Crossings

IMAGINE A state capital with an international border. Sounds improbable? Well, that's Agartala for you.

I discovered this to my utter amazement on a recent trip to the capital of the northeastern state of Tripura. I was trying to find my way to India's first land port, locally known as the "Akhaura checkpoint".

I had barely left the downtown hotel, where I was staying, with a cabbie who spoke a somewhat incomprehensible Bangla dialect from Bangladesh, when I found myself staring at a towering arch welcoming me to "Agartala land port".

Had we arrived? Already? I gasped as one of the Border Security Force jawans guarding the land port's entrance walked up to me with strong, purposeful strides. Did I have a passport and visa? Apparently, those were necessary if one wanted to get into the port. I told him I was a journalist. He shrugged and walked away. I was allowed to enter eventually, but only after obtaining a clearance from higher authorities.

The land port was set up in November 2013, born of an agreement signed by the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Bangladesh counterpart, Sheikh Hasina, who is still in office. Meant to ferry goods and people between the countries, just as a sea port does, it is one of the seven land ports coming up in the country.

Nowhere else in India is an international border, or for that matter a land port, a part of a city or its municipal corporation. It is in Agartala.

But then, Tripura, with Bangladesh on three sides and Assam and Mizoram on the other, is as much about India as about Bangladesh.

Geographically isolated from the Indian mainland, the people of Tripura have always leaned on neighbouring land. Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar told me that the state suffered most at the time of Partition. "We used the Bangladesh mainland to travel to Bengal and elsewhere. But it was not possible anymore without passports and visas," he said.

Even today, you can't fly from Calcutta to Agartala without going through Bangladesh. Technically, you can, but the air fare and travel time would be thrice as much, a Tripura government official told me.

"It is only 350 kilometres or so from Calcutta to Agartala as the crow flies (via Bangladesh). But if you take the land route from Calcutta, it will be roughly 1,700 kilometres via Assam and Meghalaya," Tripura governor Tathagata Roy said over a cup of steaming tea at Raj Bhavan in Agartala.

In fact, the governor added, you can catch a glimpse of the border fencing at the back of the Agartala airport as the plane lands. "Look out of the plane window next time,'' he said.

Governor Roy's ancestors were from a district barely 30 kilometres from Agartala, now lying in Bangladesh, which used to be known as "Tipperah or Tripoora" in British India. And that, says Roy, who already visited his ancestral village, is his "personal stake" in the development of Tripura.

So when he found that bus services between Calcutta and Agartala, launched with much fanfare not long ago, had turned out to be a damp squib, he took up the matter with the ministry of external affairs.

Indian passengers need passports and Bangladesh visas to arrive in Agartala via the Bangladesh land route. Who wants to travel from one part of a country to another with a passport and visa?

The foreign ministry, at the governor's urgings, has already taken up the matter with the Bangladeshi government.

The Akhaura integrated checkpost is, however, a misnomer, for Akhaura, a railhead, lies on the other side of the border, in Bangladesh.

Debasis Nandi - manager of the sprawling land port with immigration, customs and bank counter besides a vast warehouse and quarantine facilities - says Bangladeshi products worth Rs 282 crore were imported to India through the land port in 2015-2016. "This [land port] is preferred by Bangladesh since they export through here. The land port in Bengal (coming up in Benapole) is used mostly by India to export goods to Bangladesh,'' says Nandi, a Tripura government officer on deputation.

The land port functions between 6am and 6pm. "Many people have their relations on either side of the border. Some from Bangladesh come for treatment or to shop at the Big Bazaar in Agartala," says land port staff and Agartala resident Prosenjit Banik.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot get away from Bangladesh or vice versa in Agartala. Sarkar says the Bangladesh Prime Minister has a soft spot for Tripura because of the help extended by the people of his state in the 1971 Bangladesh liberation.

"Hasina said on her last trip to Agartala that she and her government would do everything possible for Tripura,'' says Sarkar, adding that the broadband hub set up in Agartala following an agreement between India and Bangladesh would put his state on the information super highway.

India has also agreed to build and fund a rail link between Agartala and Akhaura in Bangladesh and build a bridge and widen a road to the state's southern tip to connect it with the Chittagong port.

Recently, when Olympian and daughter of Tripura, Dipa Karmakar, returned home, a neighbourly delegation from Bhairab, a small place close to Dhaka, stopped by to welcome, congratulate and invite her to a felicitation ceremony in Bangladesh that would be held in her honour.

Not all bridges need the sanction of the state. Some bridges are more organic, overarching, intrinsic. That's how it is between Agartala and Bangladesh.

Debaashish Bhattacharya