In early May 2025, Indian authorities forcibly disappeared 38 Rohingya refugees from Delhi, deceiving them under the guise of biometric registration [1]. Among them were minors, the elderly, and the critically ill. They were flown, bound and blindfolded, to Port Blair, then loaded onto a naval vessel. Beaten and abused aboard, including reports of sexual assault, they were asked: “Myanmar or Indonesia?” They pleaded not to be sent back to the country they had fled. No one listened.
One by one, they were thrown into international waters and left to swim. Hours later, weak and disoriented, they realized the truth: they had landed back in Myanmar. This was not an isolated incident. India officially labels the Rohingya as “illegal immigrants.” Denied asylum, they are restricted from legal work, healthcare, and education. They live under constant threat of detention and deportation.
Postcolonial Realism
What is distinctive about India’s brutal handling of Rohingya refugees is its borrowing of the language of the very imperialist structures that once subjugated them. India acknowledges the global imperialist regime that produces refugee populations through war, underdevelopment, and climate collapse [2]. However, this acknowledgment is followed by a refusal to challenge imperialism in any substantive manner. Instead, a short-term model of securitization is adopted, which attempts to preserve the sanctity of borders through continuous expulsions of refugees.
In the 2018 Supreme Court hearing on Rohingya deportations, the Additional Solicitor General stated that India “cannot be the world’s refugee capital” [3]. This imports a Euro-American imaginary of being overrun by refugees, a fantasy central to the far-right politics of Europe and the U.S. The legal justification for the pushback operations (deploying chili spray and stun grenades) demonstrated how India is operationalizing the techniques of deterrence perfected by the global North, from Australia’s offshore detention model to the U.S.-Mexico border militarization.
The imperialist alignment of Indian refugee policy is deepened in Home Minister Amit Shah’s 2025 remarks, where he states that India is not a “dharamshala,” a term invoking hospitality and care, but one that is now rhetorically negated [4]. The distinction he draws between legal migrants who “spread prosperity” and others who are “a threat to security” is eerily consonant with the neoliberal securitization logic of Western asylum regimes, where economic utility determines the right to remain.
The anti-refugee sentiments of the Indian nationalist imaginary are paradoxically realized through a recognition of unjust imperialist systems. This paradox represents postcolonial realism: an ideological atmosphere in which the limits of political imagination are determined not by the dream of liberation, but by the pragmatics of imperial endurance.
In the contemporary global imperial order, the structures of domination (military hierarchies, financial institutions, surveillance networks, climate apartheid) have become so vast, interconnected, and self-reinforcing that they appear as immutable facts rather than historical constructs. The structural inequalities of the global order are acknowledged only to justify the adoption of imperial techniques: deterrence without redress, visibility without hospitality, sovereignty without transformation.
The national militarization of Indian borders is ultimately an expression of the incapacity to physically overturn the fossilized borders that mark the globe. Since the means of technologically advanced violence are concentrated in the Global North, the Global South experiences a deficit in physical strength, or the ability to impose its will on richer countries through the threat of destruction. When the international equations of violence are not favorable for ex-colonized countries, the next thing left to do is to enforce such violence at the regional level, where southern nations can try to compensate for the autonomy that they have lost due to global hierarchies.
Postcolonial border violence, then, is compensatory in nature: it is an affirmation of localized integrity attempting to conceal the country’s defeatist realism vis-à-vis global hierarchies. Insofar as imperialist nations are unwilling to give up their monopoly on violence, is the compensatory cycle of postcolonial border militarism the only reality left? Do the nations of the South need to dedicate all their resources to accessing military powers that can then allow them to impose their will on the North?
The Futility of Punishment
Mahatma Gandhi overcomes the vexing question of violence by pointing to its structural futility. Violence, he says, is motivated by the desire for “punishment,” to make the oppressor suffer for the oppression they have inflicted [5]. But the imposition of suffering on the other is not something that they will accept willingly. As a fundamentally coercive act, punishment is unsustainable: power maintained by force always provokes resistance, a resistance that demands another act of imposition. Violence, thus, seems to stretch into what GWF Hegel called a “bad infinity”: an arithmetic series repetitively trying to reach the infinite [6].
Gandhi uses the history of WWII to illustrate the bad infinity driving border violence [7]. After the devastation of World War I, France, haunted by its losses, built the Maginot Line, a massive fortification along the German border, to deter future invasion. In response, Nazi Germany expanded its own Siegfried Line, creating a mirrored structure of mutual defense. This arms race exemplifies the security dilemma: one nation’s defense becomes another’s threat, triggering endless militarization.
Both lines, though defensive in intent, normalized continental rearmament. When war came in 1940, Germany bypassed the Maginot Line through Belgium, rendering it obsolete. But the deeper failure lay in the belief that security could be achieved through fear.
This is the heart of Gandhi’s critique. He invokes these fortifications not to highlight tactical flaws, but to expose the logic of fear that underpins modern sovereignty. “It is the Maginot Line that has made the Siegfried Line necessary. And vice versa,” [8] he writes, capturing a loop of mutual insecurity in which each state sees the other as a permanent threat.
Gandhi’s point isn’t limited to aggressors like Nazi Germany. Even “defensive” nations, postcolonial or otherwise, become entangled in this violent logic when they prioritize deterrence over justice. To militarize is to accept fear as the basis of political life. It reflects a refusal to imagine peace beyond the mere absence of war, or sovereignty beyond control over land.
What would the alternative have been? A trans-border democratic model rooted in justice and dignity. Instead of investing in bunkers and artillery, Europe could have prioritized reconciliation, economic de-escalation, and popular diplomacy, restoring German dignity without rearming it. A continent built on worker solidarity and mutual disarmament might have done more to prevent fascism than any fortress ever could. Infinity lay not in an ever-receding destination to be reached through repetitive violence but in the very journey of creative cooperation.
Refusing the Desire for Borders
The Maginot-Siegfried paradigm of border security reflects a wider understanding of borders as politico-affective sites of imagination: borders can be maintained only if one believes that life is to be reproduced through discrete national units whose power has to be competitively increased against other such units. However, Gandhi refuses to harbor this belief. In “Non-Violence as Self-Defense,” he says: “Our economy would be so modeled as to prove no temptation for the exploiter. Whether one or many, I must declare my faith that it is better for India to discard violence altogether even for defending her borders” [9].
Here, borders are trivialized through the construction of an internally just society, a society that functions as an epistemic intervention on the level of global politics. Today, India’s top 1% holds more income today than it did under the British [10]. What if this model was changed so that everyone had access to a dignified live? The success of this model would then delegitimize the capitalist paradigm of manufactured scarcity and precarity, which motivates people to defend their borders. Borders don’t need defense if cooperation guarantees abundance for all.
This is a trans-border circuit of epistemology that slowly shifts how we think about existence. Ethics becomes political technology: by changing the terms of engagement (what people want, fear, value) you change the shape of global power relations. And this change reveals a world that desires the expansive reality of the world, instead of bordered territories.
Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh” is a searing reflection how the Partition of the subcontinent seems completely inane to the un-bordered thinking of the inmates of a lunatic asylum in Lahore [11]. One of the inmates, fed up with figuring out where exactly India and Pakistan are, climbs up the nearest tree. When the guard threaten him with punishment, he says, “I wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I wish to live in this tree.”
In the current world, the subjects living in the aftermath of colonialism and imperialism will keep desiring borders as long as they impotently want to punish their oppressors. Gandhi knew this was futile. As he said, “India can gain more by waiving the right of punishment. We have better work to do, a better mission to deliver to the world.” [12] While this mission may not match the grand abstractions of national borders, it will certainly embrace the intensity of Manto’s tree.
Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book “Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia” (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024) and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books.
