There are many strange borders in the world,
such as Spain surprisingly having territory in Morocco, North Africa.
The third largest island in the world, Borneo,
is divided among three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.
There are too many borders in the world that are hard to understand,
but there is one place that can be considered
the most bizarre and worst border in human history,
that is the border between Bangladesh and India.
This was the former border between India and Bangladesh.
this part belonging to India, and this part to Bangladesh.
You may notice a bunch of inexplicable chunks in the middle
these are called “enclaves”
What is an “enclave”?
An “enclave” refers to
a piece of land that belongs to Country B, but is located within the territory of Country A.
Let’s look at another map
you’ll understand more clearly what an “enclave” means.
The yellow part is Bangladesh, and the orange part is India.
If before 2015 you were a citizen of India living in the Indian city of Dahala Khagrabari,
you might not go far before you enter the territory of Bangladesh,
and then maybe after another ten or so minutes, you’d be back in India.
Then, after walking for a few more tens of minutes, you would be back in Bangladesh.
For a very long time, the border between Bangladesh and India was this chaotic.
The green area is Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan, and the pink is India.
They are intermingled, creating a very confusing situation.
Can you imagine how inconvenient life could be for people living in this border region?
So how did such an unusual border come to be?
We’ll have to look back into history for that.
Originally, before there was a unified government on the South Asian subcontinent,
the area was mainly ruled by two kingdoms,
the Raja of Cooch Behar and the Maharaja of Rangpur.
Legend has it that the leaders of these two countries loved to play chess,
and territory was their stakes. The loser would cede a piece of enclave to the winner.
Later, in the 16th century, this fragmented situation on the South Asian subcontinent changed
with the rise of a new Muslim Empire, the Mughal Empire, which conquered the South Asian subcontinent,
marking the first unified government in the history of South Asia.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries,
the Mughal expanded into the prosperous region of Bengal.
Once it reached today’s India-Bangladesh border, it met strong resistance locally,
namely from the Kingdom of Cooch Behar we just mentioned.
Although the Mughal forces defeated the Cooch Behar troops in a battle,
the high cost of military expenditures
made it difficult for the declining Mughal empire to continue this campaign.
Consequently, in 1713, the two countries began peace talks
Cooch Behar ceded territory to the Mughal empire.
However, please note, the two countries never used maps during their negotiations.
Even though they had lengthy discussions,
the territorial ownership of this area remained ambiguous.
The reason maps were not used was not due to a lack of maps or technological backwardness,
but rather because such ambiguity served the interests of both parties at that time.
The Mughals still wanted to continue expanding, but were temporarily short of funds.
As long as the ownership of this land remained ambiguous, they would still have the chance to wage another war in the future.
For the king of Cooch Behar, he also did not want to lose face domestically,
and the ambiguity of the territory could help him maintain his prestige.
Therefore, although the sovereignty of West Bengal was somewhat messy during this period,
it was not nearly as hopeless as the India-Bangladesh border situation in the 20th century.
But then a group of people came to disrupt
That was the British empire.
In 1858, the British Empire revoked the East India Company’s administrative rights over the South Asian subcontinent
and began to rule directly.
The British colonial government exiled Bahadur Shah II,
the last emperor of the Mughal Empire, to Burma
and executed most of the Mughal royal family members.
Queen Victoria, the reigning monarch of the British Empire, received a new title – Empress of India.
In order to effectively control this territory, which was dozens of times larger than its own,
Britain adopted a policy of divide and rule,
deliberately inciting antagonism between Muslims and Hindus,
which allowed Britain to maintain its position as ruler.
Entering the 20th century, nationalism swept across the globe.
The Indian independence movement and the outbreak of World War II
significantly weakened the British colonial rule in India.
In 1947, the British Parliament agreed to India’s independence,
ending the British India era and marking the birth of the Republic of India.
However, due to the previously mentioned policy of divide and rule
and the strong xenophobic tendencies of Indian nationalism,
a huge conflict arose between Muslims and Hindus.
Muslim leaders decided to separate from the new republic, where Hindus were the majority,
and establish a separate Muslim country, which is Pakistan.
Establishing a country is one thing,
but the question is, how do you draw the borders between India and Pakistan?
During the past era of the Mughal Empire, even though there were conflicts,
Muslims and Hindus lived together.
There were no clear territorial divisions
indicating which land was Islamic and which was Hindu,
everyone was a subject of the Mughal emperor.
However, now that it was time to split the “family property”,
there was no precedent to follow, so what was to be done?
The British, eager to wash their hands of the matter, came up with a “genius” idea,
which was to draw the map in an office in London.
The person in charge of this project was a British gentleman, Cyril Radcliffe.
This Caucasian gentleman had never been anywhere east of Paris, let alone India,
yet such an inexperienced person was appointed the chairman of the Boundary Commission,
responsible for studying and planning the borders between Pakistan and India.
What’s more non-sensical is that Radcliffe was required to draw the borders within 40 days.
If you were Radcliffe, what would you do?
Of course, you’d use the simplest and most brutal way to divide the territory:
whichever side had more people, it would belong to them.
Let’s look at this map of the partition of India and Pakistan.
The darker areas are marked as “Hindustan”, where the Hindus are the majority,
while the white areas are considered to be where the Muslims are the majority.
This corresponds to what is now the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan.
The middle was all allocated to the Hindus,
which is the territory of today’s Republic of India.
However, the British carved out a piece of land in the northeast corner for the Muslims,
which is today’s Bangladesh, known at that time as East Pakistan.
With this, the former British India was split, in such a crude and simple way.
But can you imagine how many people were displaced by this map?
According to statistics, the partition of India and Pakistan
led to the displacement of between 14 and 15 million people within a few years from 1947.
Both Muslims and Hindus were forced to move out of places
where their ancestors might have lived for hundreds of years,
simply because of a map drawn by a British man in a comfortable office in London.
This is also why the India-Bangladesh border we saw at the beginning
is so absurdly full of enclaves, and even enclaves within enclaves.
It was mainly due to the hasty exit of the British Empire from the Indian subcontinent,
where they arbitrarily adopted the territorial agreements from the time of the Mughal that we mentioned earlier.
It’s clear that India in the mid-20th century was completely different from that of the 18th century
the British were well aware of this, but colonialists just don’t care.
This mess was left to the future governments of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
However, the current question is,
why couldn’t the newly established governments of Bangladesh and India
effectively resolve this terrible situation?
The answer is simple: geopolitics and nationalism.
In simple terms, India was unwilling to sign
a new border agreement with the Bangladesh government in the 1970s.
It may seem strange to us now,
but purely because at that time India had 102 enclaves in Bangladesh,
while Bangladesh only had 71 enclaves in India.
If there were to be a territorial exchange, it would mean that India would effectively lose 31 enclaves,
which was completely unacceptable to Indian nationalists.
Furthermore, at that time, India had territorial disputes with surrounding countries.
Indian politicians were worried that territorial loss would send a signal of weakness to the international community.
Therefore, India rejected the territorial agreement with Bangladesh.
Due to this political reason,
for the next 40 years, the people of this border lived in such strange and inconvenient areas.
It was not until 2015 that India’s democratic government set aside its nationalist concerns
and agreed to the territorial exchange agreement.
The largest democracy in the world finally agreed to serve its people.
The worst border in human history was finally able to disappear.
In summary, this terrible border originated from
a relatively vague concept of boundaries in the early modern era.
During the Mughal era, the conflict between Muslims and Hindus
was not as intense as it later became, so this ambiguity was manageable at the time.
But when the British arrived in the 18th and 19th centuries,
the colonizers cared more about extracting resources from their colonies
than they did about building infrastructure or improving living conditions.
The divide-and-rule strategy of the empire tore apart South Asian society,
causing Muslims and Hindus to become bitter enemies.
After the independence of India and Bangladesh,
considerations of nationalism, religious ideology, and new geopolitical factors
led the Indian government to refuse to sign new border agreements.
As a result, ordinary people living on the border
continued to live in such absurd circumstances for as long as 40 years.
Today, in the 21st century, many Indians nostalgically remember British colonial rule,
imagining that it served the people,
helped build infrastructure in India, and brought modernization.
These people criticize the Muslim empire for hindering India’s modern development.
What really happened is that
after the bloodsuckers sucked the blood of the colonies, they gave the victims a little soup to drink,
and the victims were actually very moved.
This terrible border reveals the darkest and most tragic side of human history.
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