India and Bangladesh have suffered ever since the hastily drawn Radcliffe Award which demarcated the border between India and Pakistan. In June 1947, the British government appointed Sir Cyril Radcliffe to chair two boundary commissions -- one for Bengal and the other for Punjab.
Since he had a little time and was not genned up, he did it in a haphazard manner leading to untold suffering and hardships for a large number of people. There are instances when a village was divided with one part going to Pakistan while the other remaining within India.
In a few cases, the dividing line passed through a single house with some rooms in one country and the remaining in the other. Radcliffe justified all this with the truism that no matter what he did, people would suffer. The rationale behind such a casual approach may never be known since Radcliffe destroyed all papers before he left India. In fact, he left on August 15 itself, even though his Award was not yet published.
On August 16 at 5pm, the Indian and Pakistani representatives were given two hours to study the Award and it was published the next day.
One of the many blunders of the Radcliffe Award was to leave the enclaves of India in the erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and that of Pakistan in India, even though there was no mechanism to exercise control over them by the concerned countries.
These enclaves, also called chitmahals or pasha enclaves, are enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border in Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, Assam, and Meghalaya. As the story goes, the enclaves were used as stakes in card or chess games centuries ago between the Raja of Kooch Behar and the Maharaja of Rangpur. After the partition of India, Rangpur merged with East Pakistan and Kooch Behar was transferred to India in 1949.
The first attempt to de-enclave them was made in 1958 with the Nehru-Noon Agreement for an exchange between India and Pakistan without considering loss or gain of territory. But it was challenged in the Supreme Court of India which ruled that constitutional amendment is required to transfer the land.
So, the government of India introduced the constitutional (Ninth Amendment) bill in parliament for implementing the agreement but it could not be passed due to objections to the transfer of southern Berubari enclave. It continued to hang fire as India’s relations with Pakistan deteriorated.
The process received another push only after Bangladesh attained independence in 1971 and India became the first country to recognise it. On May 16, 1974, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman signed the Land Boundary Agreement which provided for the exchange of enclaves and the surrender of adverse possessions.
The spirit behind the agreement was to boost up regional peace, progress, and co-operation, as the two countries had inherited atavistic hand-me-downs of controversial and complex issues. Though Bangladesh ratified it the same year, the Indian parliament could not. No one expected that India would take 41 years, as the two countries had shared extremely cordial relations and India had played an active role in its independence.
However, better late than never, the unanimous passage of the Constitution (119th Amendment) Bill, 2013, on resolving the 4,096km land boundary dispute, is a momentous occasion in the parliamentary history of India, as political parties which are generally so poorly divided have gone above politicking and passed it.
Since it is a constitutional amendment, more than half of the state legislatures have to ratify it. But this is just a formality as all parties have shown their support in parliament.
The bill seeks to amend the First Schedule of the Constitution to exchange the disputed territories occupied by both countries in accordance with the 1974 agreement and the additional historic agreement on demarcation of land boundaries signed by then PM Manmohan Singh in 2011 in Dhaka. The LBA envisages a notional transfer of 111 Indian enclaves to Bangladesh and 51 enclaves to India.
There is no exchange of population, and the 37,334 residents of India’s enclaves within Bangladesh will become Bangladeshi citizens after the land swap, while 14,215 people residing in Bangladesh’s enclaves inside India will become Indians. Those who want to go back to their respective countries are free to do so.
It was a humanitarian issue as the inhabitants of these enclaves were virtually stateless people who could not move out and did not get any amenities essential for dignified and healthy living. These enclaves had, in fact, turned into dens of crime and smuggling.
It is a big achievement for the Union government which enunciated “India’s neighbourhood first” policy. Due to Look West policy, small neighbouring countries in South Asia had formed the opinion that India is a big elephant which behaves like a big brother.
All this will change Bangladesh’s perception of India -- a country which had been viewed with suspicion -- and will promote trade and co-operation between the two countries. Bangladesh has taken long strides in economic fields and so its trade with India has grown. India’s exports have more than doubled over the past five years, from $2.7bn to $6.1bn in 2013-14. The co-operation between the two countries will be mutually beneficial.
It is hoped that when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Bangladesh, he will effectively tackle the problem of the waters of the 54 rivers that the two countries share. The vexing question of the sharing of Teesta waters needs immediate attention. With the trust level going up, the peoples of the two countries can be sanguine about many positive outcomes.