The sky had ripped open. It had been raining an entire day and night; there was water everywhere and dai ma (midwife) was clueless.” Ayesha Bibi, a resident of Jaridharla village in West Bengal’s Cooch Behar district, talks about the night she went into labour three years ago. “It was midnight. Then, a doctor arrived from Bangladesh, but he surrendered.” ‘Surrendered’: she uses the word in English.
Jaridharla’s nearest hospital with basic obstetric facilities was 20 km away in Dinhata town. But the challenge was to cross the snow-fed River Dharla, which “roars like a bellowing bull”, to quote a local writer, and is entirely hazardous in the monsoon. “And we would have required permission from the Border Security Force (BSF) to go to Dinhata—we come from a border village,” she says as her frail three-year-old son clings to her.
So what the family did was to head to Moghulhut town in Bangladesh, just across the border. Ayesha Bibi’s contractions by now had grown severe. They put her in a chair and tied bamboo rods to its legs for support. Then four men carried her. At the border, the family was stopped by the Border Guard of Bangladesh, who soon let them pass when they realised Ayesha Bibi was close to collapsing. They even suggested a clinic. Ayesha gave birth that night. The Caesarean delivery was not cheap at 30,000 Bangladeshi Taka (₹23,000) for an agricultural family, but at least she and her baby had made it on time. Later, they got little Ahad a birth certificate from Dinhata.
“Isn’t that good?” asks a middle-aged man with a white beard, who has been sitting with me, curiously listening to me listen to Ayesha Bibi. “The country is divided, the bridge and the train line are missing, but these villages connect both,” says the man. He tells me he is a teacher but asks to remain anonymous.
On the face of it, Jaridharla, a quiet little hamlet by a stream, with vast corn fields and children carrying over-sized umbrellas, is like any of the thousands of hamlets in West Bengal. But Jaridharla, on the extreme north-eastern border of the State, is almost entirely dependent on a town that is just a 15 minute walk away—Moghulhut—in Bangladesh.
The snacks that Jaridharla eats, the textbooks that children read, and the school they go to, the doctors who treat them, the agricultural workers that landholders employ—even the currency used and the national anthem sung—all come from Moghulhut. Jaridharla and the neighbouring Daribosh, two isolated villages on the western bank of River Dharla, can access Lalmonirhat without any hindrance to movement. And so, people from both sides of the border walk in and out of each other’s country without any travel documents.
Getting to these villages is not simple. I have to first make it past the BSF checkpost on this side. A broad-shouldered man tells his boss that reporters want to visit Jaridharla and Daribosh. The villages may be on the Indian side of the border, but their proximity to Bangladesh means intensive security checks.
The jawan asks us to wait. Dozens of cows are tied inside the Gitaldaha BSF campus, which resembles a railway station. It was, indeed, once one of eastern India’s busiest stations. Built around 1900, Gitaldaha station connected Rangpur Division (in present-day Bangladesh), to Cooch Behar when India was not split. Gayatri Devi, the late princess of Cooch Behar, notes in her autobiography that in Gitaldaha they would “change to the broad-gauge Calcutta train in the middle of the night, half asleep” to wake up in Kolkata the next morning. Today, the BSF here mainly monitors the movement of cattle from India to Bangladesh.
A makeshift BSF checkpoint at Gitaldhaha
The permission arrives, and we thank the officials who have also arranged a diesel boat to take us across River Dharla, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, to Jaridharla. As we board the boat, we wonder aloud about a gigantic unfinished steel structure that erupts from the river. “It is the bridge… trains used to run here,” says Moin, a 10-year-old boy in a blue school uniform, our co-passenger. Before the bridge nosedived into the river, trains would cross over to Gitaldaha. Moin has a big, new aluminium bowl on his head. He is carrying it to sell in Bangladesh.
Soft border, hard border
Also accompanying us is a talkative BSF official whose job is to gather routine intelligence from the villages; he mainly checks the fate of cows and the movement of ‘newcomers’ from the two border villages. “Painful,” he says, making a disgruntled face. Yes, I think, it does sound like a painful proposition for a man nearing retirement to chase cow smugglers at night.
India and Bangladesh share a little over a 4,000-kilometre border; and in spite of the affable nature of their relationship it remains an authoritative, hard border. Cooch Behar’s civil administration acknowledges that the problem is acute. “It is a genuine humanitarian crisis; it is an immense problem for pregnant mothers or even if you are just trying to get a birth certificate,” says Partha Chakravarty, Block Development Officer of Dinhata 1, the block that governs the two villages. But they are trying “their best,” he says. “We have now drawn up a list of women who will deliver in the coming months and we are trying to arrange to get them to Dinhata before their due dates.”
At Jaridharla, I meet Lima Akhter, an energetic Class IV student—and a singer. But when we ask her to sing the national anthem, she is reluctant. Then after much coaxing from the elders, Lima and her four school mates begin: Amar sonar Bangla, ami tomay bhalobashi (My golden Bengal, I love you).
Lima’s school mates—Sakib Khan wearing a “With God All Things Are Possible” T-shirt; little Rashedujammal, who speaks with a lisp; Tahmina Akhtar, a Class II student, and a little older Sairabanu Akhter—slowly join Lima “ …Ma, tor bodonkhani molin hole, o ma, aami noyonjole bhasi (If sadness, O mother! casts a gloom on your face, my eyes are filled with tears).” They practise the song every morning in their school, which, of course, happens to be across the border in Bangladesh. Every morning they pack their lunch boxes and school bags and walk by the edge of the dykes that divide the cotton and paddy fields to get to Moghulhut.
The children readily pose for photographs, textbooks in hand. English For Today —the Class IV text book published by the National Curriculum and Textbook Board of Bangladesh—is one among them. Islam and Ethical Education , Bangladesh And The World , Mathematics,Amar Bangla Boi ( My Bengali Book ), all curiously printed in Kolkata, are the others. Lima points to the anthem, by Rabindranath Tagore, printed on the third page of Amar Bangla Boi and says this is where she learnt it from. Sakib asks if Tagore wrote India’s anthem as well.
In neighbouring Daribosh village, however, the primary government school has partly collapsed, the plaster on the walls is peeling, and bricks lie in a heap in the classroom. I am told that teachers rarely visit the school.
It is not just children and pregnant women who are dependent on Bangladesh in this hamlet. Rasheda Bibi, a grocer from Jaridharla, routinely buys her supplies from Bangladesh. Her best-selling products are potato chips, rusk, and Lifebuoy soap, all made in Bangladesh and brought to India in a giant white bag. She candidly says that all transactions are made in Bangladeshi Taka, and suggests we take a photo of a 100 Taka bill, with its image of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father.
Bishnubala’s face is nearly fully covered by the stalks of the kochu roots she is carrying on her head. She is returning home to Bangladesh after a day’s hard work. “We get 120 Taka in Bangladesh but 150 here,” she says.
Bishnubala returns to Bangladesh with tender kochu
Biscuits and salt
In Daribosh, we stop for tea. Then we enter a house or two, to share chips and ask a few more questions. The villagers pull us inside a room made of corrugated tin, as hot as an engine room, away from the view of the BSF official. “BSF must have interrogated you for long hours,” says Nurul Mia, a former Panchayat Samiti member and a farmer who produces and sells tobacco and jute. “They do that to us everyday. It often delays us from taking our produce to Cooch Behar,” says Mia. This, despite the fact that the produce is grown and sold in India.
Abdul Khaleq, 60, who runs a grocery shop in Daribosh, whips out a writing pad to explain. “See this,” he points to one of the jottings. “I tried to bring in 24 packets of mustard oil but they allowed only 12. This, even though I’m bringing it from an Indian market to an Indian village.” The logic behind rationing daily consumables is to stop the smuggling of goods to Bangladesh through Jaridharla and Daribosh.
The locals don’t deny that smuggling is a problem, but ask why entire villages must suffer on account of a few smugglers. “It is true that the poorest of the poor carry a kilogram of salt or a couple of biscuit packets or a T-shirt to sell in Bangladesh. It gives them ₹10 or ₹15. But are they smugglers?” asks Majnu Sheikh, a member of Trinamool Congress in Daribosh.
Easily solved
“To sell farm produce or to buy products, we need BSF’s permission. If we argue, we are harassed,” he says. According to the villagers, the problem “can be easily solved”. “Just shift the BSF camp from the east of Dharla to the west—about three kilometres—to the India-Bangladesh border; don’t allow anyone to come in or go out and the issue is solved,” says Nurul Mia.
And such a solution has apparently indeed been worked out. Senior central government officials tell me, off the record, that land has been identified to shift the BSF outpost beyond the villages to the border. “There are a few problems with acquisition, but we hope to address those in a few months.” The officials deny that villagers are harassed. “True, we check them. But they are all Indians, aren’t they?”
In Kolkata, sitting in his plush study, a former central government mandarin, asks: “Should we close the border or open it more—to address common issues jointly?”
suvojit.bagchi@thehindu.co.in
