Word: sides
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...India, for its part, is unlikely to allow people in the disputed areas to simply choose a side. A referendum there would inevitably renew demands for the long-promised plebiscite in Kashmir. But political parties on the border have not been shy about using these residents to swell their vote banks. Subhasis Ghosh, the Cooch Behar official in charge of dispensing development funds, says he received 10,000 applications for voter ID cards last year and rejected 8,000 for dubious family and residency ties to his district. "A voter card is the most valuable thing in this area...
...nearby, made of steel, concrete and barbed wire. Like the U.S., Israel and other countries, India is constructing a massive frontier fence, hoping that it will act as a bulwark against what the government in New Delhi perceives to be problems and threats on the other side. When finished, the Indian fence along the 2,500-mile (4,100 km) border with its eastern neighbor will all but encircle Bangladesh...
...53/4-mile (9.3 km) length of fence are lined up on the sand. The Central Public Works Department carried them out by boat during the summer monsoon, when water levels were high enough to transport heavy equipment, and they will eventually support the fencing that will separate the Indian side of the island from Bangladesh...
...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 stretch of border are villages that simply refuse to accept the lines drawn by Radcliffe's pen. New Delhi backs those that want to stay in India, despite the legal claim...
...word I hear most often to describe this boundary is porous. It twists through all kinds of terrain, from the mangroves on the western end through the fierce currents of the Brahmaputra River in the north to the thick jungles of the Chittagong Hill Tracts on the eastern side, all of which serve as natural barriers. At its most developed, the border looks like Petrapole, the channel for the vast majority of legal migration and one of the largest land crossings in Asia. More than 1,000 people pass through every day, most by bus and some on foot, along...