Agents of Exception: Border Security and the Marginalization of Muslims in India

The narratives of fear and uncertainty from the discourse of the ‘global war on terror’ have been used by many governments to expand securitization processes. As more aggressive security tactics have been deployed, scholars have sought to understand the changing relationship between individual rights and the authority of sovereign states by drawing on Giorgio Agamben's insights into the state of exception. In this paper I argue that borderlands are a key site for investigating the connections between the state of exception and securitization processes because political borders are the symbolic markers of the limits of a sovereign's authority. I trace the securitization of the borderlands between India and Bangladesh and I describe the increasingly exceptional measures employed by Indian border security forces in order to prevent terrorist threats from entering India. At the intersection of the state of exception in the borderlands and the securitization narratives and practices of the global war on terror, Muslims in both India and Bangladesh are marginalized in the affairs of the state and targeted in state-sanctioned violence. I conclude that borderlands, as an explicitly spatial example of the state of exception, are a crucial site for locating and understanding the decision on the exception.