Opinion People without a state

For the children of the Bangladeshi enclaves along the eastern border, school lay in another country. Now, for the first time, the enclaves will have two schools of their own, built by the Indo-Bangla Enclave Exchange Coordination Committee, a local NGO, and funded largely by the enclave dwellers themselves. The schools underline the predicament of the people of the Indo-Bangladesh enclaves, abandoned by two states and left to fend for themselves. Over the last two and a half years, in particular, they have been subject to the vagaries of a dithering Centre, unable to hold its ground and push through the land swap deal with Bangladesh.

An international enclave is a fragment of foreign territory landlocked within a country. When the borders were drawn in 1947, about 51 international enclaves came into being in India, initially territories of East Pakistan and then of Bangladesh. There are 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh. Over the last six decades, enclave dwellers have led a stateless existence, stranded in these tiny pockets of land. Cut off from the administrative offices of their country’s mainland, they cannot acquire birth certificates or passports. Accessing basic facilities like hospitals and primary schools, or going to nearby markets to make a living, entails a perilous journey across an international border and harassment by state officials. Until a joint census conducted by the two countries in 2011, they were never counted. But among the 20,000 people in the Bangladeshi enclaves, there is a growing desire to join the mainstream, to find political representation — thousands lined up to vote in the West Bengal panchayat elections last year.

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Decades of political apathy seemed to lift in 2011, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Bangladeshi counterpart signed the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA), which provided for the exchange of enclaves between the two countries. But that initiative lost its way in Parliament. The LBA has now joined the Teesta treaty in the UPA’s list of failures on promises to Bangladesh. The next government will inherit many of UPA 2’s foreign policy indecisions, but the LBA is low-hanging fruit. Apart from the need to keep faith with a loyal ally, the plight of the enclave dwellers should be a powerful argument for pressing on with the land swap deal.