We get some answers to this in chapter ten, the story of Keramat Bhai. Yet, it is worth reflecting here that those who come are driven not just by absolute destitution and deprivation but also by determination to succeed and get out of the swamp of poverty. As far back as 1991, a wizened old patriarch called Mugha ul-Khand talked to me at the village of Modhupur, about 150 kilometres north of the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, about the crisis that is pushing people across the border.’1

‘Every year our land holding is shrinking, our families are growing. My father had twenty-four bighas of land, (one bigha equals about 0.35 acres or 0.15 hectares). Now my four sons have two bighas each. What can you grow on two bighas?’ One son had already sold part of his land, and each of the sons had several children.

Mugha ul-Khand declared that his people were prepared to go anywhere ‘to Assam, if necessary, if we can get land and live with dignity. But will the Assamese have us? There are man-made frontiers and prejudices.’2

Here was a man, then aged not less than eighty, who declared that his family would be prepared to move away from Modhupur to an unfamiliar land. The rumours of anger against settlers in Assam had reached even this placid village. But that did not seem to affect their thinking—they were still prepared to consider the possibility, that if the worst happened and their land holdings became unsustainable, they would migrate to a foreign country and face a hostile atmosphere. The old man said that none in his family had gone to Assam.

These days there are well-organized gangs who organize travel and settlement to India for a fee. This illegal system of organized movement has been around since the beginning of the influx into Assam, at the start of the last century. These days, it is much more profitable and better tuned.

People do not go merely from Bangladesh to the North East. But for a premium, they can find themselves in cities such as New Delhi and Jaipur. Of course, getting to Calcutta is easy pickings.

In June 2000, the Delhi police unleashed a drive to oust illegal settlers from Bangladesh. Their goal was to identify these groups and push them out, placing them on trains to send them back to their homeland. This was not the first such effort as we have seen from K.P.S. Gill’s campaign in Assam in 1964. A campaign against Bangladeshis was launched in 1996 in New Delhi when about 200 terrorized ‘Bangladeshis’ were herded into a train and sent toward Bangladesh. The were pushed across the border, in the face of protests by Dhaka. To add to their humiliation, a number of men were forcibly tonsured by the Border Security Force before being sent away. The Marxist government in West Bengal was appalled and public opinion in India reacted sharply to the images of the tonsuring and the forced repatriation.