New India-Bangladesh Border Wall Could Leave Climate Refugees Stranded
India is fencing off its border with Bangladesh. What will that mean for millions of potential climate refugees?
An 8-foot-high, double-walled, barbed-wire fence draped with laundry menaces the border between Sutia, India, and Dhannokulla, Bangladesh. But if I wanted to cross from Sutia to Dhannokulla last week, I wouldn't have needed to jump the fence—I could have just walked through a friendly neighbor's garden. As I watched, a border-infiltrating chicken did just that, bypassing what the press has dubbed the Great Wall of India. In fits and starts since the mid-1980s, New Delhi has raised a fence along roughly 70 percent of India's 2,544-mile border with Bangladesh. (Another 621 miles, running across the delta's shifting rivers, are unfenceable but patrolled. ) But while both governments have agreed to a 150-yard "no-man's-land" on either side of the border, many houses have a front door in one country and a back door in the other.
This meandering, partly open, partly militarized border mirrors India's relationship with Bangladesh. Until partition turned the eastern Bengal delta (what is now Bangladesh) into East Pakistan in 1947, the region had never contained an international border. Pakistan's first prime minister called the new country, which was separated in two by India, "moth-eaten."
Arjan Einbu