Chicken’s Neck

Ah, Chicken's Neck! What an incredible spot on the South Asian map this is. With nothing to show for it but the lines drawn on the map after 1947, which separate this country from that and the other, the narrow strip is like the mouth of the tube of toothpaste that is India, squeezed out through this orifice, to exude into the eight states of the Indian Northeast..At the very southeastern tip of Nepal is the town of Bhadrapur. Cross the border by wading through the shallow waters of the Mechi river, which drains the southern watershed of the Kanchenjunga, and at the village on the Indian side, catch the chhoti line (one of the few metre gauges still operational in India) which hugs the Nepal border all the way west to the Nizam's Lucknow. Or forego that option on this occasion and turn your attention southeast, where, barely two-dozen kilometres away, it is Bangladesh – Rangpur district of "North Bengal"..Ecologically, whether it is Nepal, Bangladesh or India, it is all the same floodplain. Paddies and banana groves, and the aromatic stench of drying hemp, which villagers have peeled from jute stalks that have been steeped in stagnant water. Clumps of dwellings all raised above the flood line because of centuries of rebuilding. More or less, even the same level of poverty in the villages in all three countries and flashy display of wealth of the mofussil trading classes in the cacophonous bazaar towns, whether Siliguri or Rangpur..All the goods and services that mainland India provides the Northeast and all the natural resources the latter has to export to the former, pass through the Chicken's Neck. And so, National Highway No 31 has no choice but to make it to this northern tip of West Bengal before heading down the Siliguri bypass into lower Assam. The chhoti line and the broad gauge all funnel their way through this sliver of land, ferrying passengers, goods and – a most significant category for the Northeast – soldiers..The railway station of New Jalpaiguri can easily qualify as the ground zero of the Chicken's Neck. Nothing could be of more strategic importance for the Indian state given the multiple insurgencies in the Northeast, from Kamtapur right there in Indian 'north Bengal' to the tender spot just east of where the Bodos and the ULFA are agitating. To add to that are the complications offered by the proximity of the Tibet border (just a question of hopping over, via Sikkim into the Chumbi Valley and on to Lhasa), being hemmed in by two reasonably unstable neighbours – Bangladesh and Nepal, and having Bhutan no more than a stone's throw away..Kilometre after kilometre at the Chicken's Neck, you drive by towering pylons past vast lengths of high-tension lines that transfer energy from the Northeast to the mainland. Underneath, runs the pipeline, which starts in Assam's oilfields and ends at the refinery in Bihar's Barauni. The reservoir on the Mahananda sends a massive canal southeastward into West Bengal through this same narrow stretch of Indian territory. Only the civilian air corridor does not follow the strictures, air agreements allowing the Indian airlines to overfly Bangladeshi territory to connect with cities such as Guwahati, Jorhat, Dibrugarh, Dimapur, Agartala and Imphal..In terms of places of interest, the Chicken's Neck is home to Naxalbari, whence Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal called on the peasantry of India to rise against the bourgeoisie in the 1960s. Other than some disconsolate statuary by the roadside, there is little enthusiasm, let alone revolutionary fervour, visible here in the listless villages that border the air force base at Bagdogra. The energy of the 'Naxals' has, however, been picked up today by comrades in Bihar, the Deccan and the Nepali hills. Increasingly, you have to be a "remote area" if you want to keep the fire burning, and the Chicken's Neck, where every third vehicle on the highway appears to be military or police, is hardly the place for it..I started by saying that the Chicken's Neck had nothing to show for itself. Well, clearly, it has a lot to show for itself.