A procession of the enclave exchange coordination committee. File picture

Cooch Behar, April 28: The railways have agreed to attach two additional coaches to a passenger train to allow more than 2,000 Bangladeshis living in enclaves to arrive here from Bamunhat and submit a memorandum to the district magistrate demanding the exchange of the landlocked territories between the two countries.

“The India-Bangladesh Enclaves Exchange Coordination Committee had submitted a written request for three additional coaches in the Bamunhat-Alipurduar Passenger. We can only provide two,” Tushar Adhikary, the station master of Bamunhat, said.

The train departs Bamunhat at 7am everyday.

The secretary of the committee, former Forward Bloc MLA Dipak Sengupta, said the people would come from six enclaves in the Dinhata subdivision and three in Mekhliganj.

Sengupta said the enclave-dwellers would alight at Dinhata, where the committee is based, around 10 in the morning. From there, they will travel to the district headquarters on trucks.

“We live in Bangladeshi territory inside India and are scared of police and the BSF. But since so many of us are going to Cooch Behar tomorrow, I am feeling much more confident,” said Abdul Rehman, a resident of Karala, a Bangladeshi enclave in Dinhata.

The Cooch Behar district administration is getting ready for a huge gathering here. District magistrate Rajesh Kumar Sinha said he would forward the demands for the exchange of enclaves to the “proper quarters”.

Sengupta said there were a number of other demands as well. “The residents of Indian and Bangladeshi enclaves should not be booked under the foreigners act. Instead, the district administrations in both the countries should recognise the identity cards that the committee is going to provide to the enclave-dwellers,” Sengupta said. He added that representatives of the committee would meet Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi in Calcutta on May 6.