Diptiman: His people’s voice

Everyone was surprised when Moymona Khatun filed her nomination to contest from Kalmati constituency in the 2011 Assembly elections in West Bengal. They were not surprised because she was relatively unknown, but because her husband was a resident of Poaturkuthi, a Bangladeshi enclave. According to Indian laws, her husband doesn’t even exist.

The returning officer was reluctant to accept her nomination. But Khatun cited the example of Indian tennis star Sania Mirza, who is married to Shoaid Mallik, the Pakistani cricket player. The case was referred to Delhi and the Election Commission gave Khatun the go ahead.

It was a masterstroke. For the first time, someone from an enclave was standing for elections. A point had been made that they existed. Though Khatun lost the election, she bagged 3,000 votes.

The brain behind the masterstroke was Diptiman Sengupta, who in 2008 took over activist group Bharat Bangladesh Enclave Exchange Coordination Committee (BBEECC). His father had founded the group in 1994. “Politics understands votes. We wanted to consolidate voters from the enclaves to force politicians to stop dillydallying the implementation of the India-Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement,” says Sengupta.

A former marketing executive at a mobile-handset company, Sengupta gave the campaign a much needed impetus. And he did it from the scratch. He formed village level committees in enclaves in both, India and Bangladesh. Like a smart marketing executive, he used social networking tools like WhatsApp and Facebook to spread information on the plight of the enclave people to a wider population. On the ground, BBEECC intervened every time an enclave resident was harassed. “Till 2008, enclave residents were often arrested by the BSF and police as infiltrators. Medical facilities, even for expectant mothers, were denied. They didn’t exist in any official record,” he says.

The activism worked. In 2010, India for the first time offered medical assistance to an expectant mother from a Bangladeshi enclave. And in September 2011. Prime Ministers of both the countries entered a land swap agreement to end the impasse. Even the ruling Trinamool Congress, whose leader Mamata Banerjee is the Chief Minister of West Bengal, came around. After initially opposing the land-swap deal in 2011, the TMC came out in support of the Land Boundary Agreement during the General Election campaign in early 2014.