On a humid June afternoon, the 55-year-old Sati Rajbanshi sat in the narrow strip of land separating India and Bangladesh while border personnel argued over which country he belonged. Around him stood armed guards, barbed wire fences, and curious onlookers. Photographs and videos circulating on social media showed him sitting silently in the no-man’s-land, caught between two states that appeared unwilling to claim him.The image quickly went viral.Yet what made the incident remarkable was not merely the man’s predicament. It was the reaction it generated. Social media platforms were filled with comments describing him as an “illegal infiltrator”. Others demanded harsher action against undocumented migrants. People appeared less concerned with the man’s condition than with the symbolic significance attached to his presumed identity.Before any court had ruled, before any investigation had been completed, before the facts of the case had been established, thousands had already reached a verdict. The episode was not simply about one individual stranded at the border. It revealed something deeper about the contemporary politics of citizenship and belonging in India.Questions of migration and citizenship becoming part of mainstream political discourseOver the last decade, questions of migration and citizenship have increasingly moved from the margins of political discourse to its centre. The figure of the “illegal immigrant” has become one of the most powerful symbols in contemporary public life. It is invoked in debates about national security, demographic change, welfare distribution, electoral politics, and cultural identity. In the process, citizenship itself has begun to change its political meaning.The consequences are visible not only at the border but across the country.In recent years, reports have periodically emerged from places such as Bengaluru, Odisha, Gurugram, Chhattisgarh and Delhi of Bengali-speaking workers being questioned, detained, harassed or accused of being Bangladeshis or Rohingyas. In several instances, those targeted were later found to possess valid Indian identity documents. Yet the suspicion persisted.For many migrant workers, the problem is not merely documentation. It is perception.Language becomes suspicious. Accent becomes suspicious. Food and dressing habits become suspicious. Above all, being a muslim in contemporary India makes one vulnerable. Even the possession of identity documents does not always resolve the question.The issue is particularly significant because migrant labour has become an indispensable component of the modern Indian economy. Workers from districts such as Murshidabad, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, and South 24 Parganas travel thousands of kilometres to work in construction sites, factories, warehouses, restaurants, and transport networks across India. Entire local economies increasingly depend on migration and remittances.Yet the same workers who are welcomed as labour are often viewed with suspicion as people.This contradiction lies at the heart of the present moment.The politics of the ‘illegal immigrant’The figure of the Bangladeshi migrant has occupied an important place in Indian politics for decades, particularly in Assam and the border districts of eastern India. Concerns regarding undocumented migration were never entirely imaginary. Questions of land, political representation, and demographic change have long shaped regional politics.What has changed is the scale and scope of the discourse. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the dominant force in Indian politics transformed a regional issue into a national political narrative. Terms such as “infiltrator”, “illegal migrant”, and “demographic threat” became part of everyday political vocabulary.The controversy surrounding the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) further intensified these debates. The recently concluded SIR exercise in West Bengal has added fuel to fire by excluding millions of people from the voter’s list in spite of them being mapped with the 2002 electoral roll on the pretext of logical discrepency. A disproportionate amount of those excluded were Muslims, Matuas and people from other backward castes.Supporters argued that these measures were necessary to identify undocumented migrants and protect national interests. Critics, however, warned that they risked producing new forms of exclusion by transforming citizenship from a settled legal status into an object of continuous verification. They also argued that the religious criteria embedded in the CAA sat uneasily with the constitutional commitment to equality before the law.Regardless of where one stands in that debate, its broader political consequences are difficult to deny. Citizenship increasingly became something to be demonstrated rather than assumed, verified rather than possessed.The shift extended beyond formal institutions. In public discourse, legal citizenship was increasingly supplemented by cultural citizenship. Language, food habits, dress, religion, and regional identity became informal markers of belonging.The Bengali-speaking Muslim emerged as a particularly vulnerable figure within this framework.The result was a gradual collapse of distinctions between categories that are, in reality, quite different. “Muslim”, “Bengali-speaking”, “Bangladeshi”, and “Rohingya” increasingly appeared together in political rhetoric and public imagination. Suspicion often travelled more quickly than evidence.The production of consentThe Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued that power is sustained not only through coercion but also through consent. States rely not merely on laws, police, and administrative authority. They also depend upon the ability to shape common sense.This insight remains remarkably relevant today. The effectiveness of exclusionary politics depends not only on state action but on public acceptance. Citizens must come to view particular groups as threats. They must internalise distinctions between insiders and outsiders. Over time, assumptions that were once controversial begin to appear self-evident.The reaction to the elderly man stranded at the border illustrates this process.The cruelty visible in many online comments was not simply a matter of individual prejudice. It reflected a broader political environment in which certain categories of people have increasingly been constructed as objects of suspicion.The significance of this transformation extends beyond social media.A society begins to change when it becomes easier to identify with the state than with the vulnerable individuals subjected to state power.Children in No-Man’s-LandThe implications of this politics became visible again in the recent Panchagarh border incident.For nearly three days, ten people – including three children – remained stranded in the no-man’s land along the India-Bangladesh border near Panchagarh. Exposed to rain, storms and the scorching summer sun, they waited in a narrow strip of territory that belonged fully to neither state. Their predicament was not the result of war, natural disaster, or criminal activity. It emerged from something far more ordinary and therefore far more disturbing: the everyday functioning of contemporary border politics.According to reports, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) attempted to push the group across the border into Bangladesh on June 5. Bangladesh’s Border Guard (BGB) refused to accept them. The result was a bureaucratic deadlock in which human beings became trapped between competing claims of sovereignty. Only after nearly sixty two hours were they reportedly taken back by Indian authorities.Among those stranded was a family from North 24 Parganas in West Bengal. Reports suggested that the father, Shamsul, possessed Indian identity documents and had spent years working as a vegetable trader. Yet none of this appeared to matter. For three days, citizenship existed only on paper. In practice, the family occupied a political vacuum in which neither state seemed willing to acknowledge responsibility.The image is difficult to forget: children sleeping under open skies while governments debated jurisdiction. The presence of children makes the episode particularly disturbing.International human rights law is unambiguous on this question. Both India and Bangladesh are parties to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention requires that the best interests of the child be treated as a primary consideration in all actions concerning children. Whatever disagreements may exist regarding citizenship or migration, children cannot be treated as collateral damage in administrative disputes.A child stranded at the border is not a security threat. A child sleeping in the open while governments argue over jurisdiction is not an immigration problem. Yet such situations are becoming increasingly visible in a world where border control often takes precedence over human welfare.Labour, migration, and political economyThere is also an economic dimension to these developments that is frequently overlooked.Throughout history, periods of economic insecurity have often produced renewed anxieties about migration and belonging. Questions of unemployment, declining public services, inequality, and social distress become refracted through the language of identity. The migrant becomes a convenient explanation for problems whose origins lie elsewhere.This tendency is not unique to India. Similar dynamics are visible across Europe and North America, where migrants and refugees have frequently become the targets of frustrations generated by broader economic transformations.The political utility of such narratives is obvious.Workers who share common economic interests are encouraged to view one another as competitors or enemies. Social conflict is redirected away from structures of power and towards those with even less power.The politics of exclusion therefore performs an important ideological function. It fragments solidarities that might otherwise emerge across lines of religion, language, or nationality.The return of Bishan SinghAt moments like these, it is difficult not to return to Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh.Written in the aftermath of Partition, the story follows Bishan Singh, an inmate in a Lahore asylum who desperately wants to know whether his village belongs to India or Pakistan. Nobody can provide a satisfactory answer.When authorities finally attempt to transfer him across the border, he discovers that neither country can truly accommodate him. Caught between two states, he collapses in the no-man’s-land separating them.Manto’s story has endured because it captured something larger than the trauma of Partition. It captured the absurdity of a world in which political boundaries become more important than human lives.Today, Bishan Singh seems to reappear with disturbing regularity. He appears in the elderly man stranded at the border while crowds gather to watch. He appears in migrant workers compelled to repeatedly prove their citizenship despite possessing valid documents. He appears in families trapped between competing bureaucracies.Most importantly, he appears in the growing distance between legal categories and human experience. The tragedy of Toba Tek Singh was never simply that a man became stateless.Its deeper tragedy was that everyone around him accepted the logic that had produced his predicament. That is the danger confronting us today. When exclusion becomes common sense, when humiliation becomes entertainment, and when suspicion becomes a substitute for evidence, the crisis extends far beyond the border itself. At that moment, what is stranded in the no-man’s-land is not only a migrant, a refugee, or a suspected foreigner. What is stranded there is our humanity.Soumya Sahin is Assistant Professor of Economics at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences.