At India-Bangladesh border, helpless villagers seek pathways to escape
In Bengal's border village, nearly 3,000 residents, where every third family has a relative settled in Bangladesh, the villagers are getting calls for help.
For the past five days, Babu Ram Majhi(26), a resident of Ranghat village in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, is trying to find a way to get his relatives to cross the Kudaliya river. Majhi’s relatives are stuck in a village across the river. The monsoon has caused the water to swell up to 10-12 feet. The stretch that divides him at Ranghat and his relatives in the neighbouring Matila village, is not more than 30 feet wide. For someone who has lived all his life next to the river, it is an easy task. Majhi is also from a family, who were traditionally into fishing.
But there is a problem — Ranghat is in India, Matila is in Bangladesh. The river is the international boundary. It wasn’t a problem till last week, but since then, the political turmoil in Bangladesh, the collapse of the Sheikh Hasina regime, violence across the country and fears of mass infiltration into India, have caused India’s Border Security Force (BSF) to tighten border security.
In this border village of nearly 3,000 residents, where every third or fourth family has a relative settled in Bangladesh, the villagers are getting frantic calls for help.
“My relatives are asking me to find a way to enter India. My mother’s cousins are trapped in Bangladesh. They are Hindus and are feeling unsafe. The village across has both Hindus and Muslims. There is no violence there but clashes have happened in the adjacent villages, so my relatives are worried. They want to cross the river and live in India until the situation is better. But we are helpless. We are talking to police and BSF but they are also unable to help,” Majhi said.
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Majhi’s neighbour, Phool Bela Bagchi (55) was born in Bangladesh but moved here after marrying a Ranghat resident. Bagchi keeps note of happenings in Bangladesh through the young men in her village, who read the local papers and scan social media. Her elder brother and his family are trapped in violence-hit Bangladesh.
“On Sunday night, a day before former Sheikh Hasina fled the country, my brother called and said the situation was tense, but they were safe. They wanted to come to India and asked if it was safe to cross. Most of the border guards in Bangladesh too had left their posts that day. I had thought of checking with elders in the village the following morning because they are in touch with the local BSF company commanders. But the following morning, my brother’s phone was switched off. My neighbours, who too have relatives in the Chutai village(Bangladesh), said my brother’s family is not at home. I don’t know if they have survived the violence in Bangladesh,” Bagchi said.
Bagchi said that until 10-15 years ago, security at the border was not as stringent as it has become in recent years. During the summer, the river is not more than four feet deep so people from both villages crossed the river at night without being detected by BSF officials.
“There was no fence or border guards for hundreds of metres until a decade ago. One BSF guard had to manage hundreds of metres along the river. This is why cross border marriages were common and we have hundreds of villagers who have relatives in Bangladesh. Every third or fourth house here has a relative there,” she said.
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Senior BSF officials in Kolkata said this is the case of many border villages along the 4096 km India-Bangladesh border. The border spreads across fields, roads, hills and rivers in West Bengal (2216.7 km), Assam (263 km), Meghalaya (443 km), Tripura (856 km) and Mizoram (318 km).
And while the border was not as porous as it was back in Bagchi’s youth, it remained relatively porous until last week, with border guards allowing people to cross over to visit friends and relatives.
Amresh Arya, DIG and PRO of south Bengal frontier, said, “BSF has always been a friend to border residents. We adopt a humanitarian approach for our people but the current situation is different. In the last one year, there must have been over a dozen cases, when we have coordinated with Border Guards Bangladesh(BGB) and helped families from both countries during funerals. Families were allowed to meet at the border and pay their last respects whenever a close relative died across the border. The bodies are brought to the border and the families, assisted by border guards, catch a last glimpse of their relatives and pray together. They then return to their respective countries. But the circumstances are different now.”
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The political turmoil in Bangladesh, cases of prisoners, including terrorists fleeing jails and looting weapons, Sheikh Hasina’s party members trying to flee Bangladesh, and recent instances of Bangladesh residents trying to enter India in hordes has led the Union government to order a very high alert on the border. In North Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district on Wednesday, BSF personnel had to fire multiple rounds in the air to deter potential infiltrators at a border village. BSF has increased deployment on the border. With a bulk of the forces currently deployed for Amarnath Yatra security — around 140 battalions are in J&K, the number was less than 100 last year — BSF personnel working in offices and headquarters have been instructed to go to the border.
Ranghat is notorious for smuggling. In September last year, the forces caught a man at the village with 22kg gold smuggled from Bangladesh. Night is when smugglers find loopholes in the security grid and attempt to cross the border.
But this too has changed.
On Monday, within hours of government sounding a high alert, night curfew was imposed along the Indo-Bangladesh border. Villagers are not allowed to step out after 9pm. Night fishing is also banned. There are more guards round the clock now.
Majhi is keen to help his relatives, but it is going to be difficult.
A senior BSF officer posted in the force’s Eastern Command headquarters, explained, “One cannot be sure, if the person requesting for help is an innocent Bangladesh civilian trying to flee for safety or a person with criminal antecedents. I’ll give you an example of how situation has changed on the ground. In the past, if we saw an unarmed person crossing the border, we would instruct him not to cross and warn repeatedly. But if he still disobeyed our instructions, we would allow him here, as he was unarmed, and then take action legally. But now if we see the same person, we will first warn him. If he continues to walk across the border, we will fire pump action guns and stun grenades — both non lethal to ensure he cannot enter India. It is enough to send them back. Firing such non lethal weapons was done in North Bengal when the crowds swelled up to 300 on Wednesday. The message from the government is clear -- no infiltration under any circumstances.”
