It is in a tiny strip which is very much part of India, butoutside the fenced border. Located in a strip along the porous land border,which crisscrosses hills, meadows and barren lands, the village is very muchpart of India, but on the other side of the border.
People in this village of Karimganj district of Assam recallwith a shudder how a woman paid a heavy price for this essentially bureaucraticbungling. The legend has it that when she started having labour pains late oneevening, her husband rushed her to gate no. 40, which they had to cross toreach to a primary health centre barely two kilometres away. But the gate “ thevillagers’ only link with the rest of India “ remains open only during thedaytime, that too intermittently and the Border Security Force soldiers manningthe border were not going to make an exception for her. Soldiers beingsoldiers, they didn’t budge, asking the harried couple to wait till the nextmorning. Umpteen knocks on the black iron gate of around six feet high wentunanswered.
“The next morning, there was no need to take her anywhere.She was dead,” says Monilal Suklabaidya, who makes his living as a labourer.
The woman’s death, something that happened in the late 1990sand is now more a matter of folklore, is an indication of how an estimated90,000 people live (or die) “ literally outside the purview of the modernstate, since numerous ‘border villages’ they live in happen to be part of Indiaand yet remain outside the border.
Fencing on this zigzag border, which began in 1986 and isexpected to be completed in March 2012, has left a substantial portion of theIndian territory including populated villages to its western side. But for theknee-high pillars marking the actual boundary, this strip is virtually mergedwith Bangladesh. For more than two decades now, two rows of eight-foot highbarbed wires mounted on a concrete base and layers of concertina wires betweenthem, have been dictating the lives of these Indians.
