A Style of Illegal Entry

On Friday, an Assamese daily published photographs on its front page to show how migrants from Bangladesh made their illegal entries into India across barbed wire fencing. The photographs showed how the fencing wires were parted wide enough to permit the insertion of a bamboo or wooden frame over which the intruder was made to slide in a supine position. The ease with which this was done merely indicated how pointless it is to have a barbed wire fencing along an intertiol border unless the wires are stout, taut and close-knit enough to defy attempts at creating gaps. The interesting part of all this was that the manoeuvre was carried out in broad daylight. How was it possible to do all this in broad daylight and for the operation to be photographed without the BSF troops finding the time to intervene and even to shoot a few bullets in the air to frighten such intruders? And even if former Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s directive had been not to shoot illegal infiltrators along this border, there should have been both time and inclition to scare prospective infiltrators from indulging in such adventurism. Obviously, what photographers can shoot with their cameras does not provide adequate time for BSF forces to shoot with firearms.