Border Bureaucracy and Discourses: Demarcation and Surveillance of the Punjab Border in the Wake of 1947 Partition

Abstract

The establishment of state authority over the movement of people and goods across borders became a key marker of statehood after decolonization. In South Asia, India and Pakistan gradually and unevenly asserted territorial and fiscal sovereignty along their new borders. This article examines how the early Pakistani state confronted border anxieties through the bureaucratic practices and discourses of local officials, who embodied state authority at the frontier. This article further explores how the state attempted to regulate and classify cross-border movement and how borderland communities responded—sometimes complying, sometimes negotiating, and at times subverting these controls. Using archival sources and oral histories, the article argues that categories such as “regional” and “national,” “self” and “other” were not fixed or natural, but were produced through contingent interactions between state functionaries and local populations. In doing so, this article highlights the complex and negotiated nature of sovereignty in Pakistan’s borderlands.

Introduction

Borders are margins and boundaries, which can be interpreted as spaces of both constraint and opportunity. Security analysts and a burgeoning body of scholars have sought to constitute the issue of the Pakistan border as a sensitive one and matter of national security. Such analysts frame the border as a site where the state fought for its sovereignty and the border population suffered from interstate conflicts, presenting the periphery of the nation-state as a lawless and backward zone. Pakistan’s “political economy of defense” has been the focus of raucous debate in the public sphere and much scholarly work, thus garnering public support for increased border security. ¹ This has intensified the widely accepted notion of early Pakistan as a “fearful” state with weak control over its frontiers and contributed to strategic insecurity and military dominance over politics. ²

The dominant narrative situates Pakistan’s precarious security environment as a direct legacy of Partition, foregrounding the Kashmir dispute and attendant contestations over geographical imaginaries. While influential, this perspective is limited in scope. It neglects to examine how newly constituted postcolonial borderlands engaged with the state, thereby rendering border-dwelling populations as a static and homogeneous category. Moving beyond the established historiographical focus on Pakistan’s borders as inherently “sensitive spaces,” this article aligns with and contributes to an emerging body of borderland studies that approaches the frontier as a site of both opportunity and uncertainty for local communities. As Nugent observes, borders constitute “a single package” that simultaneously embody ambivalence and ambiguity, making them, in his words, “fascinating research sites.” ³

Studying the South Asian postcolonial boundary offers challenging insight into the inner workings, complexities, and limitations of the early Pakistani state and its interplays with border populations in the immediate period after Partition. ⁴ The full complexity of the demarcation of the new international boundary, the establishment of border institutions, and the interactions of state and borderland society could best be understood through an examination of the changes that took place in the “everyday state” along the new international border in the years preceding independence. ⁵ An examination of the working of the “everyday state” around boundary making, border policing, customs practices, and cross-border interactions helps in grasping the complex interplay between defiance and nation formation in the years immediately after 1947. ⁶ This exploration thus uncovers a complex process between the ways in which the Punjab borderland communities responded to the new international border and shows how it became part of the socially lived experience of ordinary people during a phased transition—from colonial subjects to border citizens—from boundary making to border-fencing.

The “everyday state” has evolved into one of the key frameworks for understanding everyday bureaucratic practices, state authority, and its legitimation. ⁷ Some studies on colonial state formations have recognized the significance of knowledge-making processes, such as the compilation of documents that allowed colonial authorities to understand and manage their subjects. Such documentation now serves as a repository for our understanding of the workings of colonial bureaucracy. Laura Stoler’s work prompts us to read these imperial archives “along the grain,” identifying them as technologies of rule in themselves rather than a mere repository of sources for the study of past events. ⁸ Documentation continues to constitute the core of postcolonial governance.

This article utilizes government documents from the archives of the Punjab Police Surveillance Branch, Wagah Field Intelligence Unit reports (FIUs), military court proceedings, and the files of the Pakistan Land Customs Department (LCD) (all housed in Lahore). It also makes use of police first information reports (FIRs) from border police stations and border incident reports (BIRs) from the Pakistan Rangers records. Taken together, this documentation furnishes valuable insight into the working of everyday interactions between border people and border institutions and authorities. These documents were produced by the state officials in charge of enforcing border policing and customs, and some information may have been obtained by coercion. These documents, with “itineraries of their own,” comprised “the administrative apparatus” that, in turn, “opened to a space that extended beyond it. Contrapuntal intrusions emanated from outside the corridors of governance, but they also erupted… within that sequestered space.” As such, “these archives are not simply accounts of actions or thoughts.” They are records of “rubrics of rule [in] a changing world [of] efforts to ‘catch up’ with what was emergent and ‘becoming’ in new situations.” ⁹

In reconstructing the story of the state’s segmentation of border dwellers through its own files, this article follows Ann Stoler’s work in showcasing these files “as sites of the expectant and conjured—about dreams of comforting futures and forebodings of future failures.” ¹⁰ Bureaucratic border reports written during the making and surveillance of the Punjab border between India and Pakistan provide insight into how transgressions were viewed. Such reports, therefore, come with their own set of issues concerning veracity and are sometimes clearly embellished accounts and received narratives, representing official notions of law and transgressions. How did the border bureaucracy, “petty sovereigns of governmentality” at the edges of state, control mobilities and materialities through monitoring and enforcement? How did this affect the people living in proximity to these borders on either side?

Studies of Partition recognize that 1947 marked the beginning, rather than the conclusion, of the process of dividing both territory and populations. ¹¹ Yet this perspective offers limited insight into the lived experiences of borderland communities and the material realities of the border—both as a spatial process and as a feature embedded in everyday life. Little attention has been paid to how the new international boundary between India and Pakistan was materially realized on the ground or its evolution from a porous frontier into a heavily securitized zone. This raises critical questions: what instruments did the state employ to consolidate the emerging international boundary through mechanisms of surveillance, interdiction, and enforcement? And to what extent did the Pakistani state adopt differentiated approaches to its eastern and western borders?

Partition, border, and bureaucracy

The process of instituting state authority for the protection and control of access of the movement of people and goods through borders is a vital symbol of statehood. ¹² After decolonization, India and Pakistan slowly and unevenly imposed sovereignty in the borderlands. The system of selected approved routes, border-crossing points, and customs check-posts was instrumental to the constitution of the border. States have a special purpose for such discourses of control, which Scott calls “seeking like a state.” ¹³ Along the Punjab border, state authority proceeded at the expense of the former free movement of people and goods between Lahore and Amritsar. The system of controls was put into practice with the creation of an elaborate system of permits, licenses buttressed with check-posts, and preventive laws. While the names are easy to confuse, the Indian border force was called the Armed Punjab Police (APP) and its Pakistan counterpart was called the Punjab Border Police (PBP). Both were created in 1948.

Nonetheless, many borders in South Asia, particularly at peripheries, remained porous—often on purpose—for a long time after decolonization. ¹⁴ Even in Punjab, the India—Pakistan border remained permeable for years after Partition. ¹⁵ The drawing of borders creates not only cartographic anxiety and territorial problems, particularly when lines on maps only vaguely follow logical geographic or ethnographic contours, but also issues in citizen-state relations. ¹⁶ Borders in South Asia did not evolve gradually from an understanding between neighboring countries. Rather, the states of India and Pakistan were born with abrupt, illogical, and arbitrary borders, disrupting existing trading patterns and criminalizing the routine activities of pastoral communities. ¹⁷ The Punjab international border, which was created in 1947 at the end of British colonial rule, defined the boundary of the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. Along the over 550-kilometre section of this western boundary, the Punjab border bore many of the hallmarks of its South Asian prototype, dividing a population that spoke the same language and shared similar cultural traditions. Nevertheless, in the intervening years, territorial anxieties over security and sovereignty triggered concerns regarding unregulated mobilities and the prevalence of informal economies. The border was surveyed, demarcated, and marked with pillars, security forces were deployed, and in the aftermath of Sikh militancy in the 1980s, India fenced off a section.

Punjab was not the ideal place to draw an international dividing line that stretched from Kashmir to Rajasthan. ¹⁸ The fact that trade and migration had filtered across the region for centuries posed problems for anyone seeking to enforce the new boundary line. Networks of roads and railways had been the traditional arteries of trade in the region for decades. The partition of Punjab resulted in the partitions of many territories and infrastructures. Furthermore, while zigzagging along village and town boundaries, the environmental and riverine nature of the border posed additional problems, such as reefs, tiny waterways, tributaries, streams, and jungles. The 1947 Radcliffe Award found rivers to be a convenient instrument for partitioning territories, but river systems created difficulties when standing in for the border. At the time, Punjab had a permanent pasture because of its rivers, as the Ravi ran parallel to the boundary from Ranian (near Amritsar), while the Sutlej skirted from Fazilka to Sulemanki. However, these rivers are prone to suddenly changing course. The combined effect was that a number of Punjab’s villages were situated along rivers that constituted the new international border. This border environment made it difficult not only for survey teams to demarcate on the ground but also for policing. The changeability of Punjab’s rivers exacerbated tensions over border canal headworks. ¹⁹ Not surprisingly, environmental and pastoralist border areas were more porous than other sections.

In many ways, the border formation in Punjab was an uneven process; a project of decades of encounters and negotiations deciding factors on the ground and involving different administrative branches. After months of protracted negotiations to settle the boundary’s demarcation, both the Indian and Pakistani governments reached an agreement to set up a joint surveyor-general in 1951 and, two years later, the Punjab Implementation Committee. With the assistance of the directorate of land revenue, work and power departments, and other institutions in the border-creating process, demarcation and indexing began. In 1953, the surveyors-general of Pakistan and India completed the first “preliminary and on-the-spot survey” along the districts of Lahore and Amritsar, Sialkot and Gurdaspur, and Kasur and Ferozepur, mapping out a 150-kilometer boundary to minute detail, with rivers and other environmental features. ²⁰

The demarcation line immediately aggravated nascent differences around the interpretation of the Radcliffe Award and the actual implementation of the boundary on the ground. The border’s location was hotly contested, occasionally leading to disputes, misunderstandings, and even border clashes. Cross-border raids became exceedingly common, delaying the work of positioning teams that sought to map out the limits of the neighboring spheres. Efforts were made to solve outstanding border disputes at both the local and national levels. In August 1953, for example, the deputy commissioners of Lahore and Amritsar met at Wagah and agreed on one of the four disputed points between Wagah and Attari on the railway track, referring a dozen other disputes in the three border districts to the central financial commissioners of India and Pakistan. ²¹

Problems dividing the agricultural land of the local peasantry, especially shared pastoral landscapes, also played a part in delaying the process of demarcation. The Radcliffe Award cut a channel several hundred miles long, mostly through settled agricultural land. The boundary crisscrossed through hundreds of scattered villages, slicing through regional agricultural and economic networks. The lines especially affected agricultural communities who had previously shared not only farming equipment and labor but also a local system of pastoralism for livestock rearing. The Punjab countryside was a dense patchwork of small and large holdings, the rights over which were shared in a variety of ways. Government documents show that people along the frontier ignored the existence of a border altogether. In some places, disputed areas were renegotiated among the border people themselves through a mutual exchange of land. Some peasants appealed to governments to transfer land away from the border, and some communities remained in territorial limbo for years, if not decades. In places, disputes between the rival parties over land possession involved local officials on both sides of the border, sometimes culminating in border clashes. One border surveillance report stated that in April 1948, when a land dispute could not be resolved in the village of Kartal (near Zafarwal, Pakistan), a group of 150 Sikhs, the former residents of the village, raided it and destroyed crops. ²²

This shared ownership problematized the process of border demarcation negotiations between India and Pakistan and often resulted in violent altercations. In other words, even as the Radcliffe Award imposed a line from above, right to land was still negotiated—with varying success—on the ground, often by those who lived there. Many peasants on both sides of border assertively claimed these interlocked areas to be grazing land for their animals. Sometimes, individual land disputes turned into full-fledged international border clashes between India and Pakistan. In November 1952, for example, the villages of Rania, Daoke, and Rajatal (in Amritsar) became the scene of a protracted stand-off between the two neighbors, who exchanged heavy fire for three days. ²³

Pakistan’s slow mapping of the boundary concerned India, especially the low priority given to the Punjab border in the wake of the 1955 Pant-Mirza Agreement. While the Indian parliament had ratified the agreement, the government of Pakistan used all available ploys to delay the process of demarcation. It was at this time that Indian Prime Minister Nehru wrote to his Pakistani counterpart on 4 April 1956:

India’s confidence has been badly shaken by Pakistan’s non-ratification of the Pant-Mirza Agreement. Most of the latest border incidents are the result of the non-implementation of the agreement … The Radcliffe Award will naturally be the basis of this demarcation but adjustments might be made, by agreement of the two governments, so as to avoid as far as possible international frontier being unnatural and arbitrary such as when a village might be divided…. If we can fix a rigid timetable for it as I understand that it is a complicated business. ²⁴

What emerges from this statement is that India took an extremely serious interest in the demarcation of the western border. Regulating the flow of people and commodities had become an affair of state of the utmost significance. Alongside the importance of territory and economic sovereignty, there were, however, environmental hindrances to be tackled as well. As India began to assert more of a grip on its side of the border, Pakistan manufactured multiple excuses to avoid the demarcation, including proposing “certain changes” to the 1955 Pant-Mirza Agreement such as the simultaneous demarcation of the borders of Punjab and Bengal. Inevitably, relations between the neighbors became strained. India viewed the two issues as quite separate, believing there to be no useful purpose to “mixing them up,” as such would only lead to further delay. India saw Pakistan’s reluctance to ratify the agreement as the main hurdle, and viewed the modifications Pakistan suggested as against the “very spirit of the agreement and part of delaying tactics.” ²⁵

From the outset, Pakistan was much concerned about the demarcation and policing of the East Pakistan boundary with West Bengal to deal with potential threat of jute smuggling, which became “the centerpiece of a new national development programme” processed under state control. ²⁶ As a consequence, Pakistan border policies and resources were more quickly and efficiently implemented and invested in the eastern border than the western. As early as 1949, the government of Pakistan began to establish new outposts on the Bengal border expressly to stop the smuggling of jute, fish, and food grains to India. ²⁷ Three years later, the government introduced the passport regime by classifying Indian visas into six categories. Special arrangements were made for the issue of passports to the “border residents of East Pakistan” who had to pay “frequent visits to places across the border for trade or other essential purposes.” ²⁸ While such a specification was not on offer for Punjab borderlanders, “special arrangements” were made for the issue of passports in West Punjab to pilgrims, sports teams, and “goodwill missions” regarding the 1947 Partition-related recovery of abducted persons. ²⁹

While the passport system replaced the existing permit system, it initially aimed to thwart unofficial movements between East Pakistan and India, where around 8,000 people crossed the border daily by smuggling through the railway stations of Darsana and Benapole. A 1952 report of the British high commissioner in Dhaka to London described the “illegal traffic of smugglers, currency racketeers and political undesirables” between the two Bengals as “spurious.” As far as Pakistan was concerned, the introduction of the passport system would “automatically eliminate this kind of traffic.” ³⁰ Indian newspapers denounced Pakistan’s “obstructive attitude,” contrasting it with the “Indian liberal approach to the border policy.” ³¹

Earlier, at the May 1952 passport conference in Karachi, India had proposed “passports without visas” between the divided Bengals on the grounds of “common citizenship in the Commonwealth and to eliminate visa work,” for which Pakistan was not prepared. Pakistan cited the example of South Africa as a Commonwealth country that required visas from other Commonwealth members. Another Indian suggestion was to try the visa system “experimentally for a year in the Punjab border only.” Pakistan insisted that replacing the permit system with a passport system would offer “greater facilities for travellers,” ensuring “security of the countries.” ³² In actuality, Pakistan’s central concern was curbing jute smuggling to India and, to this end, implemented a number of regulatory institutions, procedures of inspection, and systems of penalties and punishments throughout the 1950s. ³³

To intensify its surveillance of East Pakistan trade, the Pakistani parliament passed the East Bengal Smuggling of Food Grains Act in 1953, outlining that it would be an offence if the quantity of grains exceeded the maximum fixed by the government. ³⁴ Two years later, the government announced a scheme to purchase jute in the five-mile-deep border belt to avoid smuggling. When this scheme could not thwart cross-border contraband trade, Pakistan imposed “a dusk-to-dawn curfew” along its 2,000-mile border with India in January 1957 to stop the “smuggling of jute and rice to India.” ³⁵ By the end of that year, Pakistan had unleashed an anti-smuggling drive (Operation Closed Door), deploying the military in an effort to stop the annual loss of Rs. 80 crores in foreign exchange to India as a result of jute and currency smuggling. ³⁶

In December 1957, during his visit to Dacca and a 500-mile flight along the Bengal border, the Pakistan Prime Minister Feroz Khan Noon suggested the death penalty as “a strong deterrent to smuggling” food grains, fish, cotton and jute into India. ³⁷ Yearly, the value of these illicit commodities amounted to USD 20 million. ³⁸ While Operation Closed Door was designed to bolster East Pakistan’s economy and stop the drain of crores of assets annually to India, its outcome was limited. The effort appears to have failed, as an index of the state economy was the value of the rupee. At the start of the operation, the exchange rate stood at Rs. 100 Indian to Rs. 136 Pakistani; three months later, the rate had declined to Rs. 100 Indian to Rs. 142 Pakistani. In 1958, Pakistan increased its security deployment at the East Bengal border in accordance with the army’s commitment to “operation close door … to clean things up … and of the arrests of black marketers, racketeers and smugglers.” ³⁹ General Umrao Khan, the newly appointed chief martial administrator of East Pakistan, stated that “Partition has now taken place for the first time” in the Bengal borderland. He initiated an inquiry against “anti-state elements,” which now included Marwari merchants, who controlled the region’s jute trade. For the first time, the National and Grindlays Bank (a British bank in Dhaka) came under scrutiny for “engaging in unwise lending” to jute dealers. ⁴⁰

For India, smuggling from West Bengal to East Bengal was an equally strategic national issue. As Indian Prime Minister Nehru wrote to the chief minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra Roy, on 13 August 1950:

Our Director of Intelligence today told me that he had been worried for some time past about the figures of migrations from and to West Bengal … a considerable number of people travelling were smugglers, carrying small quantities of goods each time … from West to East … cloth from East to West … fish…. The Director told that the normal and smugglers’ traffic daily was about 4000. ⁴¹

The Bengal border barricades—an elaborate system of outposts and anti-smuggling initiatives—formed a clear attempt to regulate the movement of goods. India sought export alternatives for Calcutta’s jute mills industry, the biggest consumer of jute in the world, and, by the early 1950s, much of the demand for its jute goods came from Argentina and other South American countries. ⁴² Despite all these arrangements, government documents show that smuggling along the eastern borderland continued unabated. Between 1965–1966, there were 10,543 “cases of smuggling” registered in Pakistan, of which 9,447 were recorded in East Bengal alone. ⁴³

Van Schendel provides the most sustained analysis in The Bengal Borderland, strikingly contrasting the Punjab and Bengal borderlands. The need for effective border maintenance impacted wider processes of state construction involving the growth of several levels of government institutions. Such institutions were put in place more quickly and efficiently in Punjab, according to van Schendel, than in the Bengal borderland. The Punjab border barricades better regulated the movement of people and goods, and taxed trade served wider national interests rather than merely the local economy. ⁴⁴ To use van Schendel’s own conceptualization, the Bengal borderland persisted in large areas as an “adolescent border,” while its Punjab counterpart rapidly acquired the trappings of an “adult” one. ⁴⁵

A recent study of the Punjab border reveals its striking dissimilarities with the Bengal borderland, arguing that the Punjab borderland—far from being relatively closed—was as fragile and permeable as its eastern counterpart, at least up until the late 1980s. ⁴⁶ The constant struggle between the state and cross-border mobilities played out along the Punjab border, where the boundary demarcation remained unfixed years after Partition and state control was diminished by both the region’s vastness and the shared cultural homogeneity of the borderland communities. Contraband became a common activity of border life, presenting a challenge to the state’s territorial integrity and border-making process. The following section focuses on the actions of low-level bureaucrats and their ambivalent relation to both border people and the state.

Border and bureaucratic discourses: criminalizing the border-dwellers

Partition created a borderland society in South Asia. Within months after Partition, India and Pakistan created “Indians” and “Pakistanis” by establishing visa regimes. While free movement along the new international boundaries was possible for a short period after the cessation of Partition violence and tide of refugees, from 15 October 1948, entry into Pakistan required a valid “permit” issued by the Pakistan high commissioner in New Delhi or the deputy high commissioner in Jullundur. These permits were limited to two months from the first entry into Pakistan and confined travelers to the city specified on the permit. In 1952, a passport system characterized by excessive red-tape replaced the permit system. Legally, access became difficult and cast suspicion on those who wanted to cross the border, as strict conditions were attached to visits and tough regulations limited the goods that could be transported. By the late months of 1948, local border officials in Wagha began reporting to the headquarters in Lahore, who in turn reported to the central government in Karachi, incidences of illegal cross-border movements by the border population. At first, the BIRs collated by the Wagha border authorities focused on the illegal crossing of “local villagers.” Soon, however, BIRs of the early 1950s began speaking more conclusively of “contact” between border-dwellers on both sides of the border. These BIRs hint that the Punjab borderland populations were adept at exploiting opportunities for cross-border trade (smuggling) created by the existence of different government systems, monetary methods, and consumer goods prices. Local knowledge of the immediate environs and pre-Partition social ties on both sides of the border was the most important card borderlanders possessed. Pre-existing cross-border connections also meant that relations of trust were more easily built. By the 1950s, certain localities, points, and groups had made themselves clear in the official records. One police FIR for Noor Ala describes an experience of cross-border trade centered around the capacity of navigating skills and trade networks by blending profits from both sides of the border: “I knew them [Sikhs] before Pakistan came into being. We have been in the consumer trade for years between Lahore and Amritsar … I used to go and come back seven days in a week.” ⁴⁷

There is evidence that border populations on the Indian side likewise exploited the ambiguities of their location to the full. Official documents in the Manawa police station on the exchanged “List of Smugglers” indicate certain border-dwellers’ involvement in the cross-border activities from the Amritsar border villages, namely Nuashera Dalla, Burki, Havellian, Daok, Rasulpur, and Kakar Mang. “Over half of people in these border villages are engaged in smuggling,” believed the officer in charge of Gharinda police station, whose area comprised these villages. ⁴⁸

As border populations exploited cross-border opportunities, local officials fretted about the border’s territorial integrity, and controlling border-dwellers thus became a priority. Archival records reveal that the two border authorities kept count of the inventory through frequent updates of borderlanders’ mobilities and included not just the people of a given border village but also their cattle on the exchange list. Other reasons given by the border bureaucracy included that villagers were always inclined to exploit their locational settlings to their advantage, making their loyalty as citizens questionable. The border authorities viewed border populations, by virtue of their new occupation alone, as potential criminals or even spies. By the 1950s, border officials—the state’s institutional presence at the margin of society—had reported “almost the whole adult male population” of the Punjab border villages to be “under suspicions of smuggling.” ⁴⁹

With their own sense of the border, these low-level bureaucrats portrayed the border-dwelling people as transmitters of criminality—what we might call a borderland community’s history of the state! Borderlanders were collectively viewed as one of the greatest security threats to the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state. One BIR of 1954 estimated that “almost all of the male population in the close border belt” within ten kilometers of the border was involved in smuggling and needed to be quarantined and monitored. ⁵⁰

How significant were these alarmist border surveillance reports? While it is uncertain how such cumbersome claims were intended, certainly the regular border reports to the headquarters of Lahore and Amritsar became very important, as they created a territorial bureaucratic discourse by citing the statistics of “border incidents” and the scale of contraband “seizures” to justify more power, reinforcement, and employment. As such, these locally rooted officials—vital agents in this process—represented the border as a physically defined line on the ground through the criminalization of border-dwellers, who enjoyed an extra layer of impunity due to the fact that those committing such crimes could easily cross the border. ⁵¹

Confronted with the tense realities of everyday border situations on the ground, local officials were conditioned to mull over in terms of a bounded space. They were often the most vocal proponents of preserving the integrity of the border, whereas national imperatives were deemed more willing to resolve disputes practically without direct confrontation. The general situation affected bureaucrats at the top rung much less than officials on the ground, where the non-existence of demarcation easily led to disagreement and disputes. This governmental discourse of the India-Pakistan borderland, through exaggerated enumerations, began to acquire threatening prominence in the official records and provide justification for the central bureaucracy’s drafting of anti-smuggling measures and surveillance installations. By the early 1950s, the Wagah authorities had started receiving instructions from the Lahore headquarters on mustering “particulars” about the volume of “anti-social activities” in the Punjab borderland. ⁵² Such actions, in turn, defined the border not only locally but also in the national imagination of the state. Above all, such actions also had enduring impact in terms of how the populace in the heartlands of the state would view the borderland.

Why did the border communities come to have such different images? The boundary was continually defined in the months and years following August 1947 by the everyday acts and practices of state actors as they strove to demarcate the boundary on the ground. These locally rooted officials, whom Jones terms the “petty sovereigns of governmentality,” imbued with the notion that the borderland was “an exceptional space,” played a significant role in the production of a “bureaucratic discourse” on the process of state formation and the framing of varied categories of nationalizing projects within an overarching narrative of illegal cross-border activity. ⁵³ The Punjab border bureaucracy, located at a distance from central and higher authorities, had substantial discretionary power at the peripheries of the state to loosely interpret laws, bringing the border into being not only on the ground but also in the national imaginary.

One of the significant aspects of administrative bureaucracy, in both colonial and postcolonial settings, was its granting of great discretionary powers to the executive bureaucracy. Official powers of discretion operated as “alien authority,” constituting the law of the state and facilitating governance. ⁵⁴ These empowered ordinary public officers, sometimes to the degree of tyranny, to bring the quotidian violence of bureaucratic paperwork to the surface. Such power consisted of the state’s unwritten and unspoken rules, which operated between the written law and its application. As Ann Stoler described, this involved “distinguish[ing] between what was ‘unwritten’ because it could go without saying and ‘everyone knew it,’ what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it could not be said.” ⁵⁵ The permissibility of social mobilities and commodity movements was repeatedly renegotiated because the definition was often at the unilateral discretion of locally rooted border officials, not of the central state. In daily border life, a symbiotic relationship was often forged between state and non-state actors. “Crossing fees” to checkpoint authorities ranged from “cultural tropes” involving the performative gifting of naan and fresh vegetables to “institutionalized payments.” ⁵⁶ Officials at the Punjab border could enforce mandates arbitrarily, thereby selectively and discretionally deciding which kinds of goods to let through, in what quantities, by whom, and in what moments.

The Punjab border was a smuggling frontier where practically all large-scale smuggling operations required the co-operation of border institutions. The Border Security Force (BSF) was sometimes popularly referred to as the “Border Smuggling Force” and the Radcliffe line as the “Radcliffe Plunder Line.” ⁵⁷ The Punjab border became an economic periphery through which traders frequently circumvented international tariffs using institutionalized bribery, seen as a necessary informal mechanism for moving goods across the border. In such cases, border institutions, traders, smugglers, and border-dwelling people simply did not see eye to eye, but in many manners depended on one another. “I used to provide roti and lassi [yoghurt drink] to the border patrolling police near the Burki naka-bandi,” a border-dweller explained.

We would cross the border and deliver items and return with lachi [cardamom] and other items from the local markets even in Khalra and Patti. Upon returning, when the border guards had finished food, we would collect our dishes…. Sometimes, we were given a time slot to cross the border and had to come back in due time. ⁵⁸

State and non-state actors across the border were socially and economically intertwined, forming “extra-state” configurations by exploiting border policies to their own benefit. ⁵⁹ Border institutions tended to regard each other as competitors, as there was almost no twinning or communication between customs and the police at the Punjab border, but there was intense rivalry between them over graft. Customs officers considered police action to infringe on their mandate, while the police alleged that “smugglers” often received soft treatment from customs; in such instances, border authorities on both sides of the border actively undermined each other’s credibility. On the other hand, the relationship between “smugglers” and border institutions were not wholly confrontational. A reading of several crime reports shows there was co-ordination between officials on either side of the line that led the contraband trade system to different levels. In 1951, when Fletcher, a British editor of the Lahore newspaper Civil and Military Gazette, was arrested in connection with smuggling gold into India, he named police inspectors on both sides of the border who aided his passage through the Wagah-Attari crossing numerous times. ⁶⁰

This combination of regulatory power and discretion characterized the Wagah-Attari crossing, a site of intense interactions between law enforcement and law evasion. Even though the administrative presence was stronger at this check-post than anywhere else along the Punjab border, this crossing was the center of the exchange of contraband goods. Nowhere else was the “everyday state” so aggressively loosening and tightening its territorial grip at the same time. Yet the attitude of the locally rooted officials, who were the state’s human presence at the border, was malleable to the needs of contraband trade, especially regarding consumer goods, even while playing an important role in the emergence of border discourses.

Border pastoralists as “maj chor”

In the case of the Punjab borderland, governmental discourse on pastoral communities had a striking impact. The policing of pastoralists was associated with state-making, as they were viewed by the border bureaucracy as transmitting lawlessness, even though evidence to this effect is patchy. Between 1948–1954, border crime reports regularly detailed the unlawful activities of “cattle badmash” belonging mainly to members of the Nakhi, Bagga, Dogra, Sandhu, and Gujjar Bagga biraderi, who primarily operated along the Kasur-Ferozepur borderland. Livestock marketing in Kasur remained almost entirely in the hands of these groups. While the informal livestock sector was relatively efficient in supplying urban consumers with fresh meat and dairy, by the 1950s, these pastoralists had decisively been associated with criminality within the local bureaucratic genre of the “everyday state”—the “official” way of seeing these livestock-rearing communities, as opposed to the view of the groups in question. The local officials’ lack of the vision—to invoke Scott’s ocular metaphor—was mirrored in the certainty that, while there are an abundance of BIRs about transmitting lawbreaking, there are very few relating to the minutiae of pre-existing customary rights over shared pastoral land use, even when the delimitation of boundaries between India and Pakistan remained unmarked. ⁶¹

Although the border rarely proved a deterrent to pastoral activities, the threat supposedly posed by these people was additionally rooted in their ability to cross long distances from the border space into the inner reaches of the Bella Areas of the Mamdot estate to the Sulemanki Farmlands. For example, Haji Bagga, from the village of Kot Bagga, was well known in the area (in the Kanganpur police station) for cross-border cattle raids. Several FIRs from the Kanganpur police station mentioned the “Bagga” of the village Bagga for cattle-lifting across the border.

Haji Bagga, the headman of the village, owned farmlands around the border areas, which were a sanctuary for the “Ferozepur cattle” smugglers, mainly the Rai Sikhs. ⁶² Owning hundreds of head of cattle himself, Bagga ran the local seasonal cattle festival and had emerged as a powerful figure in the livestock-rearing community of Kasur. He was locally acknowledged as the badshah (king) of cattle chor up until October 1958, when his farmlands were raided in the military government’s anti-smuggling drives. Bagga was arrested and sentenced to ten years jail by a Kasur magistrate. ⁶³

Although local officials in Kasur collectively implicated cattle groups in criminal activity, there are very few references to the arrest or imprisonment of these individuals. ⁶⁴ Still, this overarching official desire remained entrenched in both locally rooted administrative discourses and societal prejudice, even until today. The same is true, to some extent, in the case of the Rai community on the other side of the border. A recent study has noted how the Indian Punjab cattle smugglers, especially the Rai Sikhs from Fazilka and Ferozepur, developed “their new-found locales across the border” for their own gains. ⁶⁵ The border institutions portrayed Rai Sikhs as “cattle chor” in postcolonial border-making situations. The settlement of Rai Sikhs along the border in Indian Punjab demonstrates—in ways suggestive of the experience of the Meo community in Pakistan—that similar processes were under way in Pakistan, suggesting the need for comparative cross-border work.

Meos as “mukhbir”

Within these voluminous BIRs, the mobilities of the people of the Meo community were described as “smuggling” and “anti-social activities.” The Meos, a migrant community in the Punjab borderland who migrated from the former princely states of Alwar, Bharatpur, and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab, had long been the face of the “criminal tribes” that inhabited colonial categorizations of different groups. ⁶⁶ Within this discourse, the Meos emerged as a particularly suspect community in both official postcolonial discourses and local popular folklore. Meos settled in Punjab borderland in the 1950s. In both crime reports and border surveillance reports, the Meos are described as maj chor (cattle thieves) and “backward.” ⁶⁷ Their “backwardness” was linked directly to their indulging in cattle theft, as their names were understood as “Hindus.” By the 1950s, Meos were decisively associated with criminality within the overstretching discourse of locally rooted state officials, presented as potentially criminal border-dwellers who crossed the border for cattle raids and, as such, posed a hazard to the integrity of the border. Such portrayals translated into state initiatives to guard the border and police the community. These constructions of Meo criminality were particularly indispensable to this process. In effect, through their marking out in locally rooted bureaucratic discourse, the Meos came to encompass a distinct and cohesive category for defense of the border. They were thus viewed as potential criminals or sometimes spies by the border authorities.

Did colonial knowledge of the Meos also shape the postcolonial state’s descriptions of the community in term of transmitting criminality along the border? Mayaram’s point of the colonial state is not that much different from iterations of the postcolonial state, as the framing of the Meos’ collective identity in this way was at least partly rooted in the colonial association of the group as a “criminal tribe” with “thieving and plundering propensities.” ⁶⁸ After Partition, the construction of the Meos as criminal border-crossers by local low-level bureaucrats both imagined the border as a space of national interest and helped militarize it. While border police reports implicated the Meo as a collective group, it was primarily individual members of the community who travelled across the border, sometimes for criminal ends, and were marked as cattle chor. ⁶⁹ Although this framing was incoherent and locally contingent, it had acquired widespread notoriety in popular border folklore and neighborly jokes and slurs by the 1950s. Fitting in these national frames, popular accounts also referred to the Meos as chor. ⁷⁰ In all these narrations, the Meos’ reputation as a dangerous community was seen in term of transmitting criminality along the border.

While the Meos consolidated their position at the Punjab borderland through interactions with border institutions, they were decidedly unwelcome by the local population, mainly composed of the Muslim castes of Jat, Rajport, Arian, and Kashmiri. Some popular Punjabi border ballads focus on the jokes and “neighborly names” that involved ethnic slurs. Some Meos became victims and were even murdered. Anwar Nat, who worked as a carrier for four decades, summed up differences between the Meos and locals:

Meos were never a part of border people. They spoke differently…. wear differently… intermarried within their own people… They were those who worked as mukhbir. They were double agents for both India and Pakistan. [Therefore] top gold smugglers never recruited them as carriers… They were [comparatively] poor than the local population. To be honest, that was not an ideal exchange of the transfer of population [at Partition]. We substituted Kaan [crows, Meos] with Moors [peacocks, Sikhs]. ⁷¹

While Meos were unwelcome by the local population, they consolidated their position in the Punjab borderland through interactions with the border institutions, for whom they worked as mukhbir (informal spy) in the initial years. Compared to the “local” borderlanders, who kept ties with former Sikh landlords, Meos had relatively limited knowledge of local geographies and lacked cross-border contacts near the Lahore-Amritsar border. While Meos were not immune to smuggling, they also saw opportunities as informants of the border institutions. Members of the Meo community were recruited as mukhbir by the Pakistani Wagah authorities to make effective inroads into the workings of local society. Exploiting the localized differences between migrant Meos and the locals, the Wagah authorities cultivated informants among the Meo population—at very little cost.

In the case of Bengal, Sur notes that—in the interests of nation-building—both India and East Pakistan used border villagers and trans-border kinship ties for espionage, either through formal employment or by assisting the police, with whom they shared ethnic and religious affinities. ⁷² While there was no coherent program of intelligence gathering on the Punjab border, the Wagah police had started to make effective inroads into the workings of local society through the recruitment of Meo border-dwellers. Informants were paid for the details they gathered about the identity of smugglers, their whereabouts, and the routes they used. In 1958, the Wagah border police raided the house of Noor Butt in the border village of Manawa and arrested twelve Sikhs. Information from Aziz Meo seems to have prompted this raid. A day before the raid, he had informed the Wagah police that “Sikhs are staying at Noor Butt’s place… they will be crossing the border tomorrow mid-night carrying goods.” ⁷³

This informal mukhbir system became a tool to control the border population, whom the border institutions collectively viewed as transmitting criminality. A reading of several border surveillance reports reveals that, by the late 1950s, many mukhbir had been inserted into the local society to report on suspicious activities, such as smuggling. The Wagah authorities had come to appreciate early on that the only way to win against the border population was working through trusted informants—effectively turning the border population against itself. Individuals belonging to the Meo community were mainly cultivated as “sources” for the authorities. For example, a border report from October 1957 detailed: “a mukhbir informed that twenty-five Sikh smugglers are staying in Majeed Dayal’s house in Jallo More … they will be crossing into India Friday night.” ⁷⁴ These smugglers were all arrested in a midnight raid and their commodities seized. In another incident, based on information from a “Meo source,” a production center of gold-smuggling jackets was discovered in Jallo More village. “As a result of the raid… 300 jackets were found.” ⁷⁵ Subsequent reports continued in the same vein. Major Dilshad, who served in the Wagah FIU, explained how the informal intelligence-gathering system became a double-edged sword.

Many people plied as a “source” for different agencies. They had many roles. They were porters, smugglers, and spies at the same time. They worked as a double agent for different agencies on both sides of the border…. They used to exploit rivalry among the customs, police, and other agencies…. My best “source” was Dinu [a Meo from Govinda village], who was murdered. ⁷⁶

At Wagah, the varied border agencies operated independently and competed to collect information. Dilshad continued: “Often there was a run: Rangers mukhbir, FIU mukhbir, police mukhbir.” ⁷⁷

Explaining the Kutch section of the borderland between India and Pakistan, Ibraham notes: “The bureaucracy is itself the site of multiple discursive strands, which contest and compete with each other in the production of official policy.” ⁷⁸ The paid network of informants kept the authorities fairly up to date about suspicious activities in border villages. The acquiring of such information was deemed crucial if the emerging boundary spaces were ultimately to be controlled. Information could be used to gauge situations, e.g., whether different smuggling participants were interlinked in some ways to urban traders or transnational rings, forming a racket. Information, however, was not enough to provide the border authorities with evidence useful to thwarting smuggling. It is not surprising that Meos, acting as informants, were viewed with hostility and suspicions by the local population. The Meos were certainly not part of the notion of the regional economics of smuggling in the Punjab borderland, partly because of their labelling as mukhbir. ⁷⁹

Subsequently, the Meos living on the border came to be looked upon by members of the established population as despicable “others,” working for the Wagah authorities against the local population. While some Meos worked as mukhbir for a living, the community came to be collectively associated with the border institutions. Consequently, the Meos locked themselves into a vicious cycle, as both the Punjabi borderlanders and Indian Border Force perceived the (migrant) Meos as working for the Wagah authorities. Therefore, a Meo came to assume the status of an “outsider” and “spy” in the Punjab borderland. The community had to pay the price for this concocted narrative, with many families forcibly displaced from the borderland during “border belt schemes” under the auspices of in the “interest of national security.” ⁸⁰

Conclusion

The early years of Pakistani statehood were marked by a complex and uneven process of translating the abstract notion of sovereignty into tangible control over borders. Moving beyond the dominant security-centered narratives that treat these frontiers primarily as sites of geopolitical contestation, this study foregrounded the everyday practices, negotiations, and frictions that shaped the border as both a material and social construct. By examining bureaucratic procedures, classificatory regimes, and enforcement mechanisms employed by the state—alongside the strategies through which borderland communities navigated, contested, or appropriated them—this analysis has shown that the categories of national and regional, self and “other,” were neither fixed nor preordained, but instead were actively produced through interaction. The Pakistani state’s differential engagement with its eastern and western frontiers further underscores the need to view border-making as a contingent and multi-scalar process, shaped as much by local dynamics as by national imperatives. In recognizing borders as spaces of both constraint and possibility, this article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how the postcolonial states and their peripheries co-constituted one another in the aftermath of Partition.

As Stoler has shown, “colonial administrations were prolific producers of social categories [through] unsure and hesitant sorts of documentation and sensibilities.” Not much was “hegemonic about how those [categories] worked on the ground,” and “disquiet, anxieties, uncertainties repeatedly unsettled the conceit that all was in order, because papers classified people.” ⁸¹ In postcolonial settings, the border was an ideal site for the construction of varied categories of criminal communities. With their own sense of the border, officials routinely portrayed the Punjab border societies collectively as transmitters of criminality, framing them primarily in terms of their ability to transgress the border spaces. In this evolving bureaucratic imperative, these local state actors attempted to justify militarization on and near the border. These local border bureaucrats’ repeated enunciations of the threatened sanctity of the border translated into state discourses and initiatives that aimed to materially demarcate the border, not merely in negotiation and national imagination but physically on the ground. For these reasons, both the demarcation and securitization of the border were important, even if the actual level of regular border clashes between India and Pakistan never rose above a small scale. It was the actions of border-dwellers that brought the border into effect and made an equivocal line real. In other words, local histories were shaped as much by the specificities of the borderland communities as they were by border institutions. By extension, the criminal and legal processes were very closely tied together, defining one another. As the Punjab frontier was being demarcated and policed, a large number of people continued to challenge state authority.

Crime reports reveal an administrative discourse that framed Punjab’s border communities as criminal tribes, constructing their supposed “criminality” within the framework of postcolonial border-making. These findings therefore highlight the prominence of postcolonial priorities and imperatives. The history of cattle communities discloses a narrative of centralizing bureaucratic policies in postcolonial state formation and the criminalization of peasant evasion of such procedures. The perennial association of cattle communities with notions of criminality and resistance to authority not only reveals the long-standing inheritance of colonial categories of difference, which marked out criminality-prone communities, but also continues to inform the parameters of their relationship to the state. Such framing of these groups finds parallels across the border and hints at the need for comparative cross-border work.