India and Bangladesh peacefully exchange 162 enclaves

[Recursion]

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/68-Years-After-Independence-Another-Freedom-At-Midnight/articleshow/48302219.cms

So, for once something about the Indian partition seems to have worked out almost well.

In 1947, British India was partitioned by the British into India and West and East Pakistan. The partitioner was -- literally -- a white British civil servant who had never set foot on the subcontinent. Millions died, tens of millions were displaced, in the resulting chaos. My Hindi teacher still remembers having to flee her home in Sindh as a little girl.

One place the partition was particularly messy was in West Bengal, an Indian state that borders Bangladesh (at the time, Bangladesh was "East Pakistan&quot . The border there was very porous (the identity of "Bengali" was stronger than the confessional differences at the time) and there were many, many enclaves on both sides of the India/East Pakistan border.

After 7 decades, these border disputes have finally been resolved. PM Modi (I'm no fan of his, but his foreign policy work has been absolutely brilliant) negotiated a land exchange with Bangladesh that granted any residents of these enclaves their choice of citizenship, and relocation money if they requested it. About 2% of the population of the enclaves went for the relocation.

Anyways, this is not ideal. Nobody wants to have to take a choice between leaving their home or changing their citizenship. But, a Hindu-majority nation and a Muslim nation just peacefully exchanged land for the first time in history. That's a hopeful thing.

[haikugal]

1. That's good news! Kudos all around. Thanks for this post! nt

[Lee-Lee]

2. The mess caused by white colonialism still kills today

This is at least a great step toward cleaning it up in one small area.

[Igel]

4. Yeah, well, consider that Islam isn't indigenous to the area.

It's there because some Muslim Persians and some others in the NW decided they needed to conquer and proselytize.

Otherwise there'd be no "Muslim enclaves", no problem with a particularly Muslim section of Thailand, none of the separatism that plagued Aceh for decades and the Moro Liberation Front wouldn't be what it is. Afghanistan would be Buddhist, for the most part.

The partition in the first place was because Muslims, having invaded and conquered, didn't want to be a minority under the wrong kind of people. They feared retribution, in part; they also didn't want the proper, natural order of submission to be violated. It was bad enough being under the British, but the Hindus? Puh-lease. Moreover, those formerly oppressed, the Hindus, were in no hurry to see the Muslims stay. Sanskritic nationalism was in vogue (this was a nationalist period in human history, after all), and those Hindus in the mostly Muslim areas also fled. But again, Islam was the newcomer to the area.


In fact, the reason for the border being so messy was because of the vestiges of Muslim imperialism and the way property and fiefdoms were parceled out and handed down. The British merely respected much of what was pre-existing. In a few places like Kashmir the ruler and his population were out of sync with each other, and so the "wrong" country got the territory. Some Muslims find this intolerable; the official position of the Pakistani state is that it's intolerable.

(We have much the same problem in Palestine, where the British respected Ottoman law, which was a mess, corrupt, biased, and sloppy. Of course, the lines that were drawn by the French and British were also insane. Then again, have you looked at ethnic/religious maps of the area? There's no good solution, just solutions that suck less than the French/British lines.)

[Johnyawl]

5. Excellent post!

Thank you.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. What surprises me is that a British bureaucratic division left these enclaves in existence

It seems to have been caused by the weird borders of a princely state (supposedly they were gambled with) that survived past independence and partition, with Koch Bihar not deciding to be part of India rather than East Pakistan until 1949:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Bihar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooch_Behar_district