The Counterfeit Capital

With its green fields and mud houses, Churiantpur, a village that lies where India's border ends and Bangladesh's begins, is a picture of peace. But if you look hard and long enough, you find yourself in a village where wary neighbours keep an eye on each another, where strangers are stalked, and where shuttered faces float in shadows of suspicion.

Churiantpur's geography has shaped its destiny. The biggest village on the zero line in Malda district of West Bengal, it is a conduit for smuggling of fake Indian currency notes, or FICN, from Bangladesh into India. It is home to at least 20 syndicates. It's made of two neighbourhoods, Mohabbatpur and Dui Sata Bighi, and half of its residents live across the fence, on the Bangladesh side. But they too are Indian citizens as they live in the buffer zone between the fence and the international border pillars. Since there is no fence on the Bangladesh side, the villagers mix freely with Bangladeshis. Churiantpur owes its thriving business of smuggling to this geopolitical anomaly. "The villagers often lob bundles of fake currency over the fence from the Bangladesh side which are collected by fellow villagers on the India side. During such operations, the racketeers on either side use cellphones and keep a watch on the BSF," said a BSF official.

With the people of two countries living so cheek by jowl here, it's not easy for the BSF to tell Bangladeshis from Indians. Mohabbatpur is so shapeless a neighbourhood that it's impossible for an outsider to figure out where the border begins and where it ends. The gates on the fence open at specific hours—four times a day, between 6 am and 6 pm—when villagers on either side can cross over. Jamal Sheikh, 11, who lives on the Bangladesh side, says, "I used to go to a primary school on the other side of the fence in Mohabbatpur. I missed my classes often as the fence gates would be shut. I left that school and my mother admitted me to a madrasa at Zaminpur which falls in Bangladesh." His father was beaten up by the securitymen on charges of smuggling. "What will we do for our livelihood if we don't ferry goods across the border?" Jamal says, attesting to the fact that smuggling is the vocation of many villagers. There was a proposal to shift the villagers on the Bangladesh side to the Indian side. The villagers, for obvious reasons, resisted the rehabilitation and refused to give up their land and houses. For them, smuggling is no longer a lucrative breach of law—it has become a way of life.

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