Former
Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee once commented: “You can change friends but not neighbours.”
Divine dispensation, geography and a tortuously shared history destined India
and Bangladesh to be neighbours. Just as in a community, quarrelsome neighbours
sharing the same geopolitical landscape do not lend to good neighbourly relations
or peace in their neighbourhood. The irony is that having coexisted peacefully
and harmoniously within what for millennia was known as the Indian subcontinent,
a few centuries of colonial rule by “gora sahibs” from distant shores
transformed these peoples into each other’s sworn enemies. When the colonial masters
realised that their much touted jewel in the imperial crown had become a millstone
around their war ravaged neck, they gave in to the increasingly strident
demands for independence by their subjects and quit these shores, only after
presiding over the partition of this once united domain into three entities,
India and West and East Pakistan. The two wings of the newly created Pakistan, separated
by over a thousand miles of Indian territory, unnaturally configured as they
were when torn apart in August 1947 from the mainland of which they had
historically been an integral part, could not have remained together in an
everlasting union.
So,
after a bloody nine month War of Liberation in 1971, the Bengalis of East
Pakistan divorced the West Pakistani partner to set up house independently as
Bangladesh. However, the issue of the contentious boundaries between them remained
and continued to fester. After Independence in August 1947, under the Radcliffe
Award which divided the subcontinent, India shared its longest land border of 4,096
kilometres not with West Pakistan or China but with what emerged as East
Pakistan. This was a tortuously complex border that cut mercilessly across
communities that had coexisted for centuries, and indeed even households that
had been one the night before.
Apart
from the sheer length of the border, some cutting across rivers, the division
also unwittingly spawned some strange creatures:
(1)
enclaves of one country within the newly constituted national boundaries of the
other (East Pakistani enclaves surrounded on all sides by Indian territory, and
vice versa), in which the inhabitants were notionally citizens of the new
countries to whom the land belonged, but totally isolated by virtue of their
location, as the new country to which they found themselves belonging by virtue
of Partition could not reach governance or services to their notional citizens
while the national entities, which now found themselves saddled with these
enclaves, refused to acknowledge these people as their own; and (2) adversely
possessed lands (lands in possession of one or the other newly carved national
entities which, under the award, were arbitrarily endowed to the other side,
whether deliberately or inadvertently because the pen drawing the line on the
map had a thick nib).
Just
as in a housing development area land allocated to buyers has to be demarcated through
a survey that formally marks the coordinates and perimeters that bound that
piece of land, the partitioned subcontinent also required such boundary
demarcation to take place, to formalize the principles of division that Sir
Cyril Radcliffe, the person entrusted by the Crown in London to draw the lines
across the map, in his wisdom had awarded to the reconstituted entities that
emerged. Post Partition efforts at demarcation under the Firoz Khan Noon
Jawaharlal Nehru accord of 1958 were unable to resolve these festering issues.
Although border demarcation work proceeded with the Surveyors General of the
two new national entities carrying on demarcation as per the Radcliffe Award,
the strip maps (the entire length of the new borders was divided into
manageable strips to make the survey work easier) continued to remain “unformalised”,
with the plenipotentiaries of the two sides not signing on to them, whether
deliberately or through mala fide “oversight”. It may be noted that not getting
the plenipotentiaries to countersign the strip maps agreed upon by the respective
Surveyors General left a dangerous situation for mischief because either side
at any given point of time could contest that the demarcation in one or more
strips had been inaccurately done. (Indeed, such a situation did arise in
mid1995 but was contained before it escalated.)
So
when Vajpayee enunciated this maxim, he was simply pointing to the practical
necessity of arriving at a reasonable understanding with India’s immediate
neighbours so that all sides could move away from debilitating distractions of
managing contested borders and focus single mindedly on development and the
uplift of their teeming populations out of the morass of poverty that plagued
the entire region. While India’s relations with Pakistan continued to remain
star crossed, the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 presented an opportunity to
get the relations with at least one neighbour right. Prime Ministers
Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Indira Gandhi, of Bangladesh and India
respectively, entered into a Land Boundary Agreement on May 16, 1974. That
agreement laid down the principles of demarcating the borders that the
Radcliffe Award had bequeathed to the two sides. The brutal assassination of Mujibur
Rahman along with almost his entire family and some of his most trusted
lieutenants and colleagues on August 15, 1975, effectively stalled further
efforts to bring the issue to closure. Relations between India and Bangladesh
became subject to mood swings depending on who was in power in Bangladesh. As a
general rule, democratic India got on better with the Awami League (the party founded
by Mujibur Rahman) which had spearheaded the Liberation Movement in East
Pakistan, while relations with other, more authoritarian minded, parties/forces
in power tended to be indifferent at best.
While
some progress was made in improving relations with the Awami League, which
headed a coalition government in 1996 after having remained in the wilderness
for almost 18 years (the Ganges Treaty and the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord,
which ended the insurgency there, were arrived at in December 1996 and in 1997
respectively), the two governments were unable to move significantly forward on
other, more challenging, issues because of the weak nature of the coalition
dispensations obtaining on both sides then.
Relations
between the two countries deteriorated significantly during 2001-06 when the
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) came to power in Bangladesh. However, a
fresh opportunity presented itself when Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League were
reelected to power with a huge mandate in December 2008. The two countries
immediately began to engage earnestly to resolve the festering bilateral
problem. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited India in January 2010, a game
changing visit when both neighbours turned a critically important corner in
defining normatively what their relations should be. The Joint Communique
issued on January 10, 2010, was a remarkable document in that it clearly laid
out the road map the two countries would follow to set right all the issues
that had for long been bothering them, including the boundary issue inherited
under the Radcliffe Award. After painstaking negotiations for a comprehensive
package deal, on September 7, 2011, during the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh, the two sides signed a Protocol to the 1974 agreement.
The
Bangladesh Parliament ratified the agreement almost immediately, but the
process was stalled as a progressively weakening coalition government in India
was unable to push through the complex ratification process in the Indian Parliament.
As India inched towards the next parliamentary elections in 2014, completion of
the ratification process by the Congressl ed United Progressive Alliance-II government
receded progressively. It was, therefore, perhaps not entirely inappropriate
that it was left to those who inherited the mantle of Vajpayee to assume the
task of completing what the Congress led government had started. The unanimity
with which the Rajya Sabha (on May 6) and the Lok Sabha (on May 7) approved the
Constitution (100th Amendment) Bill, operationalizing the Bangladesh India Land
Boundary Agreement, 1974, and the 2011 Protocol, was a historic, game changing development
in the tortuous post Partition annals of this fragmented subcontinent. It
imparts to the historic accord the strongest foundations upon which to build
any magnificent edifice that leaders and peoples on both sides can dare to
dream. It testifies to the singular visionary statesmanship of the Prime
Minster of India that he saw it fit to overrule narrower political calculations
that had been contemplated mercifully very fleetingly for the larger common
good of all peoples. It also put to rest the malevolent daemons that had been
unleashed by the Radcliffe Award.
The
entire process was by no means easy, as various local conflicting interests and
sometimes viscerally antagonistic opposition at different levels had to be
dealt with, pacified and won over. One must congratulate the various field officials
on both sides who carried out the job entrusted to them by the leadership of
the two sides. That they had clear instructions on how they should address the resolution
process was of critical importance. Whenever difficulties were encountered, the
officials were given full support and backing and clear instructions by the
chain of command at all levels as was required. Without all this coming
together, this stupendous task would not have been fulfilled. But, above all,
it has to be recognised that without the visionary leadership on both sides
that eschewed narrower political considerations in the interest of the larger
common good, this would not have been possible.
Space for mutual comfort
Historically,
undemarcated international borders have been known to spawn or aggravate other
areas of dispute. Conversely, resolution of such contestations helps restore
harmony. The resolution of this border dispute has, according to first reports,
been welcomed by a vast majority of the peoples on both sides, irrespective of
internal political divisions. It has already widened the space of mutual
comfort and mutual trust that are essential prerequisites for cooperation and
collaboration in any activity. The two countries can now focus on achieving the
other broader and far reaching goals they had set for themselves in the
Framework Agreement for Cooperation signed on September 7, 2011. Among other
things, that remarkable document envisaged broader sub regional cooperation
between Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (to begin with) on a wide range of
areas/sectors. While the process commenced in 2012, it was tentative and
hesitant, with non-completion of agreements already arrived at. One may expect
to see more determined and reinvigorated forward movement on a broad range of
new initiatives that embrace common river basin management, trade and
connectivity expansion, joint or sole investments in important projects and
medium and long term energy security without which the new industrial
revolution in this region cannot happen.
A
more humane border management that will enable both sides to control illegal
cross border activities and encourage legal, mutually beneficial movements is
expected. In a sense, this is the first, and most important, prerequisite for
moving towards an economically integrated region.
On
another, perhaps more significant level, this resolution stands out as an
exemplar of visionary statesmanship, common sense and pragmatism that deserves
closer scrutiny and emulation by others. It sends out a clear signal to others
in the region that intractable issues bedevilling bilateral relations can be
resolved if addressed with sincerity, pragmatism, good sense and firm political
will, keeping in mind the greater common good of all peoples concerned.
Tariq A. Karim is a former High Commissioner of Bangladesh to India.
