India-Bangladesh border talks have lessons for Nepal
The 4,156km border between India and Bangladesh is the fifth longest land border in the world – even longer than the 3488km India-China border. They inherited the boundary from the British days, and it follows the ‘Radcliffe Line’ as defined by the British architect and chairman of the Border Commissions Sir Cyril Radcliffe during partition in 1947 based on Hindu-Muslim demographics.
After the 1971 Liberation War when East Pakistan became Bangladesh, a Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) was signed by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Bangladesh’s founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman three years later. However, it was ratified only in 2011 by India, and a revised version was signed in Dhaka in 2015.
The India-Bangladesh border disputes involve land, river and maritime boundaries which encompass much more territory than Nepal’s territorial claims with India. But there are similarities -- like the reliance on British maps of Lilu Lekh, and the Susta dispute caused by the change in course of a river in the plains.
Five Indian states border Bangladesh: 262km in Assam, 856km in Tripura, 180km in Mizoram, 443km in Meghalaya and 2,217km in West Bengal. The 2015 LBA included an exchange of enclaves and adverse possessions.
There were 111 Indian enclaves (6,900ha) within Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves (2,877ha) within India. The residents in the enclaves were given a choice either to reside in the enclaves, or to move to the country of their preference after the exchanges. India and Bangladesh also swapped territory with Bangladesh gaining more land than India.
Legend has it that the enclaves were created as part of a high stakes card game centuries ago between the Raja of Cooch Behar and the Maharaja of Rangpur. Others say it was a result of a botched expansion of the Mughal empire. There is even a story about a drunk British colonial officer spilling ink on a map. Whatever the reason, the enclaves were an absurdity even as far as man-made boundaries go.
This seemingly intractable issue was resolved when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Dhaka in 2015 and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) came to New Delhi in 2017.
There have been other territorial adjustments between India and Bangladesh since 1971. One of them is the Tin Bigha Corridor, a 170-km long land bridge that India agreed in 1982 to lease to Bangladesh indefinitely as part of the LBA agreement. It connects the largest Bangladeshi enclave Dahagram-Angarpota in Cooch Behar district of India. Bangladesh ceded Berubai as part of the deal.
The Tin Bigha Corridor was partially opened on June 26, 1992 after many years of nationalistic and communal politics both in India and Bangladesh and the removal of General Mohammed Ershad from power in Bangladesh.
India and Bangladesh relations have also been strained by bitter river and water disputes. Bangladesh shares 54 trans-boundary rivers with India,including the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Teesta. There have been disputes about too much water in the monsoon causing floods downstream in Bangladesh, and too little in the dry season when it is needed for agriculture.
But in August 2019, India and Bangladesh held a meeting of the Joint River Commission in Dhaka and the two countries agreed to collect data and prepare water-sharing agreements for seven other trans-boundary rivers.
Bangladesh borders India’s strategically located northeastern states, where India wants to bring quicker economic development by using road links to the sea through Bangladesh. India is also worried about the growing Chinese influence in Bangladesh., and is bent on resolving outstanding border and water-sharing issues with Dhaka.
The most famous water-sharing dispute between India and Bangladesh is over India’s construction in 1975 of the Farakka Barrage on the Ganges near the border. This river straddles the India-Bangladesh border for about 100km before it joins Jamuna (Brahmaputra) in Bangladesh. The width of the constantly-shifting river varies from 1.5-14km.
India built the Farakka Barrage to stop siltation at its important port on the Hoogly near Kolkata. However this reduced the flow into north-western Bangladesh in the dry season. Despite this history of mistrust, the two countries signed a 30-year treaty on the sharing of the Ganges water.
The other riverine dispute is the Teesta, which flows down from Sikkim and also joins the Jamuna in northern Bangladesh. India constructed a barrage over the Teesta, reducing the flow into Bangladesh in the dry season. After years of dispute, in 2015 things took a positive turn after the Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee agreed to support the Central Government of India on a new water-sharing agreement.
A dispute over water sharing of the Feni River after it changed course after floods was also resolved in 2019. Another dispute over whether a British map of 1893 constituted the real border at the Muhari River (as preferred by Bangladesh) or the 1854 map (as India wanted) was also solved using the international 1967 Helsinki Rules on the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers.
Besides rivers, India and Bangladesh have also grappled for three decades with their maritime border in the Bay of Bengal. It was finally settled by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2014 in a ruling which favoured Bangladesh, and the country got 19,467 km2out of the 25,602 km2disputed coastal seas.
Prabhakar Sharma is a Nepali expert on international boundaries, and worked as a survey engineer for the Cameroon-Nigeria border demarcation by the United Nations.