Word: bordered
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...areas: "nowhere people." As India and Bangladesh fight over the land they live on, their status remains in doubt. Despite sporadic diplomatic efforts - the most recent one last September - the two countries have never been able to agree on exchanging the territory or even just accepting the de facto border as it is. "For Bangladesh, every inch is important," particularly as it loses ground to rising sea levels, says Sreeradha Datta, a political scientist at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Bangladeshis in the area understandably bristle at the idea of being fenced in. "There...
...Sense of Place Look under the surface of any issue on the border, and its central paradox soon becomes clear. Securing a border is an effort to draw a bright, clear line marking exactly where the state begins and ends. That was never an easy task in India, where the line meant to separate Hindu and Muslim villages nevertheless left millions of Bengali-speaking Muslims on both sides. Rather than settling the 60-year-old questions about who belongs to whom, fencing India's border has only resurrected them...
...officers admit that the ban makes little sense; dozens of Indian citizens are killed every year while trying to earn the fee of about $22 for getting a cow across. (The animals can eventually be sold for as much as $900 each.) Legalizing the trade would reduce the border violence and open a new stream of tax revenue. But few on the border expect that to happen in a majority-Hindu country. "Which government is going to allow the export of cows for slaughter?" Mitra asks. "That would just be political suicide...
...Cows account for about half the illegal trade; Indian government rations of wheat, rice and sugar sold on the black market in Bangladesh, as well as cough syrup (used as an intoxicant across the border), account for the rest. Altogether, this informal trade is nearly as large as the formal trade, according to a 2006 study by the World Bank. Mohammad Jalal Uddin Sikder, a researcher with the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU) at the University of Dhaka, describes typical smugglers: "They are landless, most of them are female, sometimes divorced. They have no other choice." Criminalizing...
...kingdoms that faced each other near the Teesta River, staked games of chess with plots of land. To settle their debts, they passed chits - pieces of paper representing the territory won or lost - back and forth. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the law lord who partitioned India, drew the 1947 border, Cooch Behar went to India and Rangpur to Bangladesh - including the people who lived on the two kings' 162 "chit mahals," or paper palaces. Their villages, caught on the wrong side of the border, are now small islands of India surrounded by Bangladesh or vice versa. Elsewhere in this same...