As India celebrates 69th Independence Day today, there are several thousand Indians for whom the real freedom knocked at their doors after an excruciating wait of 66 years.
On July 31 midnight, India and Bangladesh made history by putting an end to world’s one of the most complex border disputes when they effected a deal, swapping control of 162 enclaves on each other’s territory. Most of about 52,000 people, residing in these small pockets of lands, will remain there but they have got their nationality that was eluding them since six decades.
Implementation of the long-awaited Land Border Agreement (LBA) has been dubbed a “win-win” deal, although it apparently lets Bangladesh gain more lands than India gets.
Bangladesh adds 111 Indian enclaves covering 17,160 acres to its mainland while India is satisfied with 51 Bangladeshi enclaves with a combined area of 7,110 acres losing around 40 sq km (over 10,000 acres) to Bangladesh. Almost all the Indian enclaves are situated in West Bengal’s Cooch Behar district. A total of 14,000 people living in Bangladeshi enclaves in India have chosen to be identified as Indians while an estimated 37,000 people staying in Indian enclaves in Bangladesh have opted to stay in Bangladesh. Lands lost to Bangladesh may be peripheral to India.
Delhi is looking at other benefits when it expects the new demarcation line will enable it to prevent border trespassing from Bangladesh, a long-festering problem which once prompted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to announce that Hindu immigrants would be allowed to settle in India while Muslims would be driven back causing uproar in the regional political arena.
India will have another most important advantage to safeguard its borders preventing easy movement of smuggled goods and drugs. It will be able to step up its war against cross-border terrorism, a threatening issue both countries are committed to fight. India has long been claiming that Bangladesh was previously providing covert haven to Indian separatists.
With the end of Indo-Bangla land swapping, a new era has dawned upon the stateless people living in the adversely held areas where little development has taken place for the last six decades. There has been acute shortage of civic amenities ranging from education and health care to social security.
These enclaves are in urgent need of rapid infrastructure development and rehabilitation of the new citizens who have long been deprived of state facilities. Indian central government is to spend 500 million rupee to rehabilitate 979 people from 222 families including 146 Hindu families who have preferred to return to India from Indian enclaves in Bangladesh. However, Bangladesh has no identical people to offer new citizenships. People from the enclaves willing to accept citizenships of either of the two countries will be allowed to do so by November 2015.
These enclaves were in place from the 18th century and have endured through British colonial rule and the independence of India and then Bangladesh.
The real crisis for the enclave dwellers, however, began in 1947, when Rangpur district assimilated with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Cooch Behar remained independent before merging with India in 1949. Subsequently, people residing in these areas were left stateless.
With the aim of resolving the territorial disputes between the two countries, the then India Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman took primary initiative inking the Land Boundary Agreement in 1974. The revised version of LBA was signed by the ex-Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina during the former’s visit to Dhaka in September 2011. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ratified the agreement during his landmark visit to Dhaka on June 6, 2015.
The pact has long been awaiting implementation due to various reasons, including the lack of necessary amendment to the Indian constitution. The last impediment for the exchange of land and population was overcome in May 2015 when both houses of the Indian Parliament passed the 119th amendment of the constitution.
