Listen to this article:

Haldibari (Cooch Behar): “We told the government – you made us Indians in 2015, so why should our names now be matched with the 2002 voter list of India?”

Shishir Roy. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar

In a small two-room quarter inside the Haldibari rehabilitation camp near the India-Bangladesh border, 52-year-old Shishir Ray folds his SIR (special intensive revision) form and looks up, angry and exhausted.

“After hearing our argument, the government officials told us that we don’t need to write anything about this in the SIR form for now – they will inform the [Election] Commission. This is the present status, but nothing is final yet. This is a new source of anxiety for us,” he says.

Shishir became a resident of Cooch Behar district in West Bengal, India, from Panchagarh district in Bangladesh, after the India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) was finally implemented on the night of July 31, 2015. That agreement ended the 68-year-old “chhitmahal” (enclave) tangle and swapped 162 enclaves between the two countries. Tens of thousands of people, who had lived for generations in a legal vacuum, were promised full citizenship and land rights on both sides of the border.

Ten years on, in the neat but crumbling blocks of Haldibari camp, those promises feel distant.

Just like Haldibari, two more rehabilitation sites, Dinhata and Changrabandha, house people from former Indian enclaves who chose to move to India when the enclaves were absorbed into Bangladesh in 2015. Their new addresses are two-room flats built in rows, on government land, ringed by tin, barbed wire and uncertainty.

On paper, these families are the “lucky” minority who exercised their right to relocate. After the enclave exchange, a little over 900 people came to India from what are now Bangladeshi territories and were placed in these camps in West Bengal. On the other hand, more than 15,000 people living in Bangladeshi enclaves inside Indian territory chose to stay where they were and automatically became Bangladeshi citizens, continuing in their own homes.

For the residents of these three camps scattered across Cooch Behar, though, the story is starkly different.

“From here to Dinhata or Changrabandha, it takes three-four hours by bus one way, and the travel cost is Rs 300, which is our entire day’s income,” says Dwijen Barman, who lives in Haldibari. “So we don’t go. People living in one camp don’t really see those in the others.”

Fencing around the Haldibari rehabilitation colony. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar

The flats the government allotted – one small room, one slightly larger, a thin kitchen strip and a bathroom – were supposed to be the first step towards permanent rehabilitation. A decade later, the walls are damp, plaster falls off in chunks, and residents say they still do not hold any ownership documents to the homes they live in.

At the Panishala camp in Changrabandha, Yashodhara Barman stands in her doorway and looks out at the peeling paint.

“Back there we had our own huge mud house, open fields, betel nut groves, farmland, orchards and several ponds,” she says, remembering her village in Bangladesh. “Leaving all that to live in these suffocating flats is painful. And look at the condition of these flats that are now our address –........

© The Wire