Border Security Issue (Real Life Firewalls -2)

This time I shall talk about the border area security issue of a country like India. It’s land frontier of 15,200 km and coast line of 7516.5 km have been always under the close scrutiny of the security personals and recently government is going to double the northern border area of the country.

To be fair, the government is so bewitched of internal threats of internal security threats in the country that it is now going to seal the borders after doubling security personal. The perpetrators with the badge of Maoist, ULFAs and naxalites may be disturbing the whole peaceful setup but they show the clear signs of furore of unemployment, red-tapism, and socio-economic injustice and reduced civil liberties. The flippant ways to deal with the security is just an effort to grow defence budget at inexorable rate at the cost of basic infrastructure of human development index. The Maoist thuggery in Nepal or ULFA’s training camps in Bangladesh and Bhutan and their dissatisfaction towards their targeted governments have the almost similar reasons for their ire. The inimical clashes with security personal leads to thinning arsenal of miscreants, hence they seek support from the similar groups across borders. The valley of political and ideological relativism between the extremist and government deepens proportional to the period of oppression.

While creating secured firewall across national boundary the basic infrastructure of the boundary area must be strengthened with the localities. The porous border across the Nepal-India is the need of local peoples’ economy and is also way of illegal human channel. In economic point of view, the larger border line once barricaded will rise to local dissatisfaction again. Hence before increasing the security across this border, the locals need to be motivated for alternate stable opportunities of employment after providing them resources. Across Bhutan-India border, the recent action by the Bhutan’s security to oust the militant training camps had been beneficial, but the basic problem is still unsolved. At this border area with dense forest where even doubling the security will not suffice, the concerned localities must have the sense of ownership hence alert for their security. Occasional rampant firing at the Indo-Bangladesh border is again an unsettled issue of misunderstanding and communication gap between the security personals. The Indo-Burma border security is difficult to maintain alone by the security personal. Unless the local youth of border area districts are willing to save their village border the firewall making task shall be Hercules one. The presence of more security personal may uplift their zeal of defence because there are measures of hope and determination by our new army chief General J. J. Singh.

Firewall creation at border is needed for the national security, but the stable solution shall be possible only after the ground level motivation towards making ‘them’ feel socially secure and respected. Only peace talks or security fetishism shall foster cumulating horrendous number of youths within the firewall.

In the coming years, the policy makers will have to reconcile the imperatives of paying attention to the youth’s basic problems of dissatisfaction which leads to insecure feeling among them selves. The need of the hour is to make the whole internal operating system robust and just not only increase the version of the firewall.