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?”

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.”

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 – they are falling apart within just 10 years. The condition of the houses is pathetic, and so is ours.”

On one side there is new uncertainty about citizenship. On the other, the daily question of livelihood. Between the two, around 300 families in these camps are asking themselves the same thing: What did we gain by coming to this country?

Temporary shelter turned permanent

Sadananda Barman, originally from Patgram in Bangladesh, now lives in Panishala camp. Sitting on a plastic chair under a low tin roof, he painstakingly reconstructs the day he chose to cross.

“There was political instability and religious provocation there,” he tells The Wire. “We thought, India is a big country, surely things would be better for us. The government brought us here with some belongings.”

The feeling of optimism was short-lived, though.

“They kept us in a tin-roof shed on a government agricultural farm. Four years later we were given these houses, and a travel pass that must be renewed every three months! Except for this shelter over our heads, we got nothing,” he reflects.

That sense of betrayal runs through many conversations in the camps.

Dwijendra Barman now drives a battery-operated toto rickshaw to earn a living.

“After bringing us to India, the government promised each family a house, Rs 5 lakh in cash, and five kathas of land,” he says. “Even after 10 years, we have received nothing. The flats where we are kept have no registered ownership. We have no proof of citizenship. So weren’t we cheated? If they send us back to Bangladesh now, we will go.”

In 2015, the Union Cabinet announced a Rs 1,005-crore plan to build infrastructure and rehabilitate the enclave returnees, including Rs 108 crore set aside purely for resettlement. Camps such as Haldibari, Dinhata and Changrabandha were supposed to be short-term transit centres before families were allotted land and integrated into local communities. Ten years on, however, those camps have calcified into permanence for many of the residents.

“Where is the family income, even if there is a roof overhead?” asks Minati Barman. “No MP or MLA in India knows us except during elections.”

On the other side of Teen Bigha, others worked her fields. Here, Minati is the one seeking daily-wage work.

“Women earn Rs 300 and men earn Rs 400 [per day] doing manual labour in the fields,” she tells The Wire. “Every household is the same. Families with elderly people suffer the most, because they cannot work. Their condition is unbearable.”

An Indian address without an Indian life

To understand why these anxieties run so deep, one has to step back and look at the strange cartography that produced the chhitmahals – pockets of one country’s land entirely surrounded by the other country.

For decades after 1947, 111 Indian enclaves lay inside East Pakistan/Bangladesh and 51 Pakistani/Bangladeshi enclaves lay inside India. People living there were neither fully governed by the state that claimed them, nor fully accepted by the state that surrounded them. They lacked schools, hospitals, roads, police – and above all, documents.

The first serious attempt to fix this came with the 1974 Indira-Mujib Land Boundary Agreement, which proposed exchanging enclaves and settling disputed strips of land. But it took more than 40 years, a 2011 protocol and a 2015 constitutional amendment in India before the swap finally happened.

At midnight on July 31, 2015, the enclaves formally vanished from the map. Those who stayed where they were became citizens of the country surrounding them. A tiny fraction – like the families in Haldibari, Dinhata and Changrabandha – chose to leave behind their homes, lands and memories to follow their flag.

On the Bangladesh side, former enclaves were quickly folded into nearby unions. Electricity, paved roads and government services reached almost all the 111 ex-enclaves within a few years. Local residents now routinely vote in elections and access schools and healthcare as regular citizens.

On the Indian side, the journey has been more uneven. In the ex-Bangladeshi enclaves that became Indian territory, basic infrastructure has improved and residents now vote in local and assembly elections. But for the small group who relocated to India and were herded into camps, the transition from enclave to citizen has been fraught – and, they say, incomplete.

“We have an Indian address now,” one youth in Haldibari puts it, “but not an Indian life.”

In the midst of this limbo, a new generation is growing up trying to build a future on a shaky foundation.

Inside Haldibari camp, 21-year-old Laboni Barman is finishing her BA from Haldibari College – the first graduate in her family.

“I have the time and opportunity, but I will not go for an MA or higher studies,” she says quietly. “What is the point? Everywhere in this state you see highly educated unemployed youth. Seeing all this, I’ve lost the desire to study further.”

Enter SIR

Laboni’s words echo a wider disillusionment. For enclave residents, the promise of 2015 was not only a flag and an ID card, but also a chance to step onto the same rung as other citizens. Instead, many feel they have been parked in a holding area: citizens in theory, but treated as expendable extras in practice.

That is why the recent SIR forms – part of the Election Commission’s fresh round of verification linking voters to older electoral rolls – have triggered such panic.

“It has been 10 years since we became Indians. This country isn’t bad – I won’t say Bangladesh was bad either,” says Pradip Ray, as he bends over a small patch of winter vegetables inside Haldibari camp. “But the politics of religion that uprooted our homes for generations has reached here too. And now we hear that if our names don’t appear in the SIR, they will send us to Bangladesh again. Let them. At least this life of fear will end.”

So far, the Election Commission has made no official announcement clarifying how SIR scrutiny will apply to residents of rehabilitation camps – people who did not exist in any 2002 voter list because they were not citizens of India at the time. Local officials ask them to “wait, nothing is final”, but the ambiguity has reopened old wounds.

“It is true that these people still have no official citizenship certificates, nor any ownership documents for the houses they live in,” says Diptyaman Sengupta, an older rights activist who has long been associated with the Teen Bigha movement. “This is all being done deliberately to keep these people under pressure, fear and anxiety. The state government should inform the Union government and exert pressure, but where is that happening?”

Reframing history

The anxiety in Haldibari cannot be separated from the shadow of Teen Bigha – the narrow corridor that once made global headlines and is now again becoming a site of contest.

The 1974 Indira-Mujib pact had promised Bangladesh uninterrupted access to its large Dahagram-Angarpota enclave through a three-bigha strip of Indian land at Teen Bigha, near Haldibari. After years of protests and postponements, the corridor was finally opened in 1992, initially for limited hours. Only in 2011 did India agree to keep it open 24 hours a day, effectively ending Dahagram’s life as a part-time enclave.

Today, Teen Bigha is being re-read by political actors in Cooch Behar as a symbol of alleged “territorial concessions”.

Shibprasad Ray of the BJP has circulated a booklet on Teen Bigha, arguing, “According to the Nehru agreement, Dahagram belongs to India. In exchange for enclaves, we want enclaves. Teen Bigha or Kuchlibari is not an enclave – it is India’s rightful claim.”

By framing historical agreements selectively, he seeks to turn the clock back, suggesting that India should have retained more land or demanded different swaps. In the process, the BJP’s campaign narrative, local residents say, sidelines the actual condition of the refugees whose lives were upended by the very agreements politicians now debate.

“Earlier, nationalists opposing the Land Boundary Agreement said they were protecting ‘Indian territory’,” says Sengupta. “Today, after all parties have taken credit for resolving enclaves, the same forces are using Teen Bigha again – this time to stoke division while the people most affected remain without basic documents.”

At the Haldibari camp, 90-plus-year-old Dhulli Barman sits on a charpoy, her sparse white hair tied back, her eyes still sharp.

“Will they push us back to Bangladesh again? Why did they bring us here?” she asks. “Seeing all this, I wonder – will I not die in the country where I was born? Will I die in another? Truly, the poor have no country of their own!”

Her life has already traversed princely states, Pakistan, Bangladesh and now India, without her ever moving of her own will. Each new line drawn on a map has found her on the wrong side of certainty.

From Teen Bigha Junction, a road runs from Haldibari towards India’s last village, Dhapra. In between lies Bangladesh’s Dahagram-Patgram road. Police from both countries stand watch at the barbed-wire edges; people from both sides see each other and each other’s vehicles. Many might be old acquaintances, even relatives – but not a single word can be exchanged across the fence.

At the junction, under a sheet of corrugated tin, Dilip Sajowal has run a tea stall for years. Asked about speaking to people across the border, he shakes his head.

“Don’t talk too much, and don’t wander here and there – otherwise there will be trouble,” he says.

Fear, danger, uncertainty and scarcity – the old vocabulary of the enclaves – have once again crept back into the lives of those who thought they had finally escaped them.

Ten years after the chitmahals disappeared from the map, their ghosts still roam the flat blocks of Haldibari, in the questions that no official wants to answer: Who counts as a citizen? Who gets to belong? And how many times must the same people prove who they are?

Translated from Bengali by Aparna Bhattacharya.

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