In 1971, Chunu Das and his parents, along with other settlers
from Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and other parts of the
central region of India, moved from Bilaspur, in MP, to
Pyrdiwah, in the East Khasi Hills District of Meghalaya, near
what is now the Bangladesh border. Today, Das is 70 years old,
and he and his relatives work on a betel-nut plantation owned by
local Khasi landowners. As with the rest of the roughly 60
percent of the Adivasi population that works on Khasi-owned
plantations in Pyrdiwah, about 98 km from the state capital of
Shillong, Das has neither the right to vote in India, nor a
government-issued ration card. “My parents died here, and I am
very much a citizen of India,” he said. “So why I don’t have
voting rights, I don’t know.” Voting rights are not the only
grey areas in which Das and tens of thousands like him are
forced to live. The international border between India and
Bangladesh looks smooth on a map, but these territories are
actually pockmarked, with hundreds of tiny bits of