On a midweek evening, waiting under a banyan tree in West Bengal’s Swarupnagar, about a kilometer and half from the Hakimpur check post on the India-Bangladesh border, is Nadim Ahmed. He is a Bangladeshi. He crossed over to India over three years back, without necessary documents.
Nadim, in the early 20s, is part of a smaller group waiting for a signal from the BSF to make a move towards the international border in the wake of the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls underway in Bengal and several other states across India.
The logic that the SIR is only to cleanse the voter lists and not to weed out non-citizens from the country does not work for Nadim, or others like him. They came over to this side of the border in search of a better life. Probably some of them found it too, till it lasted.
The Telegraph Online visited the Hakimpur checkpost where hundreds of ‘illegal aliens’ have been assembling to return to conflict-torn Bangladesh...
Video Producer: Shohini Bose
Video Editor: Rajbir Singh
