideologically with the collapse of its “Two-Nation Theory”. The war cemented hostilities between India and Pakistan with the hardening of the Line of Control, further endangered religious minorities in both countries, and gave license to India’s future interference in Sri Lanka and Nepal. 

Five decades on, this special issue reviews borders and border-making practices across South Asia. We examine the political, historical, and ideological drivers behind border-making practices, both internal and external. We explore the range of ways actors have re-made borders in the region, be it through nationalist aspirations or “everyday” subaltern subversions. Finally, our issue also asks how the South Asian Left has approached the question of borders, both historically and today. 

States have historically created borders to consolidate elite power and capital. In her study of Afghan labor in colonial India, Amanda Lanzillo explores how the British Raj and the Indian princely states’ contradictory logics – economic, on the one hand, chauvinistic, on the other – meant they both depended on and excluded this labor. Meanwhile, several authors have examined the politics of internal borders within nation-states -- the so-called frontier regions, peripheral areas, zones of exception -- which serve to further elite accumulation. Reeju Ray shows how the coal industry in India’s North-East escalated class differentiation amongst its tribal inhabitants and contributed to the region’s broader underdevelopment. Rana Saadullah Khan’s travelogue centers on Gilgit-Baltistan, an underdeveloped and politically disenfranchised region in Pakistan, yet central to both the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the accumulation strategies of both countries’ elites. Because of their comparative poverty, Gilgit-Baltistan’s inhabitants, Saadullah shows, have come to admire neighbouring China, notwithstanding its persecution of the Uyghur people which they are keenly aware of. 

Bangladesh obviously occupies a central place in this issue. Nafis H. continues the study of internal borders through a focus on Bangladesh’s indigenous Adibashis, arguing that their lack of recognition and self-determination could beckon their extinction. Ayesha Siddiqi studies the role the 1970 Cyclone Bhola played in furthering Bengali disaffection with the centralizing Pakistani state and the independence movement at large. In creative prose, Nuha Fariha narrows in on the intimacies and disruptions of this freedom struggle. 

Though the Bangladesh Independence struggle was a radical contestation of the region’s borders in recent history, its political outcomes have been questionable. Mushahid Hussain considers whether Bangladesh’s post-independence trajectory sounds the death knell of emancipatory nationalism, or whether we might revive a left-wing nationalism from the grave? Taking a slightly different approach, Amardeep Kaur looks to promote a politics of internationalism over nationalism. She examines the Milk Tea Alliance, a transnational alliance extending from the Pacific to the Punjab, against “leftovers of colonialism”– different authoritarian undemocratic regimes, centralized power, capitalist imperialism, and the police state. Meanwhile, Alina Gufran and Masha Hassan call attention to everyday contestations of internal borders, probing various politicizations of Muslim identity across India which seek to overturn divides of caste and creed. 

There remain, of course, many more facets to border-making in South Asia to discuss, understand, and challenge – a task Jamhoor remains committed to. We hope you enjoy reading the issue and look forward to your feedback.

In solidarity, 

Jamhoor team

Issue V: Borders & Border-making in South Asia