Growing up too fast: Children struggle with aftermath of state violence in India-Bangladesh border villages
- Written by Ritwika Mitra
- Edited by Tina Lee
- Illustration by Marie Schwab
India and Bangladesh share a 4,000 kilometer-long border, which looms large for children of living alongside it, particularly those whose parents have suffered abuse at the hands of the Border Security Force.
For the past six years, Waliur Rahman, 12, and Rahima Khatoun, 6, have split their time between living at their maternal and paternal grandparents’ homes in neighbouring villages. Each place has its own small perk — their mother Suraiya Parvin does not have to constantly worry about rolling beedis till midnight for a paltry monthly amount of Rs 2,000 ($23) to sustain the living expenses while at her parental home. But there, the children miss the cousins who keep them company at all times in the joint family, and the room where they lived with their father before he died.
Suraiya laments Waliur has already foregone some bit of his childhood — he offers to give up his share of food for his sister, scolds her when she asks for small indulgences, and ensures that his mother eats before he has his share. “I tried to make him understand he should eat too when I buy something for them,” says Suraiya. At this point, Waliur turns to the green-painted wall and weeps. Suraiya gently pokes him and asks, “Kadchis?” (are you crying?), wiping her own tears with the corner of her embroidered cream-coloured scarf.
There are days when she is fumbling for answers, when Rahima wonders aloud who will get her married when she grows up, as she has no abbu (father). Waliur immediately steps in and says he will. “I feel so sad in these moments,” says Suraiya.
In August 2017, Suraiya and witnesses allege, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) severely beat her husband Ziaur Rahman after he was accused of smuggling cattle across the border, and left him to die. Locals took him to a nearby hospital, where he was declared dead within an hour of arrival. While consolidated data of people who are facing severe emotional and physical torture, including death, after encounters with the BSF is not available in the public domain, Ziaur is among hundreds who human rights organizations allege the BSF has injured, tortured, or killed at the West Bengal-Bangladesh border since 2011. The families of victims represent many hundreds more who live with the aftermath of this state-sponsored violence.
Families struggle with normal lives in border villages
Since last year, Unbias The News met seven families and at least another seven local men in the border districts of Murshidabad and North 24 Parganas who said they have faced harassment of some degree, including physical violence, verbal threats, and intimidation from BSF personnel. The children in these households were growing up in fear, seeing the everyday dynamics between their parents and BSF personnel.
Among the families UTN met, there were three cases where young men in the households had died due to drowning or beating while they were allegedly engaged in couriering cattle/pharmaceutical items, one case in which the person was partially blinded by rubber pellets while he was allegedly ferrying phensedyl, a cough syrup. Among the other cases, one man was severely beaten because of differences with the BSF over the supply of raw materials for construction, and remained hospitalised for over ten days. The family showed pictures of the injuries he sustained to UTN. Another young woman was assaulted after being accused of smuggling a bicycle she had bought and had the documents for. Another youth was harassed on his birthday when he was headed to celebrate with his friends and showed irritation when asked to show his identification papers to the BSF.
In the case of Ziaur, the late father of Waliur and Rahima, the post-mortem report, reviewed by UTN, shows head injury, trauma to his right lung, rib fracture, and bruises. His children were six years and seven months old then.
An agent with the West Bengal-based Sarada Financial group before it collapsed in 2013, when hundreds of people lost money in the Ponzi scheme, and several others took their own lives, Ziaur was reeling from severe financial stress in the years that followed. He started selling rubber slippers outside of the Murshidabad district where Bayra is located. He would also occasionally do agricultural labour on other people’s lands when in the village. Ziaur’s wife and mother say that he went to work on someone’s land that fateful evening when he was beaten. His brother Dukhu Sheikh, however, adds, “I really do not know what he was doing that evening. But even if he was involved in some way in any illicit activity, does that mean the security forces take law and order into their own hands?”
"Even if he was involved in some way in any illicit activity, does that mean the security forces take law and order into their own hands?”
Building trust?
UTN spoke to Ravi Gandhi, who recently retired as Additional Director General, Eastern Command, responsible for managing West Bengal-Bangladesh borders. He said the ground situation is complex in border villages, which are often remote areas. “The BSF has a definite role to perform in securing the borders legally. Often, there are challenges. The local population often engage in illegal activities due to lack of adequate economic opportunities. But there are also organised mafias who carry out illegal operations,” he says.
Gandhi says the BSF resorts to non-lethal firing policy as a last resort. “But if firing is from close quarters due to operational reasons, it can lead to fatalities. There is a constant effort by the BSF for building trust with the local community, running civic action programmes, and boosting the local economy by buying local goods.” He adds that the force has introduced body-worn cameras for the personnel to bring more transparency and accountability in such operations.
“There was a flash of light while some men hurled abuses at me. There was a lot of blood gushing out from my eyes. I do not remember anything after that.”
For Sohabuddin Biswas’s family, whom we visited in September in Gobra village in North 24 Parganas district, there is no semblance of normalcy since he remains partially blinded after being hit by the BSF’s rubber pellet guns in March this year. “There was a flash of light while some men hurled abuses at me. There was a lot of blood gushing out from my eyes. I do not remember anything after that.” When he woke up in a hospital hours later where the BSF had taken him, the doctors told his family he may not be able to regain his vision, and that he has sustained severe damage to his brain tissues.
Sohabuddin’s married daughters frequently visit him now to care for him and his elderly mother. “The biggest shift since the incident is for his grandchildren to adjust to this situation. Whenever they would come here, their nanu bhai (which the children call Sohabuddin) would welcome them, take them to the local markets, and pay attention to each of their needs. Now we are always facing questions from the children – why is nanu bhai always sleeping, and making the noises [Biswas makes a sound from his constant discomfort]? They suddenly start crying seeing him in this condition,” says 30-year-old Reshma, the eldest of Sohabuddin’s three daughters, who has two sons aged 14 and 9.
The morning UTN visited, the youngest grandchild of one and a half years, who has just started speaking, tugged at Sohabuddin and nudged him, saying, “Nanu bhai hati hati,” (“nanu bhai, walk, walk”). When Sohabuddin kept sleeping, the child reluctantly moved on, said Reshma.
While the family maintains he went to catch fish early morning at the Ichamati river, Sohabuddin was accused of trying to ferry phensedyl bottles to Bangladesh.
Living with the aftermath
Children in the other families that we visited were severely scarred in the aftermath of the humiliation their parents faced.
Mabia Khatoun, 25, who we visited last year at the border village of Tarali, said that her then six-year-old daughter had started suffering from high fever with bouts of confusion since she witnessed Mabia being beaten up and humiliated at the BSF camp after she was accused of not having the required document for purchasing a bicycle. “It lasted for several days when she would suffer delirium with high fever. The first night was especially the most difficult. With time, she forgot.” It has been over a year, and Mabia has not gotten her bicycle back, which she previously used to transport her daughter to her father’s place for tutoring.
With the BSF camp nearby, her daughter’s tutor eventually refused to come. “He was required to answer so many queries each time he visited because we are residing in a village so close to the Bangladeshi border. If he does not carry identification, they would humiliate him. Eventually, he refused to come. Now my daughter walks down by herself for tutoring,” says Mabia, adding she just wants to move on from the incident. “I became a mother to a baby boy three and a half months back,” she tells UTN over the phone.
The other family – Mohammad Aslam, who showed us photos of his severe injuries that he alleges resulted from an encounter with BSF, said his son (about six years old) was extremely scared when his father was hospitalised. Aslam and his wife made efforts to ensure he would not see the resulting injuries.
The human cost of securing the border
The BSF is responsible for guarding India’s international borders against cross-border trafficking, smuggling and issues related to national security. In 2010, Human Rights Watch released a report, Trigger Happy, which documented excessive use of force by the BSF on both Indian and Bangladeshi nationals across the India-West Bengal border. According to the report, 1,000 people, were shot dead by the BSF between 2000 and 2010.
In 2021, a Human Rights Watch release said the West Bengal-based human rights organisation Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM) had investigated at least 105 killings by the BSF since 2011 in West Bengal’s border villages, and that the actual numbers may be much higher.
“We could not understand what was the basis of using live ammunition to attack people who may have been engaged in an illegal activity, but did not pose threat to life and yet were being fatally targeted for, say smuggling one cow."
Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, says the findings were shocking due to the nature of the disproportionate force used against civilians. “We could not understand what was the basis of using live ammunition to attack people who may have been engaged in an illegal activity, but did not pose threat to life and yet were being fatally targeted for, say smuggling one cow. The laws on both sides are pretty clear — for every death, there has to be a judicial investigation. This is not a war situation. Governments should be very careful in how force is being used,” says Ganguly.
The report documented abuses ranging from “verbal abuse and intimidation to torture, beatings, and killings”. Despite being traditionally ‘friendly neighbours’, tensions have been simmering over cattle smuggling, trafficking, and abuse of pharmaceutical products — which has also been flagged by rights bodies — between the two countries.
Kirity Roy, founder and secretary of MASUM, which was one of the collaborators for the Trigger Happy report, says the lack of data shows the lack of accountability of the state. “From our ground observation, we can say that while cases of killings have come down, torture, degrading treatment and harassment continue unabated at the borders. We supported victims’s families to approach criminal courts in cases of killing and torture. However, the police investigations and medical examinations conducted end up providing immunity to the perpetrators,” says Roy.
The UN has laid out basic principles mandating that security forces should not use force unless it is the last resort. According to media reports, India and Bangladesh discussed the issue of border killings in a recent meeting where the governments agreed to joint awareness programmes, and to implement development initiatives in the vulnerable areas.
While human rights defenders feel there is an urgent need to adopt a humanitarian approach to cross-border issues, Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, India’s former High Commissioner to Bangladesh, says it is difficult to implement this because ‘law and order’ issues are involved. “However, the BSF is strictly instructed to first try to catch the smugglers. They are shot at only when there is an attack on the BSF,” says Chakravarty.
Smuggling happens often under political patronage of both the countries and has remained a contentious issue for decades now, he adds.
"The BSF is strictly instructed to first try to catch the smugglers. They are shot at only when there is an attack on the BSF.”
The ‘Idea of border is shifting’
Talking about how the securitisation of the India–Bangladesh border has evolved, Rimple Mehta, author of Women, Mobility and Incarceration: Love and Recasting of Self across the Bangladesh-India border and senior lecturer at Western Sydney University, notes that cross-border marriages remain one of the ways through which people continue to maintain relationships and kinship. While securitisation has always existed, the idea of the border as both a “hard” and “soft” negotiation has shifted over time. Bangladeshi women who Mehta interviewed in an Indian borderland village in 2016 noted that “this has changed dramatically in the recent years”.
According to government data, the number of cattle seized across the Indo-Bangladesh border has declined from 16 million in 2016 to 46,000 in 2020. The central government has tightened the security at the India-Bangladesh border, and also given the BSF increased jurisdiction from its earlier 15km to now 50km to better “manage borders” — which opposition parties have vehemently protested, saying this would interfere with people’s everyday lives.
While the “zero line” is the actual boundary between the two countries, they cannot build any defensive structures, including barbed wire, within 150 yards of this line, as per a 1975 bilateral pact. But both countries have accused each other of violating this.
Julfikar Ali, a grassroots activist working on cross-border human rights violations, says such departures from the pact are common. But he adds that there have been some improvements in two blocks of the Murshidabad district where he works after consistent engagements with the BSF. “From January this year, the BSF moved towards the zero line and away from the villages, which helped residents live without the feeling of being under surveillance. Locals finally felt what it was to live with freedom,” says Ali.
Ali, who is also part of a non-registered local organisation, Border Development Committee, says the Murshidabad district lacks an integrated check-post (ICP). “We have written to the central government for the setting up of an ICP which will help facilitate people’s movement and trade, so people would be able to earn legally.”
Suraiya says she would burst into tears at the sight of the BSF tent posted some five minutes away from her house soon after her husband’s death. With time, there has been some acceptance. Having studied until class 10, she focuses on teaching her children whenever she feels disturbed by these thoughts.
Childhoods cut short in border villages
In Daharkanda village in North 24 Parganas district, Nakila Mondal — whom UTN first met last year and again this September — saves some money for the road journey and food items to visit her eight-year-old grandson Mohammad Hasan Mondal, who is growing up with his maternal grandparents in a village one and a half hours away in the same district.
Whenever Hasan sees his paternal grandmother, he asks if his father is still with “the police”. He often insists on accompanying his grandmother to visit him at the police station.
“He is such a beautiful child. But he is growing up without both his parents,” says Nakila, breaking down. Hasan’s mother died of leukemia when he was one, and his father has been missing for almost two years now.
River Sonai is a kilometre away from Nakila’s home. It was along this river that in December, 2023 Nafila recovered her son Milan Mondal’s clothes and slippers — the last memories of her son that now she holds on to.
“If he has drowned, how can the clothes and slippers be found? Whatever my son was up to, I have a right to get his body,”
Milan, then 30, was allegedly smuggling Phensedyl cough syrup out of India when he slipped and drowned in the river, the BSF told the family. A search operation was launched, but the body was never recovered. “If he has drowned, how can the clothes and slippers be found? Whatever my son was up to, I have a right to get his body,” she says. Soon, she breaks down, and sings a lullaby softly, “Ghore aay amar chele, amar adorer chele, eshe bhaat kha.” (My son, my dear son, come back home, and eat rice.)
Naming the dealer, Nakila rhetorically asks why his son, who was only probably acting as a low-level courier, is punished when the former goes scot free. “The big dealers never get caught,” says Nakila, who has registered a first information report (FIR). So far, the case has not moved judicially.
Hasan’s maternal grandparents take good care of him, Nakila adds in a moment of calm. “But with Milan, he was always so happy. Milan would buy him clothes, toys, anything that he would throw a tantrum for.”
Social anthropologist Sahana Ghosh, who has deeply researched the securitisation of the Indo-Bangladesh border and is the author of the book A Thousand Tiny Cuts, which documents mobility across the border, says the violence suffered by people in these areas is not limited to physical violence. “It is far deeper. In effect, the number of people who meet with physical violence are fewer. People are facing social and economic violence in their everyday lives in the borderlands. From a health worker, to a teacher, to a farmer carrying his crops — everyone is looked at with suspicion. The BSF is posted there to monitor national security, which often translates into everyone being looked upon as a potential criminal whose activities need to be monitored,” says Ghosh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the National University of Singapore.
Talking about the challenges of living in border areas and being part of a local economy where illicit trade is often normalised due to lack of livelihood options, Ghosh observes, “They choose risky activities under extremely constrained choices.”
Ali, the activist, echoes this sentiment. His organisation has started awareness programmes to educate youths on the lack of dignity in getting involved in any illicit activity, and how smuggling harms national security. “But the reality is complex. In districts with large-scale river erosion and no livelihood or rehabilitation opportunities provided by the government, youths are struggling,” he says.
Social violence
A fortnight after 30-year-old Milan’s death, Alamgir Molla — also a resident of Daharkanda — drowned while allegedly smuggling phensedyl. Alamgir, in his mid-thirties at the time of death, lived with his wife and daughter, who are now left without any breadwinner to support them.
UTN met his wife, Rajia Khatoun, and 10-year-old daughter, Mukta Molla, at a village away from their home — they were living with Rajia’s parents in Banglani in a mud house lacking electricity. The extended monsoons and lack of roads outside their home in Daharkanda pushed them to move, which also meant a long absence from Mukta’s studies. “But it is impossible for me to stay there without my husband – it is only mud and snakes all around in this season. My mother occasionally comes and stays with us but my father has been very sick too, and needs assistance,” says Rajia.
When Alamgir was around, he would carry his daughter in his arms and make sure she did not have to wade through the mud. Missing school was never an option either.
Mukta is a reserved child who tends to keep to herself. Her only confidant was her father. “She would talk to him about everything,” says Rajia with her face facing the floor as her daughter keeps straightening the hem of her dress and glancing in a different direction.
Rajia’s mother says in a low voice that Alamgir never spoke much about his work. But the family got a whiff of his involvement soon after the marriage. “I hear so many locals have some kind of involvement in this…,” says Rajia with her voice trailing off.
What is panning out in the border areas is not just state violence but also social violence.
Ghosh, the social anthropologist, observes that children in these cases are growing up with stigma. “Children often grow up with a profound sense of shame. Imagine the kind of stigma they are subjected to if their parents are rumoured to be associated with illicit economic activities. What is panning out in the border areas is not just state violence but also social violence,” she says.
The only form of justice that Suraiya and Rajia want is to move on so that their children can find ground beneath their feet.
Suraiya wishes she was not born and married into the border area. “I would probably still be living a normal life with my husband and bringing up our children together,” says the 28-year-old.
Growing up without their fathers, Waliur and Mukta have a shared goal — to become doctors when they grow up.
This story was produced with support from the Moving Minds Alliance (MMA) through the Reporters for Early Age Children in Crisis (REACH) Advocacy Stories Fund.
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