Asghar Ali looked around with an air of discombobulation when asked which party he would vote for in the ongoing West Bengal Assembly elections. “Who knows, baba,” he says slowly, his words slurred with age. “We don’t know these things. I’ve never done this, right. So I’ll need to learn”.
He then grinned toothily, quite content at having been asked this question, even if he didn’t have an answer.
Ali’s confusion – and joy – is understandable. This is the first election that he will have the right to vote in. In fact, till last year, he wasn’t even Indian – he was a Bangladeshi citizen.
The enclave issue
Ali’s exact age is unknown but he claims to remember British rule. In 1947, as Nehru spoke stirringly about India’s trust with destiny, Ali’s village became part of East Pakistan – surrounded on all four sides by the princely kingdom of Cooch Behar.
Cooch Behar soon acceded to India and Ali’s enclave, Madhya Masaldanga became a little pocket of Pakistan 18 kilometres inside India. His enclave wasn’t alone. At the time, there were 92 of these little East Pakistani (later Bangladeshi) enclaves inside India. They had mirror images: 106 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh. This surreal arrangement has a cloudy history, located in a medieval war between Mughal Bengal and Cooch Behar. In 1947, as British Bengal was split into West Bengal and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), the problem of the enclaves, once a trivial domestic matter of the British Empire, ballooned into an international issue between two truculent states.
Until India and Bangladesh finally agreed in 2015 to swap their enclaves, there were approximately 51,000 people stuck in this stateless limbo. Since Ali’s village was technically Bangladeshi land, there is no power, no schools and no healthcare. Legally, they weren't even allowed to step outside their enclave and were caged inside an area of 0.5 square kilometre, the size of a city neighbourhood.
Stateless people
In Haldibari camp, also in Cooch Behar district, Jayprakash Rai is excited about his new voter identity card clearly marking him out as Indian. “They gave it to us on Poila Baishak,” he said, which was a nice way to start the Bengali New Year. Technically, Rai has been Indian all his life – but he had been stuck in an Indian enclave 3 kilometres inside Bangladesh. As part of the 2015 Indo-Bangladesh land boundary agreement, residents of each enclave were given the choice to stay on at home or move to their country of citizenship. Out of approximately 14,000 Bangladeshi enclave citizens (one being Asghar Ali), none chose to move to Bangladesh. Out of 37,000 Indian enclave citizens, merely 979 opted to move to India. These low numbers show just how ancestral ties to the village still easily trump any top-down idea of nationality.
Jayprakash Rai, though, did make the move; one among 40 people in his village of 300 to do so. “Our life in the enclave was terrible,” he said. “There was no law and order there because Bangladesh refused to police us – since our village was India,” he said. This is a common complaint. In Madhya Masaldanga, villagers claim that mainland Indians would come in and smash and burn property to try and grab land – a Bangladeshi version of which is echoed by Rai. In another Bangladeshi camp, Dinhata, villagers complained that Bangladeshi goons forced their way into their enclave and used their land to organise gambling tournaments. Since their enclave was technically part of India, it was a legal bubble for the thugs – the Bangladeshi police couldn’t prosecute them for a crime committed there.
Vote induction
Set up by the West Bengal government, the camps created to house Indian enclave dwellers from Bangladesh are neat and clean. The residents have been allotted huts made of corrugated tin sheets – a common building material in the area. The government plans to house them here for two years and has promised them permanent accommodation after that. Camp dwellers can access the full 100 days of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act work – a rare instance of the scheme working to full capacity. They are also given rations: rice, dal, kerosene oil, salt, powdered milk and mustard oil.
In the Haldibari camp, thoughtfully, the Election Commission has pasted posters encouraging people to vote and has also conducted training sessions. “We’ve be taught how to use the voting machine,” says Rai, pressing down on an imaginary button. In the Dinhata camp, though, Naresh Barman is struggling with a more pressing issue: he doesn’t know anything about Indian politics. “We know Awami League and BNP, dada, not India’s rajneeti,” he said, shrugging. “I am aware that Mamata is the chief minister of West Bengal, though – but I’ll learn it all up before voting. Don’t worry.”
In Haldibari, Mithun Chandra Rai, however, has bigger things to worry about than the election. His mother and father couldn’t make it across because he claims that Indian surveyors, sent to their enclave in 2015, missed them out – a complaint repeated by multiple people in both Halidbari as well as the Dinhata camp.
Mithun Chandra Rai’s brother and he made it to India but their parents are still in Bangladesh, unclear even as to what their nationality is. “Where we’re standing now [Haldibari camp] in only 13 kilometres from my village,” Rai pointed out. “Yet my parents can’t come here and be with me.” Thirteen kilometres is less than most city commutes. But of course, an international border – an imaginary line on a map – renders it a virtually infinite distance.
Working the system
In Madhya Masaldanga, Jaynal Abedin, is quickly learning the ropes with respect to exercising his franchise. “We are ready to vote for anyone, “ he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “provided they fulfil three of our demands.”
Abedin and the Bangladeshi-turned-Indians of his enclave want their land ownership to be officially recognised. They also want the contracts for development work in the enclave to be handed to people from their village and for 10% of the jobs in that work to go to residents of the enclave. There seems to be little hope of these demands being met but the fact that they were already setting a price for their vote seemed a healthy sign.
Abedin’s neighbour, Taleb Ali is also happy at getting the vote but the main improvement, he feels, will be in the matrimonial sphere. “No women would marry us since we didn’t have ration cards or voter cards,” he sighed. “Now, at last, that will end."
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