विमर्श Vimarsh · Kūṭanīti
The Line That Took Sixty-Eight Years
At midnight on 31 July 2015, 162 enclaves changed countries and more than 50,000 people stopped being stateless. India settled its land border with Bangladesh by handing over acres it never held. विजय Vijay, the second of India’s great diplomatic wins.
Nikhil Sharma · कूटनीति Kūṭanīti · 23 October 2026 · 8 min read
A reading of the public record. Every date and figure is sourced at the end.
At midnight on 31 July 2015, in a village called Mashaldanga in Cooch Behar, people lit sixty-eight candles. One for every year they had lived without a country.
This is the second essay in विजय Vijay, a series on the diplomatic wins that shaped modern India. The first, on 1971, was about a war won before it began. This one is about a border settled without a shot, by a country willing to give up land it had never held in order to secure the line it actually needed.
छिटमहल · The islands
छिटमहल Chhitmahal means scattered pieces of land. When the Radcliffe line cut Bengal in 1947 it left behind one of the strangest borders on earth. Inside Bangladesh sat 111 small pockets of Indian territory. Inside India sat 51 pockets of Bangladesh. Some of the pockets had pockets inside them. One, Dahala Khagrabari, was a field of under two acres that belonged to India, inside a piece of Bangladesh, inside a piece of India, inside Bangladesh. It was the only third-order enclave in the world.
The pockets were the old holdings of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the estates of Rangpur, frozen into international law by a line drawn in a hurry. For the people inside them the result was simple and brutal. Their country was on the other side of a foreign border. No police could reach them. No school or clinic of their own state could serve them. In 2011 a joint headcount found 51,549 people living this way: 37,334 in the Indian enclaves and 14,215 in the Bangladeshi ones.
अधूरा · Unfinished
Everyone knew the answer for decades. In 1958 Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan’s Feroz Khan Noon agreed to exchange the enclaves and split Berubari. Then the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that India could not cede territory without amending the Constitution. Parliament passed the 9th Amendment that year. It was never notified for East Pakistan, because the litigation never stopped.
On 16 May 1974 Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman signed the Land Boundary Agreement. Bangladesh ratified it the same year and handed over South Berubari. India did not ratify. The land on the ground had not been identified to the last metre, and a transfer needed a constitutional amendment that no government wanted to spend capital on. The agreement sat for forty-one years.
There were small steps. In 1992 India leased the Tin Bigha corridor, a strip of about three and three-quarter acres, so that Bangladesh’s Dahagram–Angarpota could reach its own mainland. In 2011 its gates opened round the clock. On 6 September 2011 Manmohan Singh signed a Protocol in Dhaka that settled the last 6.1 kilometres of undemarcated border and agreed that adverse possessions, land held by one side across the line, would stay with whoever held them. The Protocol closed the technical questions. The political one remained.
संकल्प · The decision
The bill to amend the Constitution had been sitting in the Rajya Sabha since December 2013. Manmohan Singh’s government had drafted it and the Opposition of the day had resisted it, with the strongest objections coming from Assam. When the government changed in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to carry the bill his predecessor had written, though parts of his own camp had opposed it. A file that had passed through the hands of five prime ministers was at last treated as the country’s business rather than any one side’s.
The last hard question was Assam. Leaving the state out would have been easier in the short run. Its chief minister Tarun Gogoi argued for keeping it in. On 5 May 2015 the Cabinet put Assam back in. The settlement would cover all four states or none.
On 6 May the Rajya Sabha passed it 181 to 0. On 7 May the Lok Sabha passed it 331 to 0. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told the House the agreement would not shrink India’s borders. Not one member of either House voted against it. Modi walked across to the Opposition benches to thank Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge, whose party had drafted the bill. The credit belonged on both sides of the House. It became the Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, with presidential assent on 28 May 2015.
विनिमय · The exchange
On 6 June 2015 in Dhaka, Modi and Sheikh Hasina exchanged the instruments of ratification for the 1974 Agreement and the 2011 Protocol. West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee stood with them. Her state carried most of the enclaves and her presence told Dhaka the deal would hold at home.
The method mattered as much as the treaty. Between 6 and 16 July, 75 joint teams went house to house and asked every resident one question: which country do you want? Nobody in the Bangladeshi enclaves inside India chose to leave. In the Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh, 979 people chose to move to India. Everyone else stayed on their land and took the citizenship of the country around them.
At midnight on 31 July all 162 enclaves changed hands. In November about 920 people crossed with their belongings at Changrabandha and Burimari. On 5 May 2016, 9,776 former enclave residents voted in the West Bengal election. One of them, Mohammed Ajgar Ali of Mashaldanga, was 103 years old. It was his first vote.
समुद्र · The sea came first
The land deal had a quieter partner. On 7 July 2014 an arbitral tribunal under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruled on the maritime boundary in the Bay of Bengal. Of 25,602 square kilometres in dispute it gave Bangladesh 19,467. India could have complained. Its spokesperson said the next day that India respected the verdict.
That one sentence did more for the land settlement than many speeches. A country that accepts an award against it is a country whose signature can be trusted. Eleven months later Dhaka received exactly that signature.
विजय · Why it is a win
It ended a human wrong. Fifty thousand people got a state, a vote, a police station and a school, and every one of them chose which state.
It traded paper for substance. On paper India handed over about 9,500 acres more than it received. On the ground neither side gave up land it actually held. In return India got a border it could finally demarcate and fence end to end. Swaraj told Parliament that a solution to illegal immigration was built into the agreement. A line you cannot draw is a line you cannot guard.
It was done by consent, at home and abroad. Four state governments, both Houses without a single vote against, a text carried across governments and a neighbour that had waited forty-one years. Nothing about it was imposed.
It has held. Dhaka has changed governments since, in August 2024 and again after the election of February 2026. The arguments between the two capitals since then have been about fencing and conduct at the border, not about where the border is.
श्रेय · Credit where due
The decision to finish it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s. He carried a bill his predecessor’s government had written, kept Assam inside it and closed the exchange in Dhaka a year after taking office. The groundwork was Manmohan Singh’s 2011 Protocol, and the text was the 1974 agreement of Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Sushma Swaraj carried it through Parliament. Mamata Banerjee and Tarun Gogoi made sure their states were inside it. Sheikh Hasina’s government waited for it and received it. The credit is shared, and every name on this list earned a part of it.
अनुभव · What it did not settle
A win is not the same as a finished job. The families who moved to India spent years in temporary camps and then in crowded flats in Dinhata, Haldibari and Mekhliganj. As late as 2024 many still had no proper land records. The Teesta waters agreement, shelved in 2011, is still unsigned. And deaths at the border, which Bangladeshi rights groups count in the hundreds over the last decade, keep the relationship raw.
Those belong to the companion series. Here it is enough to say the treaty did what treaties can do. The rest is administration, and administration is a promise kept daily.
सीख · What a negotiator can take from it
Give up what you never held to secure what you need. India conceded acres that existed only on maps and gained a closed, fenceable border. In business the equivalent is the paper value you write off to end a dispute that costs you every day.
Ratify at home before you sign abroad. The 1974 agreement failed because India signed what it could not deliver. The 2015 settlement worked because India first carried all of Parliament and all four border states with it. A promise you cannot get past your own board is not a promise.
Accept the verdict that goes against you. Honouring the 2014 sea award was the down payment on the 2015 land deal. Credibility is built on the losses you accept gracefully.
Let the affected people choose. The house-to-house survey turned a transfer of territory into a free choice for every family in it. That is why the exchange has never been seriously contested.
A line you cannot draw is a line you cannot guard. India gave up acres it never held to get the line it needed.
Gurugram, 23 October 2026.
Sources, checked 23 October 2026. Ministry of External Affairs, India–Bangladesh Land Boundary Agreement booklet and FAQ, 2015. MEA, 2011 Protocol text. Supreme Court of India, In re the Berubari Union and Exchange of Enclaves, 14 March 1960. Lok Sabha debates, statement on the 1974 agreement, 22 July 1974. PRS, Constitution (119th Amendment) Bill, 2013_Bill,_2013_0.pdf) and Constitution (100th Amendment) Act, 2015-act,-2015.pdf). The Daily Star, Gogoi asks Modi not to exclude Assam, 3 May 2015, and only 979 want to leave, 20 July 2015. Business Standard (PTI), Rajya Sabha passes the bill, 6 May 2015. The Quint, Lok Sabha passes the Land Boundary Agreement, 7 May 2015. MEA, Notun Projonmo – Nayi Disha, 7 June 2015. The Tribune, India, Bangladesh exchange 162 enclaves, 2 August 2015. The News Minute, historic deal, 1 August 2015. Migration Policy Institute, India and Bangladesh swap territory, 9 March 2016. Business Standard (IANS), former enclave dwellers vote for the first time, 5 May 2016. Permanent Court of Arbitration, Bay of Bengal Maritime Boundary Arbitration, 7 July 2014; IDSA, delimitation of the maritime boundary, 19 August 2014; The Financial Express, India respects maritime boundary verdict. Deccan Herald, villagers of this Bengal enclave wait for their promised land, 16 April 2024. Dhaka Tribune, 296 Bangladeshis killed at borders in a decade, 4 January 2026 (figures from Ain o Salish Kendra). The Week (PTI), Dhaka summons Indian envoy over fencing, 12 January 2025.