India erecting a barrier along Bangladesh border

BANGOAN, India -- Amar Shaquil, a local businessman in this lush border town, said he has been crossing over into Bangladesh for more than 30 years and does not intend to stop now.

''My best friend lives there; I have family there," he said, gesturing beyond a khaki-clad Indian border guard who casually cradled a rifle. ''Am I supposed to just forget them because of this madness?"

The ''madness" to which Shaquil referred is the billion-dollar barrier India is building along its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh. The twisted razor wire now separates Shaquil's home in the Indian state of West Bengal from Bangladesh. Nearly 900 miles of the border is already fenced, and the entire project is slated for completion in 2007.

The barrier, which snakes though jungles, mountains, and villages across five Indian states, mirrors a similar one India is building along its 1,800-mile western border with Pakistan, at a cost of about $3 billion. Once both are complete, India will be completely sealed off from its Muslim neighbors.

The fences symbolize the tangled ethnic politics playing out across the subcontinent and the lingering effects of the upheavals following India's independence from Britain in 1947.

During the six years the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party ruled New Delhi, it turned both barriers into powerful symbols of the party's promise to protect India's Hindus from what it termed Islamic aggression. This resonated with voters, and the Congress Party-led coalition, which came to power last month, is expected to continue both projects.

Navtej Sarna, a spokesman for the Indian Foreign Ministry, cited the reasons for the Bangladesh fence as a combination of the same imperatives that have driven the United States and Israel to build barriers with Mexico and in the West Bank, respectively -- illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration.

Estimates vary widely, but Indian officials say that over the past three decades, at least 10 million illegal immigrants from impoverished and natural disaster-prone Bangladesh have moved to India's inner cities and border villages. India accuses Bangladesh of providing safe haven to insurgent groups in India's northeastern states that border Bangladesh. The groups, such as the United Liberation Front of Assam, the People's Liberation Army of Manipur, and National Liberation Front of Tripura, are trying to secede from India.

''There are over 90 terrorist training camps on Bangladesh soil," said S. I. S. Ahmed, a senior spokesman for India's Border Security Force. ''Infiltration from their side is constant and ongoing."

Bangladesh's foreign secretary, Shamsher M. Chowdhury, denies the allegations. ''There are absolutely no anti-Indian insurgent groups in Bangladesh, and no evidence of any Bangladeshis living illegally in India," he said, calling the fence unnecessary.

Chowdhury accuses India of creating and supporting ''the Bongo Bhumi [Independent Bengal] movement, which is threatening to dismember Bangladesh and create a separate state for Hindus living in Bangladesh . . . an act of extreme subversiveness."

The fusillade of accusations is fraying the already uneasy relationship between civilians on both sides of the border.

''Too many Bangladeshis are coming here without passports," said Nayan Das, who sells water coconuts at the Bangoan crossing. ''They take our jobs; some are terrorists. They need to be stopped."

Imran Atil, a Bangladeshi who crossed into India to attend a wedding, said he accepts that there are Bangladeshi migrants in India, but that India could be more understanding of the problem.

''People only come here out of poverty and lack of opportunities," he said. ''Don't Indians also try to get into other countries for better opportunities?"

Local border trade that flourished from both sides of the border has sharply diminished. India admits that the path of the fence leaves more than 500,000 Indians in 200 villages locked out of India when the border gates close every evening. Thousands of Bangladeshis, who used to cross over into India to see family and get medical treatment, have also had their lives disrupted.

Indians who live outside the fence need a passport to enter India when the border is open in the day and are barred from crossing at all after dark. Bangladeshis need a passport and visa to cross -- luxuries few can afford.

Bangladesh is one of the world's most overpopulated and poorest countries, with a per capita annual income of $350, about half that of India's. More than half of the population is functionally illiterate, and about 35 percent unemployed.

Ajai Sahni, director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, said he believes the Bangladeshi government is encouraging migration into India for geopolitical reasons, an allegation Bangladesh strongly denies.

''It wishes to change the demography of areas around Bangladesh so it can subsequently demand these areas be incorporated into Bangladesh," he said.

About 4 miles of the India-Bangladesh border is not demarcated because of territorial disputes. About 300,000 Indians and Bangladeshis live in 162 enclaves in each other's territory. This awkward situation was created, in the days before India and Bangladesh became independent republics, by two local rajas, or kings, who enjoyed staking pieces of their estates when gambling.

Over the years, the rajas acquired numerous pockets of land in each other's territory. Today, Dhaka and New Delhi remain unable to sort out the problem of these fractured inheritances.

Following independence from Britain in 1947, amid furious rioting, the eastern Muslim half of India's Bengal state was turned into East Pakistan. In India's west, other Muslim-majority states formed West Pakistan. For more than two decades, Pakistan's two halves tried to live as one. But in 1971, with military help from India, East Pakistan seceded to become independent Bangladesh.

Bangladesh-India ties flourished under the leadership of Bangladesh's founding father, Sheikh Mujib ur-Rahman, and his secular Awami League party. But relations between New Delhi and Dhaka grew tense after General Zia Ur-Rahman seized power in the mid-1970s.

Under Rahman and his successors, the influence of the fundamentalist Deobandi school of Islam, in whose madrassas the Taliban arose in Pakistan, spread rapidly in Bangladesh, said Praveen Swami, a security analyst in New Delhi.

The discovery of a massive arms shipment in Bangladesh's port city of Chittagong on April 2 raised alarms that the country is becoming a terrorist hub. Several groups with links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have established themselves in Bangladesh, Swami and other analysts in India say. One group, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, or Movement for Islamic Holy War, has been cited by the US State Department as working in concert with Islamic militants in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, violence against minorities has flared in both India and Bangladesh. Amnesty International says Bangladeshi militants are terrorizing the country's Hindus, and Human Rights Watch accuses the Bharatiya Janata Party of organizing anti-Muslim riots to intimidate India's Muslims, who are 12 percent of the population.

''Once we were one," Shaquil said at the border. ''Now see what things we are doing to each other."