The \"Imaginary Line\" that Divides India and Bangladesh

By SAMRAT

Borders are significant barriers only in the minds of those who have never walked across one. Anyone who does that learns that in most places there is no crack in the earth where one country ends and another begins.

I walked across the border from India into Bangladesh in 2002. It was for love; I was young and foolish. My then-girlfriend, who is from the northeast, had gone to the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh on a research trip for a doctoral thesis. This involved meeting rebels from the Chakma tribe who had long been battling the Bangladesh government, and so I was concerned about her safety. I decided to go in after her.

It proved not to be easy. My visa application went into some kind of strange limbo. I would call every day, to be told my visa still had not been approved, and that I would have to meet the minister for press and information at the Bangladeshi embassy in New Delhi. I tried to make an appointment wit h him but never got one. I tried calling the man, whom I knew. He stopped taking my calls when he realized what I was calling about. Once, I called from a landline. He answered his mobile phone and asked who was speaking. When he heard it was me, he said: “Sir is not here.”

Meanwhile my girlfriend had reached Chittagong. I decided I needed to work out an alternate way of getting in. If the Bangladeshis were going to be difficult about the visa, I'd simply do what so many Bangladeshis have allegedly done: I'd cross the border without a visa.

My family, on both my father's and my mother's side, is from places that are now in Bangladesh. There is nothing in my appearance that distinguishes me from Bangladeshis of my economic standing. I speak Bengali and I follow some of the dialects. I had the phone numbers for a few people in Dhaka. I figured I'd be okay once I got across.

The question, of course, was how I could get across s afely.

I went to Shillong, my home town, and started asking around. Shillong is located in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya bordering the Sylhet district in Bangladesh. It is less than 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, from there to Sylhet town, but it seems very far to Shillong residents, because few of them ever make that journey.

There were ways across, I started to hear. A friend mentioned an uncle who lived close to the border and knew an agent who ferried people across in both directions. The going rate was 50 rupees (about $1) per person for the agent, not including bribes to the border guards, I was told. If you got caught you might end up in the slammer, but that rarely happened. There were other agents, my friend said, who had connections with the border guards on both sides, and charged a heavier fee that included a bribe.

Another friend pointed out that border trade was big and said I could easily get across as a trader from a border district. I would ne ed to get another set of papers, and that would take a week or so.

I decided to try the honest way one last time. A call to an influential friend in Delhi luckily led to a phone conversation with the press and information minister. He agreed to grant me a visa on the condition that I would not report while in Bangladesh.

So it was with a passport and visa that I made my way to the border checkpost in Dawki. A customs officer from the Indian side, who happened to know a friend of mine, said he would walk me across. We set off down the narrow road lined with trucks laden with coal.

At the end of the road was a barrier that was raised and lowered with a rope. Pedestrians could simply walk around it, and so we did. We were in Bangladesh.

The immigration office was one little hutment with a desk, around which a few men sat drinking tea. The Indian official, who was also Bengali, knew them well. We sat and chatted a while. After tea, we crossed the road for the customs check. The office was one room, stacked with files, and it was open, and empty. The Indian officer called out for his Bangladeshi counterpart by name, but the man was nowhere to be found. So we waited, until the Indian official started to get a little impatient. “I know where he keeps his stamps”, he told me. “I can stamp it for you.”

Just then a little boy came along. “Where is sahib?” the official asked. Sahib had gone to buy fish, we were told. It was the festival of Shab e Barat.

We waited until the man returned, and he completed the formalities with profuse apologies. My friend walked back to India some 100 meters away while I set off down the road to Sylhet. One last matter remained to be sorted. I had only Indian currency.

A ramshackle little shop selling betel leaves, cigarettes and cheap food was the first establishment I encountered on the road. I asked the man if he would change my currency. He readily agreed. I gave him my Indian rupees. He reached into his loincloth and brought out a wad of Bangladeshi taka that I gingerly pocketed.

That was that. I was in. After all the anxiety about the visa, it was quite anticlimactic.

So what's the point of the story?

Well, there are several: For starters, the border between India and Bangladesh is not the Great Wall of China. If you have friends and family on the other side, slipping across and merging in is not difficult. Nor is getting citizenship documents a problem. Cases of people bribing their ways to ration cards keep cropping up, and have for years.

It is almost certain that some people walk back and forth across the imaginary line. How many is impossible to tell, because once a chap walks over and gets a ration card who can say he's not Indian? Anyone who does is automatically labeled “communal.”

Some clever people try to make deductions from census figures for border districts, but that's not very useful. Ec onomic migrants are not likely to settle in border districts of northeastern India. The economy of those places is nearly as weak as on the other side of the border. Economic migrants go where the jobs are.

With facts proving little, we are left with differences of opinions. The right takes one extreme view, and suspects all Bengali Muslims in the northeast of being Bangladeshis. The left, Congress and parties that rely on Muslim votes assert the other extreme position, saying there is no illegal immigration. Both are wrong, in my view, and both spring from communal mindsets that look at the issue in terms of religious groups and ideologies. To me it is a question of citizenship and administration. Our country has laws governing immigration and citizenship that ought to be followed. Every government in the world follows its own laws, including the government of Bangladesh. Why do we in India make it a political issue, rather than an administrative one?

Many studi es and accounts on migration in the subcontinent have established that the major immigration from what was previously East Bengal into India following the 1947 Partition and the 1971 war with Pakistan has been of Bengali Hindus, not Muslims.

The vast majority of Bengali Muslims in this country are doubtless Indians. There are doubtless some, however, who walked across an imaginary line in search of better lives.

Samrat is the author of “The Urban Jungle” (Penguin, 2011) and editor of The Asian Age, Mumbai. He can be found on Twitter as @mrsamratx.