Answer in about 150 words: Discuss the main features of the land-boundary agreement between India and Bangladesh. (2026, 10 Marks)
The India–Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) is South Asia’s most significant land-boundary dispute closed by negotiation. Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman signed it on 16 May 1974, a Protocol of 6 September 2011 completed it, and the Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, 2015 brought it into force at midnight on 31 July 2015.
Main features
- Exchange of enclaves (chhitmahals): 111 Indian enclaves (about 17,160 acres) went to Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves (about 7,110 acres) to India. They dated from an undefined 1713 settlement between the Koch Bihar kingdom and the Mughals, and Partition froze them as islands of one state inside another.
- Adverse possessions settled on the status quo principle, so people stayed where they lived: India received about 2,777 acres and transferred about 2,268.
- Demarcation of some 6.1 km left undemarcated since 1947 in three sectors: Daikhata-56 (West Bengal), Muhuri River–Belonia (Tripura) and Lathitila–Dumabari (Assam).
- Berubari and Tin Bigha: India kept the southern half of South Berubari, and Bangladesh reached Dahagram–Angarpota through the Tin Bigha corridor, leased in perpetuity (opened 1992, round the clock from 2011).
- Choice of nationality: after the 2011 joint headcount, about 37,000 people lived in the Indian enclaves and 14,000 in the Bangladeshi ones. All could choose; fewer than a thousand moved to India.
The constitutional route
Bangladesh ratified at once through its Third Amendment (1974). India waited four decades because the Supreme Court’s Berubari Union opinion (1960) held that ceding territory needs a constitutional amendment under Article 368. In May 2015 both Houses passed it unanimously, with West Bengal and Assam on board, and instruments of ratification were exchanged in Dhaka on 6 June 2015: a rare case of cross-party and federal consensus in foreign policy.
Significance
- Humanitarian: Willem van Schendel (2002) showed that enclave residents lived as stateless people in practice, without courts, schools or police. The LBA ended sixty-eight years of that limbo.
- Boundary-making: in Stephen B. Jones’s sequence of allocation, delimitation, demarcation and administration (1945), it completed the first three stages.
- Strategic: India ceded about 40 sq km net to gain a settled border, as it accepted the 2014 maritime award. Administration still causes friction: over fencing near the zero line, each side summoned the other’s envoy in January 2025.
Conclusion
The LBA shows how a land dispute can be settled: people before acreage, federal consent built in advance, and a constitutional route followed rather than avoided. India’s other unsettled borders lack all three conditions.