Kira Huju
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Kira Huju’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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watch as two girls in burqas wait for a border guard to search their rucksacks.
There is a makeshift checkpoint along this village road, which is holding up bikes and businesses and lives.
We are in Hakimpur, in the Indian state of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh.
And behind all of us is an uneasy, kilometre-wide buffer zone, still within Indian territory, but governed without its freedoms.
Now, unlike many borderlands, this is not no man's land.
25,000 inhabitants live in its seven villages.
crowd gathers very quickly to complain to me about the kinds of mounting restrictions and security checks that make life really hard in these borderlands.
They are undeterred in their complaints by this mustached gentleman in a tracksuit who keeps hovering around us.
I think by now they are used to plainclothes officers from India's intelligence bureau.
It's supposed to be against so-called infiltrators from Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
According to India's Home Minister Amit Shah, these infiltrators threaten India's security and its economy and demographic balance.
Now, there probably are millions of Bangladeshis living without the right papers in India, but it's extremely unlikely that there are 20 million, which is the sensationalist government estimate.
Either way, the Home Minister calls them termites and has promised to kick them all out.
Last year, around three dozen Bangladeshis died at the hands of Indian border guards, according to a Bangladeshi human rights organization.
But it's not just Bangladeshis that are caught by India's shrill border politics.
That politics is literally trapping Indian citizens as well.
The India-Bangladesh border is almost 4,100 kilometers long, and that makes it one of the world's longest, and it's also one of its leakiest.
So colonial history split hundreds of millions of Bengali speakers into two separate countries, India and Bangladesh, but many still move
back and forth across the border.
There are actually houses along the border that have a kitchen in India and a bedroom in Bangladesh.
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