Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh

doi:10.1111/sjtg.12181

Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh Hosna J. Shewly Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Correspondence: Hosna Shewly (email: [email protected])

Drawing on conceptualization of statelessness and ethnographic research on crucial insights of rightessness, this paper investigates how the politico-geographic-legality constructs statelessness in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh. Following the decolonization process in 1947, both India and Pakistan/Bangladesh inherited more than 200 enclaves, which comprise 80 per cent of the world’s enclaves. With improved bilateral relations, India and Bangladesh officially exchanged the enclaves on 1 August 2015, and the enclave dwellers will gradually be granted citizenship rights over the next few years. In this period of transition from statelessness to statehood, this paper can be read as contemporary history. This paper will draw attention to three aspects of statelessness. First, conceptualization of statelessness not only applies to the refugeehood or de-territorialization of people but also relates to the process of constructing transterritorial stateless people. Second, this paper will discuss the condition of statelessness constructed in a politico-geographic-legal trap. And finally, the paper calls for a wider empirical and critical focus on the hidden geographies of de facto statelessness. Keywords: de facto statelessness, politico-geographic-legality, enclave, India-Bangladesh border, ethnography, vulnerability

Introduction After the declaration of partition in 1947, people in this village flew Pakistani flags and celebrated our freedom with sweets and dancing. A few days later, some government officials informed us that part of this village is an Indian ‘enclave’ and the people living there are Indian citizens. They are neither entitled to claim anything from Pakistan, nor can they enter Pakistani territory. We were treated as a ‘caged enemy’ during the India-Pakistan war in 1965 and Bangladesh’s independence war in 1971. . . After Bangladesh’s independence we were not prosecuted for illegal entrance into Bangladesh. But we never received any state services including education, health, security and legal protection from either country (Roman Bormon, pers. comm., 70-year-old man, enclave A, 20 October 2009). I was caught in Cooch Behar town for illegally entering India and imprisoned under the Indian Foreigner’s Act for six months. By law I am a Bangladeshi citizen who needs a visa to visit India. There is nothing in the enclave, not even a police station. No government officials ever came to see this enclave and us in my lifetime. Bangladesh is far away because of the fenced India-Bangladesh border and border guards would not allow me to cross the border without an ID card [identity card] or passport. How could I survive without entering into India? Not only me but also the majority of the male Bangladeshi enclave dwellers are victims of this law (Shimul Hossain, pers. comm., 35-year-old man, enclave Y, 25 March 2010).

Both narratives elucidate the history of everyday life devoid of any state facilities in Indian and Bangladeshi enclaves in last seven decades. The enclaves (fragmented territories of one sovereign power located inside another sovereign territory) between India Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 38 (2017) 108–122 © 2017 The Authors Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography published by Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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and Bangladesh were located in the northwest part of the India-Bangladesh border (Figure 1). All enclave residents, like Shimul and Roman, entered the host country daily for work, education, medical facilities and other basic needs of life. However, such activities were marked as an illegal intrusion of Bangladeshi nationals into a foreign country and vice versa. Furthermore, they were often imprisoned in the host country for illegal entrance, as what happened to Shimul. The state actions and politics over access and the enclave exchange process left the enclave residents in a stateless limbo until these enclaves were officially exchanged on 1 August 2015. As such, for enclave dwellers, everyday statelessness and survival were connected with geographic identities, legal issues and political situations between the two states. Following the decolonization process in 1947, both India and Pakistan/Bangladesh inherited more than 200 enclaves, which comprised 80 per cent of the world’s enclaves (Van Schendel, 2002). Because of an enclave’s transterritorial location (the boundary pillar marks the enclave residents’ spatio-legal identities), these places were an example of everyday life involving two nation-states and their laws. Neither country had ever made a serious attempt to extend administration to the enclaves locked in one another’s territory (Van Schendel, 2002). In this context, sovereignty over the enclaves had never been contested; rather the home country did not establish political and legal authority in these places and kept the enclaves unadministered. Hence, the enclave residents were completely dependent on the mercy of their host country in terms of access, economic opportunities and health and educational services in last 68 years. Bilateral antagonism between the respective states not only obstructed enclave exchange initiatives, but also severely affected the enclave dwellers’ communications with the main territory on either side of the border. With improved bilateral relations, India and Bangladesh officially exchanged the enclaves on 1 August 2015, and the enclave dwellers will gradually be granted citizenship rights over the next few years (see The Hindu, 2015). In this period

Figure 1. The enclaves in India and Bangladesh.

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of transition from statelessness to statehood, this paper can be read as contemporary history. Drawing on Arendt (1951) and crucial insights of rightessness, this paper explores the relationship between politics, geography and law constructing de facto statelessness in the transterritorial spaces in India and Bangladesh. Academic literature on statelessness emphasizes displacement, refugee or asylum seeker (see Mountz, 2010; Blitz & Lynch, 2011), lack of territory and statelessness (see McConnell, 2009; Blitz, 2011) or war or violent conflict constructing statelessness in a state’s territory (see Linke & Raleigh, 2011; Sivapragasam, 2011). In this context, this paper will draw attention to three aspects of statelessness. First, the Arendtian conceptualization of statelessness applies not only to the refugeehood or deterritorialization of people, but also to the construction of transterritorial stateless people. Here, ‘transterritorial’ refers to people living in their state’s territory for generations but cut off from the mainland of their state by an international border. Thus, the enclaves’ history represents the construction of statelessness when states keep territory and people outside their spatio-juridical system. Second, statelessness is not just a political or/and legal matter; geography also plays a vital role in constructing stateless people. Finally, this paper shows that de facto stateless people live in terrible inhumane conditions, as they are not right-bearing citizens, refugees or prisoners. Hence, this paper calls for wider academic consideration of the vulnerability and rightlessness associated with de facto statelessness. This paper begins with a brief literature review of these enclaves followed by another section on statelessness in the existing literature. The discussion then moves on to the history of the state construction of statelessness in enclaves in India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The empirical section sheds light on seven decades of experiences of statelessness in the enclaves. Transterritoriality situates an enclave in a unique geopolitical entity; therefore, the history of quotidian life in the enclaves can offer multiple forms of politics, geography and legal interactions. Here, ‘politics’ means a synthesis of different scales of political practices linked to the enclaves, such as bilateral and national politics over enclave exchange and access to the enclaves, and local and embodied politics of exclusion. ‘Geography’ includes the geography of individual enclaves and the geographies of border and borderland. Law functions as rule, power and (to some extent) the extralegal power of the involved states. This paper is based on a seven-month (October 2009–April 2010) ethnographic account of six enclaves and short visits (one day in each enclave) to another 20 enclaves during the pilot study in both countries. The pilot research also involved examination of Indian and Bangladeshi newspaper reports, and discussions with local researchers, and activists in Cooch Behar and Bangladesh. The six field sites selected from the pilot data were based on enclave size, distance from the border, religious practices and relationships with the concerned states. The ethnographic research involved observing mundane events at different periods of time in different segments of the enclaves and nearby borderlands, and participating in local gatherings at tea stalls, women’s evening activities and other social events. On many occasions, border guards and enclave dwellers in one enclave provided information or remarkable anecdotes about other enclaves. This exploratory journey from enclave to enclave provided the opportunity to discover diverse types of enclave lives and distinct and innovative survival tactics based on the location of each enclave, personal politics and knowledge about administrative loopholes. In addition to participant observation, 55 in-depth interviews were conducted with enclave residents for a detailed understanding of their personal experiences and negotiations.

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India-Bangladesh enclaves in literature The Cooch Behar enclaves’ issues did not come under academic scrutiny until recently (see Whyte, 2002; Van Schendel, 2002; Jones, 2009; Shewly, 2012; 2013; 2015; 2016; Dunn & Cons, 2014). In this context, there is a distinction to make between the governed enclaves of Dahagram and Angorpota (D&A) and the rest of the ungoverned enclaves in India and Bangladesh. The D&A enclaves have been connected to their home country Bangladesh through a small Indian corridor since 1991 (see Cons, 2012; 2013; Shewly, 2012). Significantly, it was the only enclave where the state was present in the form of a police station set up in 1950s (see Van Schendel, 2002: 137) and where citizens were awarded some citizenship rights (for detail see Van Schendel, 2002; Whyte, 2002). In contrast, the rest of the enclaves were ungoverned and kept out of any administrative activities, and most dwellers were not awarded citizenship rights (see Whyte, 2002; Jones, 2009; Shewly, 2012; 2013; 2015). This paper is about these ungoverned enclaves. Scholars have focused on nationalism, identity and statelessness (Van Schendel, 2002), politics over enclave exchange (Whyte, 2002), sovereignty (Jones, 2009; Dunn & Cons, 2014), bare life and vulnerability (Shewly, 2013), coexistence of citizenship, abandonment and resistance (Shewly, 2015), and survival mobilities (Shewly, 2016). Willem Van Schendel’s (2002) unique piece on these enclaves challenged dominant discourses of the nation-state and nationalism in the space where a nation-state’s territorial contiguity is in question. Territorial discontiguity and its impact on sovereignty practices are also central in Jones’s (2009) account. Displaced sovereignty, as he aptly defines, challenges two criteria of the traditional definition of sovereignty: the conception of the ‘unambiguous connection’ of a sovereign territory and the notion of sovereign authority over a territory and its people. Like Van Schendel (2002), Jones (2009) portrays the non-citizenship and imagined nationalism of the enclave residents. Dunn and Cons (2014) also concentrate on sovereignty and conceptualize ‘aleatory sovereignty’ and ‘sensitive spaces’ with the examples of camps, enclaves and sensitivity of border guards along the India-Bangladesh border. The central focus of this framework includes the process of enacting sovereignty and competing projects of governance (2014: 95). While these papers touched on statelessness in the enclaves as part of other theoretical considerations, this paper explicitly examines the political, geographic and legal construction of statelessness in these transterritorial spaces. Thus, this paper contributes to both borderland and statelessness literature by examining everyday uncertainties and insecurities connected with de facto statelessness. Constructing de facto statelessness in the enclaves Statelessness in literature This paper engages with three threads of academic enquiries—statelessness with a specific focus on its de facto nature, Arendt-influenced work on rightlessness, and borderland as a legally empty space. Scholarly contributions on the above-mentioned threads examine how states erode some people’s citizenship and human rights in diverse circumstances. Statelessness has risen international and regional concerns since the matter causes inter- and intrastate tensions and spreads conflicts. The legal definition of a stateless person is ‘who, under national laws do[es] not enjoy citizenship—the legal bond between a state and an individual—with any country’ (UNHCR, 2006: 6). However, statelessness is not merely a legal problem; it has a broader spectrum (Batchelor, 1998:159). The strict legal definition obscures the stateless experiences of millions of

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others who might have a juridical bond with a nation-state. Scholars have accentuated the definitional differences between de facto and de jure statelessness and examined the complexities to identify and protect the universal human rights of de facto stateless people across the globe (see Blitz, 2009; Goris et al., 2009; Massey, 2010; Milbrandt, 2011: 12; Kingston, 2012). People who fall under the de jure stateless category can claim certain rights under international law if their country of origin signs the convention. In a de facto stateless situation, an individual or a group of people lack protection from the laws attached to their nationality or are unable to establish their nationality (Massey, 2010; Milbrandt, 2011; Tucker, 2013). The 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness is legally binding with respect to only the de jure stateless people (see Massey, 2010). Conversely, de facto stateless people find themselves in a complicated and vulnerable situation, as they are not legally defined as stateless, nor are they able to exercise their citizenship rights. The enclave residents in India and Bangladesh fall into the category of de facto statelessness, as they were officially right-bearing citizens under the national laws of their home country, but those rights were not accessible to them. De facto statelessness exists in different geographic locations across the globe. Statelessness in the Baltic States emerged following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1990s. De facto statelessness in Estonia and Latvia transpires because of discriminatory access, stringent ethnicity-based citizenship and administrative hurdles for ethnic Russian minorities (Lottmann, 2008). The Roma, one of the Europe’s historically marginal ethnic minorities, are often stateless when EU member states deny them nationality (Parra, 2011). On the other hand, Blitz and Otero-Lglesis (2011: 667) argue that negative asylum-application decisions by the UK asylum system create a stateless-like situation by affecting the applicants’ ‘personal identity and creating situations of arbitrariness, rightlessness and extreme vulnerability’. To explore the process of constructing de facto statelessness in the enclaves of India and Bangladesh, I will employ Hannah Arendt’s (1951) conceptualization of the characteristics of statelessness. Arendt argues that ‘the stateless persons have lost the protection of their government’ (Arendt, 1951: 279). She proposes that the ‘right to have rights’ is a political and sometimes politico-legal matter, and her conceptualization of statelessness hinges on forced migration, asylum seeking and life in exile. Arendt raises awareness on formally recognized stateless people and those who are potentially stateless such as refugees, asylum-seekers, economic immigrants and naturalized citizens who might face denaturalization in a state of emergency (Gündogdu, 2008); however, her key focus is on asylum seekers and refugees who move across borders and are unable to exercise rights and ergo become stateless (see Arendt, 1951: 281). Arendt explains (1951: 295–96): The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion. . . Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.

Thus, Hannah Arendt argues that rightlessness is synonymous to statelessness. Significantly however, rightlessness in Arendt’s definition does not mean people lack some rights, but rather rightless or stateless people are kept outside the law. In Staple’s (2012:6) words, ‘people are not people if they are excluded from the wide-ranging benefits of belonging to some or other state’. Arendt’s characterization of statelessness and its intrinsic connection to refugeehood significantly advance our understanding of the critical challenges faced by the refugees in a situation of statelessness. There have been a

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number of related works on statelessness based on The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, 1951) in social and political theory. Scholars have focused on the legal or/and political de-subjectivity of human being (Butler, 2004; Parekh, 2004; Leibovici, 2006; Tubb, 2006; Bernstein, 2008). Judith Butler (2004) uses Arendt’s conceptualization of rightlessness to elucidate contemporary forms of political and legal desubjectification of human beings from rightful citizens to rightless human beings. The issue of alienage (for both legal and illegal aliens) in cosmopolitan metropolises (Benhabib, 2004; Brock & Brighouse, 2005) also appears in contemporary academic literature. As mentioned previously, Arendt’s conceptualization of statelessness or rightlesness is linked to displacement or loss of home, while other literature places more emphasis on displacement, refugees or asylum seekers and statelessness (Mountz, 2010; Blitz & Lynch, 2011) or lack of territory and statelessness (see McConnell, 2009; Blitz, 2011). But statelessness is not always constructed through displacement; rather it can be constructed within the state’s territory when there are violent conflicts, like what happened to the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Armenia and Tamils in Sri Lanka (see Linke & Raleigh, 2011; Sivapragasam, 2011). Disputed nationality often leads to the construction of statelessness as what happened with the Urdu-speaking Biharis in Bangladesh (Persoob, 2010). On the contrary, Nyers (2006) argues that Arendt’s proposition of rightlessness might not emerge as ‘total abjection’ in a time when we also observe rightless groups claiming rights. Significantly however, the example of the enclaves suggests the transcendence of the quandary that Arendt has identified as being present in the contemporary world when states keep territory and people outside their spatiojuridical systems. Borderland has been a geographic flashpoint where legal emptiness and the extralegal practices of state agencies construct rightless people. Coutin (2003: 172) defines borderland as spaces of non-existence, a space of subjugation, where illegal migrants are excluded, rights are limited, services are restricted and personhoods are erased. Citing examples of illegal migrants on US territory, Coutin argues that they are judicially non-existent people, though these migrants are physically present. In this regard, Mountz (2011: 332) traces an ‘ontology of exclusion that dwells in the geographical margins of the nation-state’. As the entry points for this exclusion, ports are where state agencies pursue various on- and off-shore methods to ‘shrink spaces of asylum’ through remote detention, limited information about cases, scant access to legal avenues into sovereign territory, etc. Through these methods, states construct hidden geographies of detention or exclusion to turn the migrants and asylum seekers into stateless people. As such, the human body lies at the centre of ambiguities about jurisdiction and sovereignty (Mountz, 2013: 836). To ensure such legally ambiguous sovereignty, borders often move inwards and outwards and embody policies that deny rights to migrants and refugees (Soguk, 2007: 285). Border zones, thus, are places ‘suffused with law but denying access to constitutional rights and liberties and access to the liberal state’ (Basaran, 2011:02). In conducting a critical enquiry of human rights and citizenship rights, this paper examines and shows how certain statecraft practices abandoned some citizens, by keeping some places unadministered for seven decades, and constructed de facto stateless people. Politico-geographic-legality and statelessness In this paper I argue that these enclaves provide a different notion of statelessness that was constructed through a politico-geographic-legal trap. As will be discussed in the following sections, the history of these enclaves shows how states can gradually disregard

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some of their citizens and parts of their disintegrated territory that do not serve geostrategic interests. In this context, statelessness was not created because of massive political instability, war or ethnic, racial or religious discriminations. Rather state politics, geographic location of the enclaves and state laws mutually formulated the non-existence of legal sovereign mechanisms over these enclaves and constructed statelessness. There are some other places including concentration camps, detention centres and refugee camps that are considered as places outside the legal system (Agamben, 1998; Rajaram, 2003; Minca, 2005; Gregory, 2006; Amoore & de Goede, 2008). However, these extralegal spaces are examples of excessive sovereign power, whereas enclaves are places with no legal sovereign mechanisms in place (Shewly, 2013; 2015). Thus, these enclaves are de facto nonstate spaces. Politics, geography and law are important for understanding statelessness in the enclaves for various reasons. First, bilateral politics determine the existence and elimination of an enclave. Together, domestic and bilateral politics decide the status of an enclave, integration with the concerned states and connection with the home state. Such decisions are also fashioned and practised by the legal system of the country and the geographic location of the enclaves. Therefore, politics, geography and law have an overlapping influence on every aspect of life in any enclave. To understand such impacts systematically, this paper considers the enclave-host-home countries interactions. Second, the geographic locations of these enclaves situated them in between two legal systems. Therefore, the role of law was vital in everyday living. Legally the territory belonged to the home country, but practically it was unadministered and this is, I argue, an abandonment. Geography and law eventually constructed spaces of lawlessness. In this situation it these spaces foreground the connection between the legal and the spatial in the world so tightly as to be seen identical (Blomley et al., 2001). The question of legality and illegality for people living in any enclave emerges, because of the presence of an international boundary, which ultimately constructs a binary of us and them among the enclave-mainland people. The interpretation, creation and application of laws involve a variety of actors who can be seen performing and producing different degrees of law (Scherr, 2002). It was the international border that kept Indian and Bangladeshi enclave residents away from the home country, and the enclave-host country borders were maintained through the citizen/foreigner binary. It is obvious that the law enforcement of the host country attempted to keep enclave dwellers in their place by explicit and informal control over movement and settlement as part of territorial sovereignty (Shewly, 2013; 2015). The mechanisms of control included formal and informal restrictions by the host state. Formal restriction involved checkpoints, searches on buses and trains for ID cards, and strict ID-card checks for all kinds of activities ranging from hospital appointments to bank accounts (see Shewly, 2016). In this context, bodies are often ‘read’ by law enforcement officials who guess the legal status of an individual (Nah, 2007: 35). All these actions inscribing the boundaries of the citizen/illegal migrant are enacted through the governance of mobility into domains that regulate the daily life (Amoore, 2006). As Blomley (2003: 121) explains, ‘the rule of law is deemed superior, given its ability to regulate violence through routine violence with the active or tacit acquiescence of legal texts, institutions and officials’. Such violence through the rule of law constructed fear, uncertainty, vulnerability and precariousness in these enclaves prior to their recent exchange. Hence, the enclave was created as a zone of ‘confinement’ (Coutin, 2010). The law appeared as a conceptual framework or tool of power, failing to respond to politically and geographically unusual realities.

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History of the construction of de facto statelessness in Cooch Behar enclaves To illustrate how the concerned states (India and East Pakistan/Bangladesh) constructed stateless people, this section will cover the initiatives for the administration of the enclaves, enclave exchange procedures and erratic bilateral relations. Initiatives to administer the enclaves Although India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, all these enclaves received international status when the princely state Cooch Behar merged with India in 1949. Since then, the only initiative to link these enclaves with the home country was made under the 1950 agreement, which was unsuccessful because of hostile bilateral relations (for details see Van Schendel, 2002; Whyte, 2002). If successful, this agreement would have provided state officials access to the enclaves legally belonging to their side. The introduction of passport and visa systems in 1952 eventually isolated the enclaves from their home country. In effect, the enclave residents lost their voting rights following the introduction of strict border controls in 1952 (Roy Pradhan, 1995; Roy Pradhan A, AIFB MP for Cooch Behar, pers. comm., West Bengal, 15 March 2010). Neither country was sincerely willing to exercise sovereignty over these enclaves, nor did they worry about the true human scale of the enclave problem. Enclave exchange proposals Negotiations on enclave exchange commenced in 1953. In 1958 the two prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Malik Firoz Khan Noon, signed an agreement to resolve various border disputes between India and Pakistan, including the exchange of enclaves (The Nehru-Noon Agreement, 1958). Implementation of the agreement required ratification followed by a constitutional amendment. In India, the agreement triggered fierce domestic political debates and faced a decade of legal appeal processes. While India managed to amend the constitution within two years of signing the agreement, it took over a decade to resolve all the legal hurdles. But by then it was East Pakistan’s independence war that postponed the implementation of the agreement. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, Bangladesh inherited all the East Pakistan-India border disputes. In a very friendly gesture, both countries signed a fresh Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) in 1974 that addressed all border disputes. The enclave exchange options appeared more enclave-friendly, since it provided a ‘citizenship choice’ to enclave residents at the same time as the exchange. This agreement was subject to ratification, similar to the 1958 agreement, and was supposed to be implemented by 1974. Bangladesh ratified the agreement in November 1974, but India did not, in part because of hostile India-Bangladesh relations after the August 1975 assassination of Shekh Mujib, the then President of Bangladesh and leader of the Awami League. India declined to ratify the agreement and exchange the enclaves until the border demarcation and adversely possessed land issues were entirely resolved (Whyte, 2002; Bhasin, 2003). In contrast, India amended the constitution to ratify the 1958 Agreement prior to completion of the demarcation. As a result of bilateral politics, the 1974 LBA could not see the light of day. To break almost four decades of deadlock over border disputes, the third and most recent initiative to resolve the enclave problem was taken in September 2011. India and Bangladesh signed a Land Boundary Protocol (LBP) to exchange the enclaves without mentioning any specific timeframe (The Hindu, 2011; The New Age, 2011). The West Bengal state government’s opposition left the international agreement and enclave

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exchange in limbo for three years. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was against this agreement, BJP finally resolved the issue during Indian Prime Minister Norendra Modi’s state visit to Bangladesh in June 2015. Both the countries will now implement the LBA of 1974 and LBP of 2011. India-East Pakistan/Bangladesh relations and enclave issue A careful look at the evolution of foreign policies of Bangladesh and India can explain how bilateral relations affected the enclaves and other border issues. As I mentioned in a previous paper (Shewly, 2008: 104), ‘predominantly the way in which each [country] has figured in the changing foreign policy framework of the other is a fundamental element in India-Bangladesh relations’. India’s dream to become a regional power has shaped its foreign and defence policy. To that end, ‘India has followed both neo-realist and liberal institutional approaches during different regimes’ (Shewly, 2008: 104; see also Waltz, 1979; Hagerty, 1991; Wagner, 2005). India’s hard power policy constructed tense relations with Bangladesh kept all key disputes alive, including the enclave issues. A hard-line South Asia policy materialized in 1970s during the premiership of Indira Gandhi. The Indira doctrine maintained that the neighbours have to accept the reality of India’s supremacy over the region (Hagerty, 1991; Khosla, 2005; Munshi, 2006). This idea of supremacy underpinned India’s military interventions in Sri Lanka in 1971 and 1987 to 1990, and in the Maldives in 1988 (Shewly, 2008: 105). Following Bangladesh’s independence, India and Bangladesh initiated friendly relations with a ‘friendship treaty’ concerning peace and security that gave India a say in Bangladesh’s foreign policy. As part of such friendly relations, Bangladesh extended its relations with the Soviet Union, a close ally of India during that time. However, when India-Bangladesh relations deteriorated following the assassination of Shekh Mujibur Rahman in 1975, successive Bangladeshi governments replaced allies from the India-Russia block with those from China, the US-Pakistan and Islamic world (Shewly, 2008: 105; see also Lifschultz, 1979). All these issues overshadowed the issue of enclave exchange. While control over newly emerged chars (sandy or silty land mass rising out of a river bed) resulted in 59 inclusive gunfights between the border guards (Van Schendel, 2005) and controversial Indian annexation and military control over Purbasha island clouded bilateral relations (Hossain, 1981), neither country showed interest in extending sovereignty over the enclaves, as these places do not serve their geopolitical interests. The 1990s was a remarkable decade for both India’s and Bangladesh’s politics. Bangladesh achieved democracy, and India’s objective to become a global power motivated the country to formulate liberal approaches toward its neighbours (Gujral, 1998). However, India did not apply such accommodative foreign policies to Bangladesh until 1996 because of India’s ruling political party’s preferences (Yasmin, 2004; Rashid, 2005). The Gujral doctrine was an example of such accommodative foreign policies and worked very well with Bangladesh when the left wing party, Awami League, was in power during 1996–2001. However, neither side took any steps to resolve the enclave exchange issue. This negligence over the enclaves’ exchange was probably because those enclaves’ residents were not voters and therefore unable to contribute in national elections. After almost 35 years, the Congress Party in India and Awami League party in Bangladesh were in power in 2008, the same combination of the regimes that previously signed the 1974 LBA in a friendly neighbourhood policy. Both heads of the state announced in early 2010 that they were committed to resolving border disputes in a year. This time, the West Bengal state government was not interested in enclave exchange. The disagreement between the central and provincial government in India

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shows inconsistency yet again, which Appadorai defines as the ‘federal element in oreign policy decisions’ (1981: 192). Surprisingly however, the newly elected Modi government in India, a party that always opposed land pact deals with Bangladesh, resolved the issue within one year of taking office. These swift Indian actions over exchange suggest that it is politics that halted this exchange for nearly seven decades. The following section will illustrate the mundane activities of statecraft that shaped enclave residents’ lives for seven decades. Ethnography sheds light on the importance of locally embedded political actors and actions in the context of broader political processes (Megoran, 2006) and seeks to trace causal chains, check analytic reasoning and pinpoint behavioural outcomes (Volo & Schatz, 2004). Here, I intend to connect the impact or influence of state politics by interrogating political processes, institutional activities, legal practices and spatial influences on the daily routine of the enclave. Such conceptualization shows the intense impact of politico-geographic-legality on social life. Everyday de facto statelessness in the enclaves This section recalls enclave residents’ experiences of statelessness over the past seven decades. Here, the focus is on the process that constructed rightless people. When I entered the enclaves during my field research and asked the residents about their daily life, the general answer was, ‘India/Bangladesh left this place as a “jungle” [abandoned place], and we are the unwanted people of this world who have no country’. The most important issue that appeared during every discussion was the right to have a national ID card. In a sense, this card is the key to access to state provisions, as illustrated in Akbar Ali’s story below. Akbar Ali (45 years old) had been living in enclave X for the last three generations, but he had no document to prove his nationality. The Bangladesh government officially included Bangladeshi enclaves with its upazila (administrative units) but never extended any governmental activities to these enclaves in last seven decades. As a result there was no local government office or agency in the enclave that issued birth certificates or any national ID or voter cards for enclave residents like Akbar Ali. As the enclaves were enclosed by the host country’s territory, any visit to the home country involved crossing the host country’s territory and a highly guarded and fenced India-Bangladesh border. In order to enter his home country legally and cross the international border, Akbar needed to obtain a visa. Without any proof of nationality and without any consulate in the enclave, he was unable to visit Bangladesh legally. Akbar Ali never had the opportunity to learn to read or write, because there were no schools in these liminal zones. Indian and Bangladeshi schools did not enrol enclave students, since the enclave residents could not legally enter the host country. Access to education was tough for the enclave dwellers, and bribery was a useful investment for education; however education did not ensure a job. The enclave residents were also deprived of basic medical facilities, government subsidies and so on. Having a voter ID card is a prerequisite for hospital admission in India. If the enclave residents did not bring any Indian friends and relatives and their voter cards, they were unable to access emergency medical services. For the enclave dwellers, citizenship was an ever-present issue, and their official identity or ascribed citizenship of their home country was an obstacle to their daily survival. In this context, the citizenship ID card is a technology to segregate and identify the ‘foreigner other’ (Shewly, 2013, 2016). Although Bangladesh has introduced similar ID card citizenship, surveillance is much more effective in India. Nurul Huda (56 years old), a Bangladeshi enclave dweller, used a football

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metaphor to illustrate his status quo with which both Bangladesh and India were playing a match. He explained his suffering (pers. comm., enclave P, 15 February 2010): A policeman caught me in an Indian bazzar (local market) at Cooch Behar and asked me to show my voter card. I said ‘I don’t have voter card because I live in a Bangladeshi enclave.’ ‘So you are a Bangladeshi?’ he replied. ‘Yes, but this place is inside India.’ The policeman replied, ‘Are you joking? There is no such place. You are from Bangladesh.’ I was, then, taken to the police station where I tried to explain the matter, but no one listened to me. I was sentenced to six months imprisonment under the Foreigner’s Act. Once I finished my term in jail, the BSF [Border Security Force] took me to the border and handed me over to the BDR [Bangladesh Rifles]. Then, the BDR suspected me of being Indian and put me into jail, because I was unable to show any proof of my Bangladeshi identity. By this time, my brother asked a BSF officer to let him cross the border to release me. It was granted after a while. My brother brought some land registration documents to the Bangladesh police upon which I was released. Then we came home with the support of a broker who knows the safest times and routes to use to avoid the border force’s scrutiny. I was lucky that the BSF did not catch me again.

This powerful story illuminates several themes such as technical nationality barriers and the construction of illegal immigrants’ identities, statelessness and (il)legality. Indian law draws incisive boundaries between citizens and foreigners. The Foreigners Act of 1946 defines a foreigner as ‘a person who is not a citizen of India’. This Act was unsympathetic to Bangadeshi enclave dwellers, who were unable to survive without entering India for everyday needs (see Shewly, 2016). Nurul’s story unfolds the fact that he was stateless and vulnerable. The incident shows how a border can be ever present in a state’s territory and also reflects Van Schendel’s characterization of border security in India-Bangladesh as ‘haphazard control over movement across the border’ (2005: 194). Therefore the border performs as a line beyond accountability from macro to micro level. Such construction of the border as being beyond accountability connects to Arendt’s (1951) construction of rightlessness, since people were kept outside legal and human rights. Nurul was not qualified as a rightful political being on either side of the border as a citizen. He was subject to the law but not entitled to claim legal aid. The fieldwork reveals how everyday life in the enclaves close to the border was more difficult than life in the enclaves well inside the host country. One of the reasons was the border guards’ strict scrutiny and ID card checks. It is mandatory for the borderlanders to keep an ID card on them at all times. As noted in our interviews, BSF indiscriminately entered the enclave. For example an anonymous respondent (23 years old) mentioned her experiences in enclave K (pers. comm., 10 December 2009): ‘My house is two hundred yards away from the border fence. The BSF does not bother whether it is a day or night. They even enter into our houses and search for smuggled items and sometimes beat us unnecessarily.’ Most of the borderland enclave residents offer free labour, bamboo, chicken, eggs and so on to the border guards, in order to ensure easy mobility in the evening and especially during gun battles between guards on both sides of the border. Generally gun battles occur when border guards trespass into the neighbouring territory, either by accident or in hot pursuit of smugglers, or initiate disputes over smuggling deals or intention to commit rape (Van Schendel, 2005: 309; see also Jones, 2012). Such escalations of violence affect the whole borderland. Law, as illustrated, did not protect the enclave residents. Informal group discussions with Gobrachora enclave dwellers during the pilot study reveal that these enclave’s residents were extremely vulnerable to robbery and exploitation by neighbours, such as having their pets stolen, receiving death threats and so on. Parents in the enclaves

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constantly tried to send young daughters (generally 10–15 years old) to Indian relatives for security reasons. A teenage boy’s protest over an illegal cattle-trading route through the enclave caused serious repercussions for the whole enclave community. The cattle smugglers attacked the enclave with weapons, and everybody fled their homes for almost a month. People shared their stories of vulnerability and repeatedly stated, ‘We are not included in any law. Where shall we go for our own security?’ As the law did not protect them, these people were also socially vulnerable (Shewly, 2013).

Conclusion This paper has shown the essential connections and barriers that the enclave residents experienced in their day-to-day interactions with the host and the home countries prior to exchange of the enclaves. Theoretically, all of their day-to-day negotiations, contradictions, vulnerabilities and survival methods illustrate how extensively everyday life was trapped in transterritoriality in the last seven decades. Given the circumstances, the enclave is an example of the crossing point of two or more political systems, which are bound up with the legal norms of each political system. Indian and Bangladeshi enclaves were the spaces contained by lawlessness but surrounded by hostile regulations for everyday survival. Hence, social life was legally saturated, and the power of the law constituted social life in diverse ways (Blomley, 2003: 27). Multiple interactions of politics, geography and law in various scales constructed rightless enclave communities. These people were stateless through politico-geographic abandonment from the home country and legal punishment by the host country. The Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness defines that ‘the nationality shall be granted by “operation of law to a person born in the State’s territory” to anyone who would otherwise be stateless’ (Blitz & Lynch, 2011b: 2). Not only were the enclave dwellers taken out of the ‘operation of law’, but also the enclave territory was kept out of the state system for 68 years, as shown in this paper. In Arendt’s words, enclave residents ‘lost not only their citizenship rights, but also their inalienable human rights’ (1951: 281–82). The enclave residents were excluded from legal rights but defined in the host country’s legal system as illegal immigrants. Thus, the enclave residents were excluded and included as Agamben (1998) conceptualizes. The examples of everyday life in the enclaves also demonstrate how enclave dwellers coped with and survived in such circumstances and advanced their life using the fissures, gaps and legal loopholes of the state system. Enclave dwellers’ mobility and economic and political activities included diverse (il)legal means. Everyday practices across boundaries involved legal and illegal matters within this triangulation of politics, geography and law, which has so far been ignored in the existing literature. This paper employed an analytical strategy to examine de facto statelessness by exploring everyday rightlessess in the enclaves. While not new, this de facto statelessness deserves more attention, given the fact that these people are often unable to access basic human rights and most crucially unable to access benefits from international and regional instruments developed to resolve cases of statelessness. In addition, there is neither a clear definition of de facto statelessness, nor any clear instruction for the legal and operational responses to such statelessness (Massey, 2010). The cases of de facto statelessness might be plentiful, varied, hard to detect and difficult to establish. With this consideration, this paper calls for a wider empirical and critical focus on the hidden geographies of de facto statelessness.

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