On October 1, the day Bangladesh went to the polls, the Hindu tribal couple Mangalu and Miloni had just stepped out to cast their votes when a large crowd started marching down the village square. At Birol, their hamlet in Dinajpur district of northern Bangladesh, there was never much speculation about election results. The Dinajpur-2 constituency was an Awami League pocket borough and Satish Chandra Roy, the veteran Rajbanshi tribal leader of the League, had won four successive terms from there. The odds favoured Roy this time too but the crowd had its own agenda. The furious protestors carried choppers and sticks, shouted "Allah-hu-Akbar", and barricaded the Rajbanshi settlements. One of them, a local worker for Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) candidate General (retd) Mahabubur Rahman, flaunted a battery-operated loudspeaker and announced that if the pulia (local name for Hindu tribals) dared approach the polling centre, they would be beheaded. Neither Mangalu nor any of his Hindu neighbours left his home that day.

COLD COMFORT: a group of Bangladeshi refugees warm themselves in front of a bonfire at a refugee camp (left)

Next morning, the result was declared: the general had wrested the seat from Roy. The BNP supporters who had threatened the tribals returned to the village with their arsenal by noon. "My husband and I bolted the main door from inside, picked up our two children and fled across paddy fields," says Miloni. Hiding in a dry well a couple of miles away, she saw their house going up in flames. The family were on the run for a whole week, seeking shelter in one tribal village, then another. They had no money, not even a change of clothes. Their only resource was a gold bangle that Miloni wore. She sold it at a village pawnshop and raised the amount required to buy their passage to India from the "lineman"-Rs 250 per adult and Rs 100 for each child.

"We swam across the bordering Tulai river at night, but we were caught in the beam of the bsf's searchlight," says Mangalu. "Then the Indian sepoys opened fire. I heard a bullet hitting the water less than an arm's length on my side." Mangalu says that their two-year-old daughter Priyanka would have been killed in the firing but for his wife's decision to tie the child on her back with her sari. The family swam as far as possible from the BSF outpost to reach Udaypur in the Kushmundi police station area of South Dinajpur district in West Bengal.

They say there were hardly any welcoming looks in Udaypur since the area is dominated by Muslims. There was fear of the infiltrators being reported to the police and then pushed back into the homeland they dreaded. So the search for shelter continued, till the district BJP workers found them and put them up at the Badalpur refugee camp, about 60 km from Malda town.

The BSF keeps vigil along the Mahipal border

The same story is being repeated by other families along West Bengal's 2,200-km border with Bangladesh, with the fleeing Hindus crossing over from both the northern and southern parts. The only difference is that, unlike the tribal immigrants of the north, the Bangladeshi Hindus who are coming from the southern areas are refusing to assemble in ghettoes for fear of being pushed back by the police. In October 2000, the BSF had apprehended 508 Bangladeshi infiltrators in south Bengal; this October, the number was 635. Though the West Bengal chief minister underplays the phenomenon-"there has not been much infiltration in the south"-state Transport Minister Subhash Chakravarty has a diametrically opposite version. "You talk to any of the locals in south Bengal border towns like Bongaon, Hasnabad and Ranaghat and they will confirm the presence of large numbers of newcomers offering their labour at construction sites or plying rickshaws," he says. "Till October 1, the illegal immigrants were both Hindus and Muslims and they came mainly to carry out trade and went back in a few days. Now the Hindus among them are staying back."