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Illegal Border Crossers and Unruly Citizens: Burma-Pakistan-Indian Borderlands 1940s-1960s

Sat, March 18, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, Provincial Ballroom North

Abstract

This paper focuses on borders and border crossers between Burma, India, and East Pakistan during the immediate post-independence years. At the time of independence, the new states’ borders not only confused vast sections of the population by their imprecision but deprived them of their traditional practices of traversing forests, lands, and rivers to use those resources. Border crossers’ complaints about the loss of customary access were largely ignored by the states, which tended to view the crossers as illegal interlopers or plotters sent over by the neighboring states. The states redoubled efforts to control such movement by strictly defining citizenship and increasing militarization of the border police. In addition, introduction of boundaries between these countries caused conflict between diverse groups within the borderlands and between the groups and the state, often on the basis of religion and ethnicity, which persist to this day. Unresolved contestations between the state and borderland residents thus, problematizes the territorial logic of the postcolonial nation-state. Examining states’ actions and popular reactions shows the evolution of states’ citizenship criteria, their implementation, and challenges to them by mundane or violent ‘transgressions’ of people living on the borderland. In doing so, it clarifies the mechanics, and the breakdowns, of state-making.

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