Border Security Force

The Border Security Force (BSF) functions in the book as the state's armed guardian of India's frontiers, a force whose presence shapes the criminal strategies of the underworld figures who operate along the Nepal border. Its role is most vividly rendered in the account of the arms consignment heist planned by Sapna and Hussain Ustara, where the BSF's deployment patterns determine the route, the timing, and ultimately the viability of the entire operation. The force appears less as a bureaucratic institution than as a physical barrier, a concentration of armed personnel whose patrols mark the boundary between the relative safety of the interior and the perilous zones where smuggling networks intersect with state power.

The BSF as a Strategic Obstacle in the Nepal Arms Heist

The planning of the Birganj arms consignment heist was dictated almost entirely by the anticipated movements of the Border Security Force. When Sapna and Hussain Ustara learned of a weaponry consignment being channelled to Kathmandu, they decided to intercept it in the hilly regions of Birganj, specifically because that was where the BSF would be less concentrated. The choice of Birganj as the interception point was thus a direct calculation of the force's strengths and weaknesses, an acknowledgment that the BSF's presence elsewhere along the route made those areas too dangerous for an ambush. The pair's strategy involved a preliminary journey to Kathmandu via Birganj to gather intelligence, followed by a return to Birganj to execute the heist, a plan that treated the BSF's deployment as the single most important variable in the operation's success.

The journey itself was shaped by the same awareness of the force's reach. The route to Birganj ran through Raxaul, a small town in Bihar that served as the hub for cross-border smuggling of arms, electronic goods, drugs, and fake currency. The very existence of such a hub, and the smugglers' willingness to use it, reflected a tacit understanding of where the BSF's scrutiny was weakest and where its attention could be evaded. The force's presence, in other words, did not eliminate smuggling but rather channeled it into specific corridors, creating a geography of risk that the underworld navigated with care.

The Direct Encounter and Its Consequences

The BSF's role in the narrative culminates in a direct encounter that nearly proved fatal for Sapna and Hussain Ustara. After their first successful heist, the pair visited Nepal frequently over the following months, sometimes failing miserably and at other times seizing huge consignments. This period of relative success ended abruptly when they came in direct contact with the Border Security Forces during one of their trips. The encounter nearly resulted in their deaths, and though they managed to escape, it marked a decisive turning point in their operations.

The near-fatal brush with the BSF led Sapna to call off the Nepal trips for good, a decision she refused to reconsider despite Hussain Ustara's reluctance to abandon a lucrative source of income. The force's effectiveness as a deterrent was thus demonstrated not through arrests or seizures but through the sheer terror of the encounter, which convinced Sapna that the risk was no longer worth the reward. The aftermath saw the pair shift their operations to Mumbai, making the city their sole base against Dawood Ibrahim, a change that redirected their campaign from the borderlands to the heart of the underworld. The BSF, by forcing this retreat, inadvertently reshaped the geography of the pair's war against the mafia, pushing them from the frontier back into the urban terrain where Sapna would gain notice as the person responsible for disrupting Dawood's businesses.

The BSF Within the Book's Broader Geography of State Power

The Border Security Force's appearance in the Nepal narrative is part of a wider pattern in the book, in which the state's security apparatus marks the boundaries of the criminal world. The force is one of several institutions—alongside the Mumbai Police, the Crime Branch, the Narcotics Control Bureau, and the Central Bureau of Investigation—that define the limits within which the book's women criminals operate. Unlike the police forces that appear in the urban narratives of Dongri, Kamathipura, and Sion-Koliwada, the BSF operates at the nation's edge, guarding the lines that separate India from its neighbors. Its presence in the book thus connects the local stories of Mumbai's underworld to the larger geopolitical context of cross-border smuggling, a reminder that the criminal networks described in the book were not confined to the city's lanes but extended across international frontiers.

The force's role also carries a particular irony within the book's larger argument about women criminals. The book's author notes that these women were not blank slates written upon by dangerous male mafia members, and that crime was for them not only a way of transcending poverty but also a life-saving concept. The BSF, as an instrument of state power, represents the official order that these women transgressed, yet the force's encounters with them—as with Sapna—reveal the limits of that power. The BSF could deter and terrify, but it could not stop the women who dared to challenge the underworld's most powerful figures. In this sense, the force serves as a measure of the women's audacity, a benchmark against which their willingness to risk death can be gauged.

The BSF and the Book's Method of Documentation

The book's treatment of the Border Security Force is consistent with its broader method of relying on court documents, police records, and published news stories to construct its narratives. The force appears in the text not as a subject of analysis but as a fact of the criminal landscape, a presence whose movements and concentrations are recorded with the same attention to detail as the smuggling routes and the prices of heroin. This documentary approach gives the BSF a kind of solidity within the narrative, grounding the more sensational accounts of heists and encounters in the mundane realities of border security. The force's patrols, its concentrations, and its encounters are all presented as verifiable facts, part of the evidentiary texture that lends the book its authority.

At the same time, the BSF's appearance in the book is brief and functional, confined largely to the Nepal narrative and its immediate consequences. The force does not emerge as a character in the way that individual police officers or gangsters do; it remains an institutional presence, a collective actor whose behavior is predictable and whose power is felt rather than personified. This anonymity is itself significant, for it reflects the way state power often operates in the book's world—not through individual personalities but through the impersonal machinery of patrols, checkpoints, and armed responses. The BSF, in this reading, is less a specific institution than a symbol of the state's capacity to project force across its borders, a capacity that the book's women criminals must calculate, evade, and ultimately survive.