A Great Divide

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On the ground, the prospects for cooperation are even worse. "Bangladesh is definitely a sanctuary for extremist groups," says a Bangladeshi human-rights researcher who has worked on the border. But the curfews, surveillance and other techniques of "border domination," as the BSF calls it, have had the effect of increasing sympathy among the border population for terrorists. The researcher adds: "India has alienated a large section of people who think that India is our enemy." The Bangladesh human-rights group Odhikar estimates that 62 Bangladeshis were killed by Indian border guards in 2008 — about one every six days. "Bangladesh and India are not in a situation where they should shoot each other's people," says Odhikar's Adilur Khan. "The Indian government should come to its senses."

Send in the Cows
One way to improve bilateral ties is to expand legal trade between the two countries and promote the development of the border areas, which would reduce the incentives for both smuggling and illegal migration. To do that, India would have to rethink one of its most deeply held beliefs: the sanctity of the cow.

In India, cows can't be exported for slaughter because orthodox Hindus revere them, but the animals are in great demand in mainly Muslim, meat-eating Bangladesh. An organized network of herders and trucks carries cows across the northern plains of India to cattle markets near the border, where they are dispatched to smugglers who try to sneak them over in ones and twos. The smugglers quickly learned how to get around the fence: the latest in smuggling technology involves a jury-rigged contraption of bamboo poles, iron hooks and old barbed wire used to haul small cows up and over the 10-ft.-high (3 m) fencing.

The BSF captured 70,000 cows last year — worth about $62 million in Bangladesh. "I'm sure that as many got across," says Ashish Mitra, a former director general of the BSF. "It's a losing battle. Cattle-smuggling is the biggest problem that we have." The absurdities of the ban on cattle exports are a constant source of frustration within the BSF. The cows that are seized are auctioned off at customs depots, and usually bought by the same smugglers, sometimes three or four times. Moving a cow from one end of India to the other is perfectly legal, but it becomes contraband as soon as it hits the border. Once over the fence, it's legal again and taxed by Bangladeshi authorities.

Privately, BSF officers admit that the ban makes little sense; dozens of Indian citizens are killed every year while trying to earn the fee of about $22 for getting a cow across. (The animals can eventually be sold for as much as $900 each.) Legalizing the trade would reduce the border violence and open a new stream of tax revenue. But few on the border expect that to happen in a majority-Hindu country. "Which government is going to allow the export of cows for slaughter?" Mitra asks. "That would just be political suicide."

Cows account for about half the illegal trade; Indian government rations of wheat, rice and sugar sold on the black market in Bangladesh, as well as cough syrup (used as an intoxicant across the border), account for the rest. Altogether, this informal trade is nearly as large as the formal trade, according to a 2006 study by the World Bank. Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, a researcher with the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) at the University of Dhaka, describes typical smugglers: "They are landless, most of them are female, sometimes divorced. They have no other choice." Criminalizing the trade makes this already poor border population vulnerable to abuse by trading agents and border guards. Academics who study informal border trade say the volume of smuggling would not be possible without the collusion of the BSF. "There will always be black sheep," says BSF chief Kumawat, "but it's not rampant." In interviews with sex workers in the town of Petrapole, many told Sikder that they started as smugglers and turned to prostitution to finance more smuggling or to get back released goods that had been seized.

No Sense of Place
Look under the surface of any issue on the border, and its central paradox soon becomes clear. Securing a border is an effort to draw a bright, clear line marking exactly where the state begins and ends. That was never an easy task in India, where the line meant to separate Hindu and Muslim villages nevertheless left millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims on both sides. Rather than settling the 60-year-old questions about who belongs to whom, fencing India's border has only resurrected them.