The villagers have formed a committee to resist attempts by both India and Bangladesh to demarcate the area along the border. While the Congress, Forward Bloc and the CPM have joined the committee, the local unit of the BJP is campaigning on its own. Both groups have, however, the same goal-- to stop the villages from going over to Bangladesh.

The trouble started when the district administration issued a notice recently to acquire land for erecting barbed wire fencing to mark the international border. The border demarcation line lift villages in Four Mouzas in south Berubari panchayat on the Bangladesh side of the fence.

This was done, according to State administration sources,to meet Bangladesh's demand for the Four Mouzas each on the Indian and the Bangladeshi sides of the border which have since remained disputed. In the 1971 pact these were identified as `adverse land'.

Two years ago, the local people put up a stiff resistance when a Bangladesh team visited the area for a survey. Things took a serious turn when the additional district magistrate of Jalpaiguri issued the notice last March for land acquisition for the border fencing.

Forward Bloc leader Kamal Guha led a deputation of the villagers to Chief Minister Jyoti Basu on August 2 and urged him to take up the matter with the Centre. Earlier, the district administration had to stop work on the land acquisition due to resistance put up by the villagers.

``People of these Four Mouzas have always been in West Bengal and voted in all our elections. Now, Bangladesh is claiming them. The people are scared that they'd lose not only their homes but their country also,'' Guha told The Indian Express.

If the FourMouzas become part of Bangladesh, Guha says, it will cut off another large area called Daikhata from the Indian mainland and turn it into another enclave surrounded by Bangladesh. ``We can't allow this to happen.''

While echoing similar sentiments, the BJP is accusing Guha and other Left parties of ``politicising the issue for the sake of election gains.'' Leader of the party's Jalpaiguri unit Samarendra Biswas says the problem was created by the Congress Government at the Centre, which ``never showed any genuine interest the addressing the larger issue of exchange of enclaves between India and Pakistan or Bangladesh.''

Even after 52 years of Independence there were 97 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh and 114 Bangladeshi enclaves in India. Villagers in these enclaves virtually lie in a large no-man's land spread over the districts of Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri.

South Berubari, in particular, has been a major trouble spot ever since it was sought to be transferred to erstwhile Pakistan in the Nehru-Noonagreement of 1958. But the transfer could not take place because of a popular agitation against it, led by the Forward Bloc.