Matthew Edney, a geographer and historian, writes that “to govern territories, one must know them”. “But can one govern knowing just the territory and not its people?” asks Suchitra Vijayan in her book.
There is a category of books which makes one realise the privileges and prejudices they hold due to which they aren’t able to see people’s sufferings and even glorify ideas which are the main cause of those sufferings. Another category of books is those which testify to the correctness of one’s ideological stand. Midnight’s Borders by Suchitra Vijayan falls in both categories.
Vijayan has travelled 9,000 miles over seven 7 across India’s borderline remote areas and has collected many bone-chilling, painful, myth-breaking stories of the people caught in between inter-state disputes because of the lines created by colonial powers who ruled over us for over 200 years.
This book consists of many histories of Indian state violence and stories of people’s struggle for survival against strong militarisation, brutality, harassment and human rights violations by their own state.
The book engages with many sorrowful stories:
- A man escaping floodlights that invade his home in no man’s land and how disastrous situations forced him to send his wife to the other side of the border.
- An 80-year-old woman said that in her twenties, she was raped by an army patrol convoy and then was left to die in the fields.
- A family who has to live next to the people who orchestrated their son’s murder.
- A girl who was crossing the border to get married was shot by army personnel and was left to die on the fences.
These stories of people surviving in buffer areas, detention centres, ground zero and getting labelled as illegal, infiltrators, terrorists and facing massacres, rapes, institutionalised oppression via “encounter killings” and special tribunals contradicts the “Idea of India” which I have been taught in school and known since my childhood.
As a cure to the inhumane conditions in border areas, Vijayan concludes, “At the borders, even the most civilised among us begin to make excuses for repression, brutality and violence. If we were to learn from history, we must begin by imagining possibilities of freedom without nation-states, without borders that kill.”
A Barrier To False Nationalist Propaganda
Amid the rising state surveillance, communalism, glorification of mythological pasts, persecution of minorities, the largest crisis of manufactured statelessness in human history and increasing demand for a nationwide NRC in the name of nation’s security, Vijayan’s work has unmasked the functioning of state machinery by highlighting various blunders and scams being done by the army, government officials and rich businessmen in the borderline areas.
It has put questions on the idea of territorial sovereignty, citizenship and has shown what the “Idea of India” means to the people living in border areas where the constitution doesn’t exist.
As this remarkable piece of work has done justice to the brutal experiences of Ishmael, Gazi from Panitar, Felani Khatun from Phulbari, Ya from Nagaland, and other voiceless people, Midnight’s Borders is indeed a true people’s history of modern India and it will act as a barrier to false nationalist propaganda being spread through sold media.