MASALDANGA ENCLAVE, India: The stone cairn that marks the edge of Masaldanga village is a plaything for children. They climb and sit on it, unknowing or unworried by its history or its consequence. But this unprepossessing pillar holds serious effect. Technically, it marks a border between Bangladesh and India. It excises the village beyond it from being part of the country in which it sits, and excludes the people who live there from belonging to either one country or another.
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Masaldanga is one of more than 170 exclaves, tiny islands of Bangladesh stranded inside India, and their inverse, the exclaves of India surrounded by Bangladeshi territory. Historical accidents, more than 50,000 people live in these curious no-man's lands.
Fable has it these benighted villages were won and lost in ancient chess matches between the Maharajah of Cooch Behar and the Faujdar of Rangpur, who staked pieces of territory on the outcomes of games. The truth is more prosaic: they were created by 18th century treaties between the conquering Muslim Mughals and the Hindu maharajah.
When the partition of British India in 1947 saw Cooch Behar become Indian and Rangpur join what was then East Pakistan, those villages found themselves marooned in a foreign country.
The outcome is messy on both sides. Across this border there are 71 Bangladeshi exclaves in Indian territory, and 102 Indian exclaves inside Bangladesh. Masaldanga, for example, is an exclave of Bangladesh, while being an enclave inside India. There are 28 second-order enclaves (an enclave within an enclave) and what is believed to be the world's only third-order enclave (a piece of India, within a piece of Bangladesh, within a piece of India, within the country of Bangladesh).
Cartographical quirkiness aside, the consequences of being born on the wrong side of the line are serious. Typically, enclave borders are marked only with a small stone pillar, sometimes inconveniently lobbed in the middle of a field, but they are a serious divide: those on one side enjoy the benefits and protections of citizenship, those on the other are effectively stateless.
They cannot get identification documents or passports for travel. Typically, they are born at home, because their mothers will not be admitted to any hospital. They never attend school, because principals won't enrol them.
Their villages have no electricity or running water. The enclaves have no police, and so become hideouts for the bandits of the region, who threaten to report villagers for crossing the border.
For enclave-dwellers, crossing the ''border'' into India or Bangladesh is technically illegal, and regularly means arrest and indefinite detention.
In Masaldanga, just a handful of kilometres across but home to 8000 people, The Herald meets Mohamed Azgar Ali. He says he is 100 years old; an exaggeration, but not by much. Mr Ali was born Indian, in British India before partition, and now wants only to be a citizen of that country again before he dies.
''India got the freedom, but we lost ours,'' he says through an interpreter. ''We have left Bangladesh, we cannot return there. We are stuck in the middle, and we have many problems. We have no ration card, no health facilities, children are in a miserable condition with no immunisation or schooling.''
Anawa Bibi says women and children suffer most in Masaldanga. ''Whenever [a] woman has a baby, in the time of pregnancy, they cannot take her to the hospital. Even if women are dying, they are still not admitted. It is because we live in the enclave. We don't send our children to school. If we go to the school for admission, the school refuses to accept them.''
In nearby Dinhata, Diptiman Sengupta is leading a hunger strike to raise awareness of the enclave issue. He is on day 27 and, sustained only by glucose-sweetened water, he speaks slowly, pausing after each sentence and resting on the hands of those beside him.
''Both governments are claiming the land only, but not the people. But without the human beings there is no value in this land. How can we be ignored?''
Along the conventional border with Bangladesh, India is building a fence to keep out a feared horde of millions of Bangladeshi economic and climate refugees. But the enclave issue remains unresolved, despite four agreements over six decades between the two countries' governments. The latest, signed in September last year, is supposed to allow enclaves to ''dissolve'', and for their residents to join the country surrounding them. But few, so far, have been able to claim citizenship.
Sengupta holds little hope for it. ''We don't need another agreement again, we have all those agreement papers before. We need action, we need the governments to do something to help.''
