Many people living in villages in West Bengal along the Bangladesh border came to a meeting in Kolkata on Tuesday.
In conversations with this newspaper, they narrated how difficult life had become because of alleged high-handedness of the Border Security Force (BSF).
The villagers attended a programme organised by a group that works for the rights of marginalised people living in border areas.
A 33-year-old man from a village in Cooch Behar is blind in the right eye and can only partially see with the left. Pellets fired allegedly by a BSF jawan robbed him of his vision.
On the night of August 17, 2022, he was returning from a local market — less than a kilometre from the border — when the jawan allegedly stopped him.
“He seemed drunk. He accused me of being a smuggler. I protested and showed him a pack of biscuits I had bought for my son. He refused to believe me. Suddenly, he fired from a gun. My face was sprayed by what felt like bullets,” said the man.
He was taken to multiple hospitals, in Cooch Behar and Kolkata, before being operated at the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu, Nepal, run by a non-profit.
The pellets have caused much more than physical harm, said the man, the only earning member in his family, which includes his parents, wife and two sons, aged seven and five.
Days before the injury, he had come back from Rajasthan, where he worked as a labourer hired on a no-work-no-pay basis, like many young men from his district.
“I can barely see. I am not fit to work as a labourer. My father has some land. Relatives have been helping us with money. But that is far from enough,” said the man.
His wife had filed a police complaint but till date, there has been “no concrete action”.
At the programme, the man had brought a bag full of papers, mostly treatment summaries from hospitals.
A 42-year-old woman from a border village in North 24-Parganas was allegedly beaten up by a BSF jawan in the last week of December.
The woman works as a labourer on a patch of farmland near the border. Access to the land is allegedly restricted by border guards.
The woman, who was carrying her 10-year-old son on a cycle, was allegedly stopped by a jawan who asked for her Aadhaar card. After she showed her card, the jawan allegedly asked her to open her tiffin box, which had beef and rice.
“The soldier started abusing me for having beef and kicked the box to the ground, spilling the food. I was furious and went ahead to meet an officer at the camp, to complain against the jawan. The jawan tried to stop me. He pushed me and hit me with a bamboo stick multiple times,” the woman alleged.
She also filed a police complaint the same day but the cops have yet to take any action, she said.
Asked about the allegations against BSF, G.A.K. Arya, DIG BSF, told The Telegraph: “BSF personnel on the border duty in West Bengal are all trained and they know their job. They aren’t mad dogs to fire pellets without provocation. I invite you all to please visit any of the borders and see the condition for yourself. There are a few NGOs who collect money from these residents assuring media coverage of their concocted tales.”
The men and women had come to a programme that marked 25 years of Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (Masum).
The organisation has been documenting alleged state atrocities — extra-judicial killings, custodial death, rape, mysterious disappearances and police torture — in border areas.
“A majority of these people living in border villages have always been suffering. But now, the scale has multiplied alarmingly. The current regime in Delhi has shredded to bits the very fabric of human rights,” said Kirity Roy, secretary of Masum.
In West Bengal, the BSF guards around 2,216km of the India-Bangladesh border that spreads across 10 districts.
More than 1 crore people live in villages along the border.
The BSF reports to the Union home ministry, helmed by minister Amit Shah.
The alleged high-handedness of the BSF has been a raging issue in Bengal.
Allegations of the BSF stopping farmers from going to their fields beyond the fences, preventing them from cultivating “tall” crops like corn and jute citing security reasons, halting people on border roads after dusk and even assaulting people based on suspicion are reported regularly.
A 24-year-old was allegedly gunned down by a BSF constable in Cooch Behar district near the India-Bangladesh border on December 24, with central force sources claiming he was a smuggler and the family that he was a migrant worker.
Justice A.K. Ganguly, a former Supreme Court judge and former chairman of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission; Justice Malay Sengupta, former Chief Justice of Sikkim; and rights activists Sujato Bhadra and Wilfred D’costa were among those who attended the programme at the University Institute Hall near College Square on Tuesday.