(written in 2011)
The initiative to conduct a Bangladesh-India joint land survey along the Sylhet-Meghalaya border was suspended for the third time on the 21st June, 2011 as the joint survey team failed to reach a consensus over specifying the borderline from where the work should start. The main purpose to conduct the joint land survey along Sylhet border was to specify the adversely possessed land at 13 points along Jaintapur, Goainghat, Kanaighat and Jakiganj border in Sylhet.
Bangladesh wants the survey to follow the borderline based on existing pillars along the Tamabil, Shreepur, Pratappur and Jaintapur borders in Sylhet. But Indian officials’ demand for more land inside Bangladesh territory ignoring the existing border pillars and they claimed ownership of more land against the volume of what already had been possessed by their nationals at some points along the border led to repeated suspension of the joint survey.
In two previous phases between December and April, the joint team had begun surveying the Sylhet-Meghalaya border to check killing of Bangladeshis, intrusion into and possession of Bangladesh territories as well as harvesting crops in Bangladesh by Indian nationals. But due to repeated disturbances by the Indian nationals and non-cooperative attitude of Indian border security force, the survey had to be suspended on both times.
Bangladesh wants to get back, through joint survey, about 200 acres of its land along the Shreepur-Pratappur border that had remained under the possession of Indian nationals. The Indian BSF and BGB exchanged more than 1,000 gunshots at Jaintapur border in Sylhet on February 28 last year that forced several villagers along border to leave their homes.
As to the sources of BGB, the Indian nationals and officials possess in Sylhet border, 3350.10 acres of Bangladeshi land. If the joint survey completes accordingly, Bangladesh has the huge possibilities to get back the lands. What actually conducting in the name of joint survey does not go in favour of Bangladesh.
During the joint land survey by Bangladesh and India, near the Tamabil border of Tamabil of Sylhet and Padua; it was found that a portion of land was being handed over to India in the process. Upon receiving news of such occurrence, on June 18 and 20 the inhabitants of that area started protesting. The BSF chased Bangladeshi citizens along the Padua border, entering about 50 yards inside Bangladeshi territory. During this time, Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) was not seen anywhere in the area. The government was compelled to suspend the survey by the strong protest of Bangladeshis. It is to be mentioned that on 4 and 5 June at the Padua border, from pillar 1270 to 1271-7S from BSF post, about 350 acres of land in total, across 3 locations, was handed over to India. Giving up Bangladeshi land in the name of a joint survey is to belittle the country’s sovereignty. Human Rights Activits call on the government to refrain from such shameless anti-people conduct.
The local people informed to the press, joint survey at border was conducted in 1952 and 2002, but due to illegal hindrance of BSF they are unable to cultivate lands for last decade. The local peoples object, this survey, even its purpose and result is unknown to them.
Border Killings continues:
Foreign Policy, famous international magazine at its July-August 2011 issue covered a story titled ‘Fortress India: Why is Delhi building a new Berlin Wall to keep out its Bangladeshi neighbors?’ by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian and Kristian Hoelsher. The main words of the reports goes as, Felani wore her gold bridal jewelry as she crouched out of sight inside the squalid concrete building. The 15-year-old’s father, Nurul Islam, peeked cautiously out the window and scanned the steel and barbed-wire fence that demarcates the border between India and Bangladesh. The fence was the last obstacle to Felani’s wedding, arranged for a week later in her family’s ancestral village just across the border in Bangladesh.
There was no question of crossing legally — visas and passports from New Delhi could take years — and besides, the Bangladeshi village where Islam grew up was less than a mile away from the bus stand on the Indian side. Still, they knew it was dangerous. The Indians who watched the fence had a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later. Islam had paid $65 to a broker who said he could bribe the Indian border guard, but he had no way of knowing whether the money actually made it into the right hands. Father and daughter waited for the moment when the guards’ backs were turned and they could prop a ladder against the fence and clamber over. The broker held them back for hours, insisting it wasn’t safe yet. But eventually the first rays of dawn began to cut through the thick morning fog. They had no choice but to make a break for it. Islam went first, clearing the barrier in seconds. Felani wasn’t so lucky. The hem of her salwar kameez caught on the barbed wire. She panicked, and screamed. An Indian soldier came running and fired a single shot at point-blank range, killing her instantly. The father fled, leaving his daughter’s corpse tangled in the barbed wire. It hung there for another five hours before the border guards were able to negotiate a way to take her down; the Indians transferred the body across the border the next day. “When we got her body back the soldiers had even stolen her bridal jewelry,” Islam told us, speaking in a distant voice a week after the January incident.
Other border fortifications around the world may get all the headlines, but over the past decade the 1,790-mile fence barricading the near entirety of the frontier between India and Bangladesh has become one of the world’s bloodiest. Since 2000, Indian troops have shot and killed nearly 1,000 people like Felani there.
In India, the 25-year-old border fence — finally expected to be completed next year at a cost of $1.2 billion — is celebrated as a panacea for a whole range of national neuroses: Islamist terrorism, illegal immigrants stealing Indian jobs, the refugee crisis that could ensue should a climate catastrophe ravage South Asia. But for Bangladeshis, the fence has come to embody the irrational fears of a neighbor that is jealously guarding its newfound wealth even as their own country remains mired in poverty. The barrier is a physical reminder of just how much has come between two once-friendly countries with a common history and culture — and how much blood one side is willing to shed to keep them apart.
By next year, the fence will have blocked off every available crossing point between India and Bangladesh. But while tightened security has made the border more dangerous, it hasn’t actually made it much more secure. More than 100 border villages operate as illicit transit points through which thousands of migrants pass daily. Each of these villages has a “lineman” — what would be called a coyote on the U.S.-Mexican border — who facilitates the smuggling, paying border guards from both notoriously corrupt countries to look the other way when people pass through.
The border itself has hardened into a grim killing field. Although border shootings are officially recorded by Indian officials as “shot in self-defense,” the Manabdhikar Surakkha Mancha (Masum), a West Bengal based human rights organization and Human Rights Watch report found that none of the victims was armed with anything more dangerous than a sickle, and it accused the Indian Border Security Force of “indiscriminate killing and torture.”
One of the most dangerous borders of the World:
Another report of Foreign Policy on June 24, 2011 by Philip Walker titled ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Borders: Thirteen places you don’t want to be stuck at.’ Includes India-Bangladesh border and states on the present condition of border as, Although it rarely made headlines, the India-Bangladesh border was one of the bloodiest international borders this past decade. According to Human Rights Watch, India’s border security forces have fatally shot nearly 1,000 Bangladeshis trying to cross the border since 2000. In 2011, the number of Bangladeshis killed per month is down from its historical average — India announced in March that nonlethal weapons would be issued to Indian border guards in sensitive areas on an experimental basis — but it remains to be seen whether this, like times before, is just a temporary change in tactics.
In its entire border management that India has forgotten the spirit of the Mujib-Indira Treaty. The very first paragraph speaks of long-term peace and friendship, peaceful co-existence, and not having any discriminatory attitudes towards one another. But having a thousands of miles long barbed wire fence surrounding Bangladesh hardly speaks of friendship. Article 3 of Indira-Mujib Treaty stated that, ‘The Governments of India and Bangladesh agree that when areas are transferred, the people in these areas shall be given the right of staying on where they are, as nationals of the State to which the areas are transferred. Pending demarcation of the boundary and exchange of territory by mutual agreement, there should be no disturbance of the status quo and peaceful conditions shall be maintained in the border regions. Necessary instructions in this regard shall be issued to the local authorities on the border by the two countries.’
Leave a Reply