A Great Divide

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The task of controlling both illegal migration into Assam — as well as militant groups such as ULFA that operate in the border areas — falls to the 160,000 troops of India's Border Security Force (BSF), half of whom guard the frontier with Bangladesh. At the biggest gateway between Assam and Bangladesh, a junction of the Brahmaputra River near a market town called Dhubri, the BSF's Water Wing patrols 24 hours a day by speedboat. Ferries carry laborers from the remote villages downstream to jobs in Dhubri, Guwahati or Siliguri, and each one is stopped by BSF guards, who check passengers' documents to prevent Bangladeshis from slipping through. "After sunset we don't permit boats to ply," says A.K. Hemram, commander of the battalion there. "Any boat will be considered as influx."

Scattered across the river like pebbles are tiny islands called chars — no more than the tops of sandbars churned up by the fierce currents. There are dozens of them, and with each monsoon season their boundaries change. Some disappear entirely. The people who live on them move from island to island, and the BSF officers make a point of knowing every person who lives in their territory. "We have to monitor the population," Hemram says. "If there are 10 houses on an island, and suddenly an 11th house appears, we have to find out, Whose is that 11th house? From where have you come?"

Incredibly, India is putting up fencing on the islands, too. On Masalabari, the most stable of the char islands, huge concrete cylinders that will form the base of a 53/4-mile (9.3 km) length of fence are lined up on the sand. The Central Public Works Department carried them out by boat during the summer monsoon, when water levels were high enough to transport heavy equipment, and they will eventually support the fencing that will separate the Indian side of the island from Bangladesh.

The fence has made a difference: there were about 4,900 arrests for illegal crossings last year, compared to more than 10,000 in 2005. But P.K. Mishra, inspector general of the BSF's Assam and Meghalaya Frontier, seems to know that he has an almost impossible task. He has visited the U.S.-Mexico border fence and seen how difficult controlling illegal migration is. "Even [though] they have all the technical equipment, they can't stop it," he says. "How can we?"

The Terror Equation
Outside of Assam, the debate over Bangladeshi migrants has been subsumed into India's larger struggle against terrorism. In a speech in Guwahati last September, L.K. Advani, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, connected the dots. "Assam as a whole is today fighting for survival," he told the crowd, who gathered as the season's monsoon floods were subsiding. "And the threat to its survival has come from a flood of another kind — the flood of illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. Now, India is facing not only the threat of infiltration, but also of terrorism from Bangladesh ... India is facing a new form of cross-border terrorism in the east, just as we have been facing it for the past three decades from Pakistan in the west."

For years Bangladeshi authorities denied any active jihadist movement within its borders. That stance changed in 2005 when a local jihadist group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, took credit for an audacious attack in which bombs were detonated in about one hour in all but one of Bangladesh's 64 districts. The incident forced Bangladesh's leaders to acknowledge the country's internal terrorist threat. Indian intelligence and BSF officials say that Dhaka is not doing enough to stop Bangladeshi jihadist groups in the border areas from crossing into India. But the victory in Bangladesh's Dec. 29 general election of the secular Awami League, whose leader (and new Prime Minister) Sheikh Hasina has pledged to curb Islamic militancy, could mean new urgency on Dhaka's part.

The biggest threat, Indian intelligence sources say, comes from the Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jihad Islamia (HuJI), which is believed to be part of a loose terror network that includes Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Taiba, the chief suspect in last November's Mumbai attacks. "That is our No. 1 concern," says M.L. Kumawat, director general of the BSF. "Indigenous insurgent groups in Bangladesh have to be dealt with strongly so as not to allow them to use their soil to commit acts of violence in India." (Fencing on the Pakistan border has already made that area easier to patrol, the BSF says.) Mutual suspicion inhibits the one antiterrorism strategy that could make a real difference: cooperation between India and Bangladesh against their common threat. Intelligence and human-rights experts in Bangladesh and India say the two countries have not made any serious efforts to share intelligence. That's unlikely to change as long as insurgent groups from India's northeast find sanctuary in Bangladesh (a ULFA commander, Anup Chetia, has been in Bangladesh since completing a prison sentence there in 2005) — or as long as India continues its effort to wall off its smaller neighbor with concrete and barbed wire. "India carries the burden of being a local superpower," says D. Raghavan of the Delhi Policy Group. "We are seen as a bully."