This paper presents an ethnography of the India and Bangladesh international border areas. It focuses on the illicit economy, its structure and operation, and more importantly, its linkages with the state apparatus. It tries to demonstrate how the securitization of the border has affected the illicit economy. The paper explores how the triangular interaction between (1) the apparatus of border and security personnel, (2) illicit economy and smugglers and (3) the ordinary society produces a dynamic which is different from the mainland of a nation. It creates an exceptional political space where the normal liberal structure of a nation-state, and the state-citizen-civil society mediations are suspended. As a result, local communities have very little control over either the state apparatus or the illicit economy, and they live in the fear and intimidation—not of the enemy of the state or the nation, but the state’s security forces and the criminals. The border is the zone where the naked dance of the sovereign and the criminal power can be witnessed