Security Socialities: Gender, Surveillance, and Civil-Military Relations in India's Eastern Borderlands

Aminul Hossain and his wife, Najma, were waiting to cross the checkpoint in the last hour before it closed. They, like the other passengers waiting, were on their way home to a village in the Coochbehar district in eastern India, which is situated between the India-Bangladesh border and the patrol point established by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) about four kilometers from the border.¹ This checkpoint on a thoroughfare in the rural borderlands is one of hundreds dotting the 4,096-kilometer-long serpentine, and officially "friendly" border that India shares with Bangladesh. While approximately two-thirds of this border has been fenced on the Indian side, Aminul and Najma live in a part of the borderlands where the shifting course of a river has thwarted efforts to build a fence.² Residents in India's eastern borderlands must daily negotiate the architecture and practices of Indian border security as they intrude upon their village paths and, often unpredictably, into their everyday itineraries. Against the sun setting the river on fire, we parted ways by the Nazirghat checkpoint. Najma, holding on to a nimki, a fried snack, to eat on the way, called out to warn me not to linger at the checkpoint as it got dark.

Despite her advice, I stopped at Horen Barman's tea stall to catch the last bit of footfall and chatter at Nazirghat. An elderly Rajbangshi man,³ Horen Barman, maintained good relations with all of the local communities: Bengali Muslims, Rajbangshis, caste-Hindus, and the BSF. The tea stall itself was empty, and Horen-da was cleaning the glasses. I stood at the door with two other shopkeepers who had already closed up shop, talking inattentively as we all looked toward the jetty. The last boat had left, and the young male workers at the jetty were wrapping up for the day and exchanging pleasantries with the BSF constables who were also gathering their belongings and preparing to return to their barracks. "Yaar, treat us to a cup of tea at least," we heard one soldier, adjusting the rifle swung across his back, call out to the boatman counting the day's earnings. "Are you joking? You people ruined us today. You better make up for this morning's loss on some other duty," Nurul, the boatman, retorted.⁴ They walked up to the tea stall together, shoulder-to-shoulder, smiling, and asked Horen-da to serve up some tea. Horen-da muttered under his breath, "Now they come just as I have cleaned up. Can't even say no to these people." Barely able to contain my surprise at the friendliness between these two men, I stood close to Horen-da and looked at him quizzically. "Oh, relations here are polychromatic (rangin); they change color from moment to moment," he said, barely looking up.

The work of security brought such polychromes of socialities together even as they sat uncomfortably. Borderlands have been richly studied as sites where nationalism, territoriality, and sovereignty are produced and heightened through spectacles of unfriendly borders.⁵ For precisely such reasons, scholars have argued that they are places of anxiety for the nation-state, where statist impositions may be contested or subverted.⁶ This article examines the texture of civil-military relations in India's increasingly militarized eastern borderlands, particularly the production of national security and logics of threat and protection along an officially "friendly" border. It argues that such relations—" security socialities," as I theorize them—are temporally and spatially extensive, as well as dynamic and ambivalent, from the perspective of lived experience and intimate relations between the security forces and civilians who encounter them every day. My aim is to move beyond a conceptualization of national security as an imposition from above and outside on "the local," as well as a homogenous category of "the civil," to question overdetermined notions about spaces and registers of "civil-military relations." Instead, the ethnographic focus of this article is on the interface in civil-military relations, and following security socialities allows us to reconceptualize surveilling gazes...