“Everything Must Match”: Detection, Deception, and Migrant Illegality in the India‐Bangladesh Borderlands

India's militarization of its border with Bangladesh has grown alongside a paranoia around the figure of the “infiltrator” made synonymous with the “Bangladeshi illegal migrant.” Set in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh, where ethnic, racial, and linguistic markers do not allow for an easy distinction to be made between the Bengali members of two nation‐states, this article focuses on the paradoxes of documentary citizenship. Residents of these highly surveilled borderlands, as well as a variety of state actors, find that simply possessing identity documents is inadequate amid forgery and deception. The possibility of detection— detectability— of the illegal migrant materializes in India's eastern borderlands across three distinct modes of policing: the interceptive, the judicial‐determinative, and the certificatory. Through an ethnographic exploration of these modes of policing, this article sheds light on the political economy of migrant illegality and reimagines detectability, the infinite and promissory search for the impostor within, as the engine that drives the state. Detectability raises new questions beyond the fetishization of documents and the production and navigation of il/legibility. [ borders, migrant illegality, policing, documents, South Asia ]