[null, {"document_url": "https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19840515-sporadic-violence-becomes-part-of-life-for-warring-inhabitants-of-the-border-between-uttar-pradesh-and-bihar-803602-1984-05-15", "unformatted_src": "https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/indiatoday/images/default-user.png", "src": "https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/indiatoday/images/default-user.png", "formatted_filename": "default user"}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19840515-sporadic-violence-becomes-part-of-life-for-warring-inhabitants-of-the-border-between-uttar-pradesh-and-bihar-803602-1984-05-15", "unformatted_src": "https://smedia2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/stories/1984may/bihar-1_080113115652.jpg", "src": "https://smedia2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/stories/1984may/bihar-1_080113115652.jpg", "formatted_filename": "bihar"}, null, {"document_url": "https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19840515-sporadic-violence-becomes-part-of-life-for-warring-inhabitants-of-the-border-between-uttar-pradesh-and-bihar-803602-1984-05-15", "unformatted_src": "https://smedia2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/stories/1984may/bihar-4_080113115652.jpg", "src": "https://smedia2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/stories/1984may/bihar-4_080113115652.jpg", "formatted_filename": "bihar"}, null]

Sporadic violence becomes part of life for warring inhabitants of the border between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar

Sporadic violence has become a part of life for the warring inhabitants of the border between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Although a stable boundary was adopted in 1970, the discrepancy between the map and attached schedule has added fuel to the fire, with the Centre unable to help. Farzand Ahmed
May 15, 1984
ISSUE DATE: May 15, 1984
UPDATED: April 17, 2014 14:59 IST Bihar police on the border: Tension
One dead and five wounded: that was the toll. The survivors claim that they had been quietly harvesting wheat on the river bank that hot April afternoon when a group of villagers and armed constables from across the border attacked them.

They tried to escape by boat but the wooden craft was easily pierced-by the volley of bullets. The river into which their blood flowed was the Ganga. The border in question was no international divide - it separates Uttar Pradesh from Bihar.

Gopal Tiwary, 45, who had hired the labourers to harvest the crop, belongs to Nainijore village in Bihar's Bhojpur district. He has seen such violence year after year at harvest time and normally carries a gun. On April 4, he says: "I, along with my people, was busy harvesting when police from Haldi police station (in Uttar Pradesh) along with some armed villagers attacked us." Tiwary stoutly claims that he owns the land.

But the Uttar Pradesh police at Haldi have a different version. According to them the land belongs to one Bhagwan Ojha of Uttar Pradesh. Tiwary, they say, had engaged some criminals to forcibly harvest the wheat. When the police intervened, they were attacked with guns. As a result, four Uttar Pradesh constables and one villager were injured.

An assistant sub-inspector at Haldi said: "Since 1966, almost every year the Bihari farmers raid, open fire and loot away crops. This time Gopal Tiwary - suspected to be an anti-social - crossed into Uttar Pradesh side with armed men and tried to loot the crop." Amid the flurry of allegations and counter-allegations, it is difficult to gauge the authenticity or otherwise of rival claims.

The Haldi police accuse Bihari farmers of removing border pillars. Uttar Pradesh Revenue Secretary P.C. Sharma affirms that "some elements had destroyed the boundary pillars, creating a lot of confusion and during harvesting season, people from each side create title disputes. We have asked the Survey of India to relocate the border line and reconstruct the pillars."

The disputes on the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar border have flared up sporadically, generally about harvest time, right through the '70s. Dr Swami Nath Tiwary, convenor of the Diara Kisan Mazdoor Samiti, says that at least 12 Biharis have been killed by villagers and policemen from Uttar Pradesh during the past decade and large numbers have been attacked and tortured.

Tension seems to have become a permanent fixture along the 16-km stretch of border between Nainijore and Pokhra (in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia district). A platoon of the Bihar Military Police has been permanently posted at Nainijore. Yet the villagers live in terror. Seventy-five-year-old Rajgrih Tiwary says: "Our (Bihar) police is doing nothing, not even protecting us, while Uttar Pradesh police is siding with their state's villagers, who frequently raid, attack and loot. They are even killing our men."

On the other side of the border, a platoon of Uttar Pradesh's Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) is stationed at Hassnagar. "It seems that we belong to enemy countries and not two states of one country," says Uday Narain Singh, a social worker at Pokhra.

The administrators in Lucknow and Patna have not been able to effectively sort out the problems. After the Nainijore incident, the Bihar Government sent an urgent message to the Centre to help resolve the issue. The Uttar Pradesh Government also despatched a detailed note to New Delhi.

"Our effort is to settle the dispute through negotiations and not through force," says Uttar Pradesh Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ammar Rizvi. But for the rival contenders to the standing crops, negotiations have little relevance. On March 15, barely three weeks before the Nainijore incident, the commissioners of Varanasi and Patna divisions had met at Varanasi to try and sort out problems that led to the shoot-out.

The problem is long-standing. Over a century ago, the boundary between Ballia district and Shahabad (now split into Bhojpur and Rohtas districts of Bihar) was defined as "mid-stream of the Ganga". Each time the river changed course, fresh - and extremely fertile - land emerged. So did fresh and violent disputes.

In 1959, the state Governments asked the Centre to arbitrate. A commission headed by former ICS officer C.L. Trivedi recommended a new border - this time on terra firma. Parliament enforced the Trivedi award in 1970. Under it, 135 villages with 50,000 acres of land were transferred from Bihar to, Uttar Pradesh in exchange for 39 villages with 12,000 acres of land.

But the award, ironically, generated a new round of disputes. According to Tiwary, who has spearheaded the Diara Sangharsh Samiti since 1977, Uttar Pradesh has not transferred land records. While Bihar has accepted the tenancy rights of those whose lands were transferred to the state, Uttar Pradesh has not accepted the rights of the Bihari farmers whose lands are now within its borders.

The major bone of contention between the states is the discrepancy between the map and the schedule released by the Survey of India at the time of the Trivedi award. While the map shows the new borders correctly, the attached schedule is based on the first land survey of the area, conducted between 1881 and 1883. The dry bed of the Ganga representing the border: Counter claims
This vastly outdated schedule is being used to make rival claims on land in the area. In February last year, in response to a writ petition filed by some Bihar villagers, the Patna High Court had directed the two state governments and the Union Government to remove the discrepancies.

Given so much confusion, it is no surprise that landlords have tried to grab as much land as possible. There are allegations in Pokhra village that Rameshwar Singh, a major landlord, has forged records. The fudging of records became so acute recently that the Ballia Collector-cum-District Magistrate, Kalika Prasad, ordered that land should not be transferred on the basis of records produced by a single person. Prasad confirms that reports of false records have reached him and he is looking into the matter.

Singh, however, reacts sharply to such allegations. He asserts that there is no doubt that most of the village land belongs to his family and that he has maps and records to prove this.

Maps and records, however, have for decades been the crux of the problem. In Ballia, Collector Prasad says: "Bihar has not sent its records in original form and the documents submitted to us cannot be treated as genuine in the eyes of law." But in Lucknow, the state's revenue secretary asserts that Uttar Pradesh officials have never challenged the authenticity of Bihar records.

The state's officials seem to have their hands full with border disputes. There is a similar dispute between Uttar Pradesh and Haryana over the border formed by the river Yamuna. Some years ago, a commission headed by former Union home minister Uma Shankar Dixit fixed new borders.

The award, which took effect on September 15, 1983, stipulates that about 21,000 acres of land is to be transferred from Uttar Pradesh to Haryana in exchange for 19,000 acres. But before this transfer could be effected, the dispute erupted into fresh violence. On March 31, a group of Haryana villagers raided some Uttar Pradesh villages and forcibly harvested crops.

A worried administration sent in the PAC and the rest of the crop was harvested under a stiff guard. According to Nakli Singh, a Congress(I) legislator from western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana police have frequently made forays across the border ever since the state was formed. "It was for the first time that farmers harvested their crop because of the heavy deployment of the PAC," he says.

There was furore in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly over the March 31 incident. The state Government announced on April 4 in the Assembly that a high-level meeting of officials of the two states had been called to settle the dispute. The chief secretaries of the two states met and discussed the problem. Now, the district magistrates of the involved districts are to meet from May 11 to 13.

"There is now no border dispute between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh," said Union Home Minister P.C. Sethi in the Lok Sabha on April 19, 1984. But at the same time, the minister admitted that in spite of the replacement of fluctuating boundaries with fixed ones, occasional disputes between "private parties" continued. Such disputes are to be settled by the courts, he said. Hopefully the courts will be more firm and decisive in dealing with the problem.





