A 35-year-old settlement was broken in a single day. The soil on which they had built their homes, raised their children and farmed to support their families — that soil has now been left behind by 19 families staring at an uncertain future. These families have had to leave their homesteads on the orders of the administration in the Raninagar border area of Murshidabad district in India’s West Bengal.
The local administration says the step was taken because of plans to strengthen border security and build a barbed-wire fence. The affected families, however, allege that they have committed no crime, and that despite living for years on government-recorded land they have now had to leave their homes. A visit to the Pengupara area of Char Sarandajpur in Raninagar found the bamboo of broken houses lying around in places and yards left empty; where there was the noise of children only a few days ago, there is now silence.
An evicted resident, Ajbar Ali, said: ‘We have been here for about 35 years. We farmed, we ran our households. We never imagined we would suddenly have to leave. Now I cannot work out where we will go or how life will go on.’
Local people say that, while most of the 19 families have some small shelter elsewhere, the families of Milan Sheikh and Raihan Sheikh face the greatest crisis, as they have no other permanent place to live. Elderly villagers say border life is hard enough already, and that having to leave their homes so suddenly has left many broken mentally.
Sujan Sheikh said: ‘All this time I worked the land right beside my house and raised cattle and goats. Now it will be very hard to look after everything from a distance. The biggest worry now is how the household expenses will be met.’
Ajbar Ali, Tufan Sheikh, Younus Ali, Moti Sheikh and several other farmers said their farmland was still in the area adjacent to the border, but that with their homes moved, going there every day to work would become far more difficult. The administration said the settlements were located extremely close to the border, which was causing problems for surveillance for security reasons, along with a risk of border crime and smuggling; it was after considering these factors, it said, that the families had been told to move elsewhere.
The local panchayat head, Mafroza Bibi, said the area fell within a sensitive border zone and that barbed-wire fencing work was also planned there in future, and that people had been moved with their safety in mind. But behind the administrative reasoning, it is the picture of the suffering of the border people that has now loomed largest. The very people who have spent years living in the shadow of a state guarding the border are today suffering uncertainty over their own future.
A barbed-wire fence may make the border more secure. But the way the memories, roots and stories of the life struggles of many people are being buried in the shadow of that fence — these 19 families of Raninagar are a poignant example of it.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report