Rajnath Singh’s meeting with the Chief Ministers of five states bordering Bangladesh has scanned well-trodden ground in terms of the parameters discussed. In the case of West Bengal, the project to set up a border fence might flounder on the rock of land acquisition… and four decades after the unchecked influx from Bangladesh began. The demographic change may, therefore, be irreversible whether in Bengal or the other states in the North-east. West Bengal’s land policy now appears to have become a major hurdle to the erection of a border fence. As much is clear from the statement of the Union home secretary, Rajiv Gauba, after Thursday’s meeting ~ “Fencing along the Bangladesh border has hit a roadblock in Bengal because of non-availability of land and the state should arrange for land for the project.”

The short point must be that from one dispensation to another, the border-fence plan has failed to materialise. The border was porous in the mid-1970s and remains so to this day. But whereas the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had in 2006 issued citizenship cards to both the fake and the genuine, the present BJP dispensation obviously intends to address the issue from a different perspective. That compulsion was at the core of the Union home minister’s meeting with the five Chief Ministers on Thursday.

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If the Centre’s muted response is any indication, the BJP-led NDA government is unlikely to readily concur with Mamata Banerjee’s suggestion ~ theoretically based on the certitudes of a market economy. The Chief Minister would want the Centre to buy the land directly. She is reported to have made it clear that the state will not acquire the land forcibly… given the CPI-M’s misadventures in Singur and Nandigram. The suggestion is reasonable enough, but the inevitable repercussion of direct purchase calls for reflection by the Centre, the state, and the landowners. Not least because the character of the land in the five border states is not uniform and remains far from clear ~ whether it is fertile, mono-crop or multiple crop as in Singur or arid, as in Junglemahal.

Miss Banerjee has been remarkably prompt in assuring the Centre that the state “will extend all possible help to acquire the required land if the Centre accepted the state’s direct purchase policy”. A Centre-State consensus on land acquisition to check the illegal influx becomes ever so imperative as the project has been partially held up on this question. The fence, according to the Home minister, has come up on 684 km and 406 km remains unfenced. Just as land acquisition has impeded industrial expansion, so too has the failure led to an “open sesame” for illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Rajnath Singh’s plan to set up a Border Protection Grid, comprising physical barriers and surveillance, shall not be effective unless the fence is in place.