DURING HIS two-day trip to Bangladesh beginning today, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh plans to end the decades-old trauma of thousands of “non-citizens” trapped in 162 disputed enclaves on both sides of the border by regularising them.
The neighbours plan to conclude a deal to settle these enclaves – 111 on the Indian side, covering almost 17,000 acres, and 51 in Bangladesh – bringing closure to their combined population of about 51,000.
This will also give the locals the option of becoming citizens of either India or Bangladesh, after having lived all their lives in small islands of Indian and Bangladeshi territory surrounded completely by the other country’s land but with no nationality.
Bizarrely, these also include around a dozen counter-enclaves and possibly the world’s sole counter-counter enclave – a tiny patch of Indian territory inside a Bangladeshi enclave inside an Indian enclave inside Bangladesh.
“There is nobody to look after us,” said Jober Ali, a resident of Votbari village, a tiny corner of India surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.
We have no country . . . I do not have any identity. I am nowhere,” he said, adding nobody was bothered about them.
Officially, Votbari residents are not allowed to leave their village and enter Bangladesh without a visa.
But there is no fence and since they have never even been given Indian passports, Bangladeshi authorities look the other way and let them pass.
They do their shopping in Bangladesh, use Bangladeshi currency and rely on Bangladeshi hospitals in case of emergencies.
There are no marked borders separating these disputed enclaves from surrounding land, but the movement of locals is often restricted by checkpoints and none of them are eligible for services offered by either country.
Victims of history dating back to the colonial partition of the sub-continent into West and East Pakistan, which broke away in 1971 to become Bangladesh, these enclave residents were virtually “stateless people” living in a strange twilight world with no-one to take any responsibility for them.
“We are trying to address all outstanding border issues and we hope there will be no issues after Singh’s visit,” Gowher Rizvi, an adviser to Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina, said last week.
“Everything will be done according to the will of the people in the enclaves. Nothing will be forced,” he said, adding that enclave residents would be allowed to choose their nationality.
After India helped create Bangladesh following the 1971 war with Pakistan, the two nations developed close ties and signed a treaty in 1974 that would have resolved the problem.
The enclave resolution plan entails each country absorbing the enclaves inside its territory and giving citizenship to the residents or allowing them to move to their home country, where they would be provided with homes, India’s interior minister P Chidambaram told parliament last month.