And what item, pray, appears to be the biggest item on the agenda of Indian smugglers. This is a trick question that I often throw at audiences in India and elsewhere. The answers range from tea and petrol to sugar and foodgrains. Only one person in all these years has got it right and that too at a lecture/discussion with the North East Study Circle in Bangalore in August 2000.

The answer is a six letter word: cattle.

Those skinny, tired-looking, bovines that slowly travel on the Guwahati-Shillong road, as they did during the days of my youth, are the providers of protein for Bangladesh’s millions, especially at Ramzan. Our Awami Leaguer in Chilmari had got it right when he spoke of how economic considerations outweighed religious concerns. There are not less than 200 ‘cattle corridors’ on the Indo-Bangladesh border for these animals. ‘A staggering 1.7 million pieces of cattle are estimated to be illegally imported into Bangladesh every year,’ declared Bakht’s study. Of course, he meant head of cattle when he spoke of pieces. But language aside, Bakht clinically analysed the import of the animals into specific benefits for his country.

One of the important by-products of the trade in the animals was the availability of hides. Calculating that about 18 square feet of hide could be extracted from an average head of cattle, Bakht estimated an annual availability of over 30 million square feet of hide through illegal imports of cows, another 0.5 million or so square feet of hides and skin that were directly smuggled into Bangladesh. He also spoke of the impetus it gave to the availability of dairy products and meat in the face of rising demands. The supply of draft power to agriculture also improved as a result.

The list of illegal imports is imposing: there are not less than fourteen items in Bakht’s list. Livestock, fish, poultry and related products are nearly 40 per cent of the total value of all such imports. Next come agricultural products, processed foods and tobacco and then textiles and electrical goods. Liquor and the cough syrup Phensidyl, which many Bangladesh take as a liquor or drug, comprise 2.44 per cent of the total value.

Bangladesh’s total legal exports to India were a measly 21 million US dollars in 1993-94. Illegal exports to India constituted the sum total of the country’s legal trade many times over: 126 million dollars worth of goods or six times the amount earned by licensed exporters and traders.

This means that Bangladesh’s official trade deficit with India, at that time, was not less than 392 million dollars (413 million dollars for imports minus 21 million dollars of exports). With the addition of the illegal trade, this deficit rises to nearly 900 million dollars. There are other economists who say that the actual figure is over a billion dollars, because the under-invoicing of goods going legally out of Bangladesh is not often estimated.