India doesn’t have an equivalent of the Palestinian wall, or the US wall keeping out immigrants coming from Mexico; but it does have some significant walls that keep select groups in or out. This paper will explore several. Along the border with Bangladesh there’s no wall, but something far stranger and perhaps even harder to live with, in the form of a number of anomalous zones, where communities have an ambiguous status. Infamously, in Assam, detention camps are filling up with thousands of ‘non-citizens’ – mostly Muslim ‘immigrants’, including Rohingyas who fled genocidal massacres in Myanmar. Throughout India, there are now thousands of ‘gated colonies’ for the upper middle class. Muslim enclaves are also gated against attacks by hindutva mobs. Many residential schools for Adivasi children are also carefully walled, such as KISS in Bhubaneswar, with an estimated 30,000 children on one campus. Many have tried to escape. This walling in of children from Scheduled Tribes goes back to the early 19th century, when British administrators and missionaries selected children from ‘criminal’ or ‘wild’ tribes to be educated. Boarding schools excusively for ST children have much in common with jails. Prison walls are one of the enduring symbols of segregation in the modern world, and India has tens of thousands of prisoners, especially from the DNTs, STs and SCs, jailed on fabricated charges, innocent ‘under trials’.
