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LEFT IN THE LURCH: Rubeya (left) and Deepali (right)

Fourteen-year-old Rabeya Khatoon of Panchgachhi village was lured by Akbar Sheikh into eloping with him in October last. Sheikh had appeared in the village a couple of years ago. He had taken refuge at a local mosque and married Azra Bibi who also happened to be Rabeya's neighbour. Fourteen days after her elopement, Rabeya returned home. She had been tortured into incoherence. Sheikh, meanwhile, is absconding.

Deepali and Rabeya are symbolic of new social tensions involving illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in the 19 villages of Nadia district. In a region where marrying off a daughter means one mouth less to feed, people are not very discerning when it comes to choosing a son-in-law. That also means that, often, they don't even care which country or community the sons-in-law hail from. In the past three months, there have been at least five cases in the border villages of the district where girls either eloped with Bangladeshi youths or were abducted by them. Most of them were later abandoned. Every third house in the villages has daughters married to Bangladeshis who have either fled or have been "pushed back" by the police. No matter how much the West Bengal Government denies infiltration, realities are different and much worse. At a local police station, the officer-in-charge narrates such cases by the dozen. Many other cases have gone unreported.

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The girls lured into marriages by Bangladeshi immigrants have no hopes of rebuilding their lives.

The porous border is just one of the reasons why such incidents occur. A vast stretch of the region is yet to be fenced. In fact, some of the residents of the villages are actually Bangladeshis who had migrated during the 1971 war. A quack from across the border, now living in the Panchgachhi village, for example, is using the voter's identity card of a dead man. In such circumstances, it is difficult for the police or the Border Security Force to keep track of infiltrators.

There is another reason though why women in these villages are so easily trapped. Their own men have left the villages. Take the Dighalkandi village, located 200 metres from the Bangladesh border. Once with a population of 1,000, it now has 600 people, mostly women. Four hundred men have left in the past few years for places like Dubai, Surat in search of jobs.

For a Bangladeshi it is easy to pass off as a resident in these remote villages if he has a wife and a family in India. And this is just a stopgap before moving into the cities leaving their wives behind or with a local woman as a shield. With the police and sometimes even the girls' families being indifferent to the problem, the local administration has stepped in. Kartick Mondal, the pradhan of Dighalkandi, goes about in an autorickshaw announcing that parents should submit the prospective groom's voter's identity card or ration card with the panchayat. Mondal has also held meetings with other panchayats in the district.

Meanwhile, for the likes of Deepali and Rabeya there isn't much hope. "No one will marry me now," says Deepali. For these girls, there is no way out.

-By Swagata Sen

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