Exchange of enclaves from midnight of July 31

[VCheng]

Updated: June 10, 2015 02:15 IST
Exchange of enclaves from midnight of July 31 - The Hindu

The much-awaited implementation of the Land Boundary Agreement will start next month, beginning with the exchange of enclaves on July 31 midnight, official documents say. Launching the exchange of 111 Indian and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves, the two countries will start implementing the historic LBA, which the Indian Parliament ratified in early May.

Before the start of the historic process, the officials of the two countries will jointly visit the enclaves to finalise the process, according to the documents the two sides exchanged on June 6.

This is a great example of how nations can work together for mutual benefit by rising over differences in a positive way. Bravo!

 

[Hindustani78]

 

[jaiind]

at least this could solve illegal immigrants from BD.

 

[ZooZoo]

No Bangladeshi post?

Its thread where Bangladeshi should participate

Or these so called Bangladeshi here are Bots (pakistani impersonating as Bangladeshi) to spoil Indo-BD relation???

 

[nForce]

at least this could solve illegal immigrants from BD.

No this is not a solution for illegal immigration.
This solves a lot of problem for the people living in those enclaves though. They will be able to make use of facilities provided by the govt., which earlier they could not.

 

[Abingdonboy]

Now give these people the opportunity to flourish and prosper for the good of India.

 

[Hindustani78]

File photo shows a BSF patrol at the India-Bangladesh border in Fulbari, about 25 km from Siliguri.

India, Bangladesh swap border enclaves, settle old dispute - The Hindu

Television images showed people bursting firecrackers and raising the tri-colour in the Masaldanga enclave.

At the stroke of midnight Friday, tens of thousands of stateless people who were stranded for decades along the poorly defined border between India and Bangladesh will finally get to choose their citizenship, as the two countries swapped more than 150 pockets of land to settle the demarcation line dividing them.

Television images showed people bursting firecrackers and raising an Indian flag in the Masaldanga enclave, which became part of India.

External Affairs Ministry in a statement described July 31 as a historic day for both India and Bangladesh as “it marks the resolution of a complex issue that has lingered since independence” from British colonialists in 1947.

Nearly 37,000 people lived in 111 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh, while 14,000 lived in 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India.These people are getting citizenship of their choice.

The boundary agreement between the two countries took effect at midnight on Friday.

Relations between India and its smaller neighbour Bangladesh have significantly improved since Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina promised that her administration would not allow India’s separatist insurgents to use the porous 4,000-kilometre border to carry out raids in India.

Aided by India, Bangladesh gained independence from Pakistan following a bloody nine-month war in 1971. The boundary dispute has been lingering since British colonialists carved Pakistan out of India in 1947, and granted independence to the two countries.

None from Bangladeshi enclaves within India opted for Bangladesh, while 979 people from Indian enclaves living inside Bangladesh applied for Indian citizenship, said Akhteruzzman Azad, chief government administrator at Kurigram district in Bangladesh.

The region is 240 kilometres north of Dhaka, the Bangladesh capital.

The shifting of the people to the Indian side would be completed by November this year.

The two neighbouring countries are implementing the Land Boundary Agreement in line with a deal signed in 1974, and approved by the Parliament recently.

 

[Hindustani78]

Jubilant crowds celebrated
1 Aug, 2015

Text by: AFP

Jubilant crowds celebrated Saturday as Bangladesh and India swapped tiny islands of land, ending one of the world's most intractable border disputes that has kept thousands in limbo for nearly seven decades.

The long awaited freedom
1 Aug, 2015
As the clock struck one minute past midnight (1801 GMT Friday), thousands of people who have been living without schools, clinics or power for a generation erupted in cheers of celebration for their new citizenship.

A total of 162 tiny islands of land
1 Aug, 2015
A total of 162 tiny islands of land -- 111 in Bangladesh and 51 in India -- were officially handed over to the countries surrounding them on Saturday after Dhaka and New Delhi struck a border agreement in June.

The land-swap means some 50,000 people who have been living in the isolated enclaves since 1947 will now become part of the countries that surround their homes.

People of Mashal Danga Enclave
1 Aug, 2015
The enclaves date back to ownership arrangements made centuries ago between local princes.

The parcels of land survived partition of the subcontinent in 1947 after British rule and Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence with Pakistan.

In pic: People of Mashal Danga Enclave celebrate with tricolor rangoli near India- Bangladesh border in Cooch Behar District of West Bengal, as India and Bangladesh exchange 162 adversely-held enclaves on Friday midnight.

A woman lights candles
1 Aug, 2015
Bangladesh endorsed a deal with India in 1974 in a bid to dissolve the pockets, but India only signed a final agreement in June when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Dhaka.

In the final hours before the handover, villagers held special feasts and joined prayers in mosques and Hindu temples to usher in the new era.

In pic: A woman lights candles in celebration at Dashiarchhara, in Kurigram enclaves, Bangladesh.

Plans for more lavish festivities
1 Aug, 2015
Plans for more lavish festivities have been scaled back as India is observing a period of national mourning for former president A P J Abdul Kalam, who died this week.

Home finally!
1 Aug, 2015
Both India and Bangladesh conducted surveys this month asking enclave residents to choose a nation.

Nearly 1,000 people on the Bangladesh side opted to keep their Indian nationalities.

 

[kaykay]

No Bangladeshi post?

Its thread where Bangladeshi should participate

Or these so called Bangladeshi here are Bots (pakistani impersonating as Bangladeshi) to spoil Indo-BD relation???

PDF Bangladeshi members are mostly Jamatis. For rest, you can understand.

 

[ZooZoo]

PDF Bangladeshi members are mostly Jamatis. For rest, you can understand.

I even think worst, they are pakistani disgussing as angladeshi..

 

[Hindustani78]

India, Bangla border guards to begin talks tomorrow | Zee News
Last Updated: Sunday, August 2, 2015 - 16:11

New Delhi: With the historic exchange of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border accomplished, high-level delegations of both the country's border guarding forces will commence their annual DG level bilateral talks here beginning tomorrow.

A 22-member delegation of the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) will sit across the table with their counterparts Border Security Force (BSF) for their four-day annual Director General level talks on a host of border issues at the paramilitary forces' headquarter here.

The visit assumes significance as this is the first official Bangladeshi team to arrive in Delhi after the historic Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) has been conducted with the exchanges happening between the two countries.

The BGB delegation, set to arrive here today, is led by BGB DG Maj Gen Aziz Ahmed while the BSF side will be headed by BSF DG D K Pathak with representatives from Ministry of Home Affairs, External Affairs, Survey of India, NIA and other law enforcement agencies.

The two sides will sign a joint declaration on August 6, a day before the Bangladeshi delegation leaves for Dhaka.

The BSF said the two sides are expected to discuss issues related to trans-border crimes including instances of cattle smuggling, illegal movement of fake Indian currency, activities of Indian insurgent groups based in Bangladesh, prevention of illegal migration, joint efforts for effective implementation of common agenda programmes and host of other confidence building measures.

"The emerging border scenario after the LBA will also be discussed," a senior official said.

At the stroke of Friday mid-night, 51,000 stateless people of India and Bangladesh attained freedom when the two countries ended decades of their lingering wait for citizenship by exchanging 162 adversely-held enclaves between them.

PTI

 

[Hindustani78]

District Magistrate of Cooch Behar P. Ulagnathan and Superintendent of Police Rajesh Kumar Yadav at a programme to mark the inclusion of the Poatarkuti enclave in India on Saturday. Photo: Sanjoy Ghosh

The national tricolour is hoisted at Poatarkuti enclave for the first time. Photo by Sanjoy Ghosh

Enclave exchange: India, Bangla border guards to begin talks tomorrow - The Hindu

This is the first official Bangladeshi team to arrive in Delhi after the historic Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) between the two countries.
With the historic exchange of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border accomplished, high-level delegations of both countries’ border forces will commence their annual DG level bilateral talks here, beginning tomorrow.

A 22-member delegation of the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) will sit across the table with their counterparts Border Security Force (BSF) for their four-day annual Director General level talks on a host of border issues at the paramilitary forces’ headquarters here.

The visit assumes significance as this is the first official Bangladeshi team to arrive in Delhi after the historic Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) has been conducted with the exchanges happening between the two countries.

The BGB delegation, set to arrive here today, is led by BGB DG Maj Gen Aziz Ahmed while the BSF side will be headed by BSF DG D K Pathak with representatives from Ministry of Home Affairs, External Affairs, Survey of India, NIA and other law enforcement agencies.

The two sides will sign a joint declaration on August 6, a day before the Bangladeshi delegation leaves for Dhaka.

The BSF said the two sides are expected to discuss issues related to trans-border crimes including instances of cattle smuggling, illegal movement of fake Indian currency, activities of Indian insurgent groups based in Bangladesh, prevention of illegal migration, joint efforts for effective implementation of common agenda programmes and host of other confidence building measures.

“The emerging border scenario after the LBA will also be discussed,” a senior official said.

At the stroke of midnight on Friday, 51,000 stateless people of India and Bangladesh attained freedom when the two countries ended decades of their lingering wait for citizenship by exchanging 162 adversely-held enclaves between them.

 

[UKBengali]

Glad that this has been resolved at last.

Those poor people had to live in inhuman conditions
for all those decades.

 

[Hindustani78]

Enclave residents, all poor, hardworking peasants, have been stranded in no-man's land since partition in 1947. Bangladesh did not have access to them, while India ignored them. Now this will change. File photo: Ashoke Chakrabarty

As July melted into August at the stroke of midnight, 51 Bangladeshi enclaves formally dissolved into India. The residents of two such enclaves shared their happiness and relief at having finally found a national identity.
August 5 is a beautifully gloomy day — it has rained all morning, the sky is still overcast and the grey emphasises the green of the paddy fields spread out as far as the eye can see. However, the residents of Paschim Moshaldanga, a hamlet of 28 houses, are anything but gloomy. They are celebrating their freedom from a life of fear and falsehood — and relishing the sudden attention from the media worldwide.

Until July 31 this year, Paschim Moshaldanga was one of the 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India, all of them dotting the rural extremes of Cooch Behar district in West Bengal. Bangladesh did not have access to them, India ignored them. Their residents — poor, hardworking peasants had been stranded in a no-man’s land ever since the Partition of India in 1947.

If they’ve managed to live through the seven decades as non-entities, that’s largely because of the human instinct for survival and sometimes kindness shown by relatives living on the Indian side. The kindness usually came in the form of false address proofs, forged identity proofs and illegal power supply, without which they would have remained deprived of basic necessities in life.

But as July melted into August at the stroke of midnight, these pockets formally dissolved into India; simultaneously, 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh merged into that country. The long-pending land swap, ratified by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina on June 6, finally gave their residents national identities.

“We have finally got independence, we can now move around freely, talk freely,” says Kadam Sheikh (36), a resident of Paschim Moshaldanga, who often spends months together away from home, working as a construction labourer in cities such as Gurgaon, Noida, Amritsar and Dehradun.

“I got myself a fake voter ID card because there is always the fear of getting arrested as an illegal migrant when I go to work in those places,” says Sheikh, sitting under a rain-washed tree along with his neighbours. “But the card is of no help to my children because it shows my age as 25, whereas my daughter is 19 and son is 17. Hopefully I will get a new card now — a genuine one.”

His neighbour Jamal Sheikh (55) says: “We had to use fake names, fake addresses for every little thing — sending children to school, getting treatment in a government hospital, earning a living. They would send us away if they came to know we are from a chhit.”

Chhit literally means drops or specks in Bengali, and is the term used locally, and quite aptly, to describe the enclaves. Even though the chhits have been totally ignored by India all these decades, they have relied entirely on India for survival, especially the Nazirhat market in Dinhata sub-division of Cooch Behar, where they sell their produce and also shop for their daily needs — from salt to clothes. Venturing too far from Cooch Behar always came with the risk of getting arrested, something that Amir Hossain learned the hard way.

National identities of their own


• Land swaps that came into force on August 1 gave the residents of 51 Bangladeshi chhits enclaves national identities
• Paschim Moshaldanga and Madhya Moshaldanga among the chhits transferred from Bangladesh to India.
• All the chhits come in the rural extremes of Cooch Behar, West Bengal
• All Chhit residents on Indian side of the border — a little over 14,000 people — have chosen to become Indian nationals
• Even though they have been totally ignored by India, they have relied entirely on India for survival, especially the Nazirhat market in Dinhata sub-division
• 111 Indian enclaves, with a population of 37,000, transferred to Bangladesh. About 1,000 of the residents to come to India

How did the chhits come into existence in the first place? The joke is that a drunk British officer, while drawing the Radcliffe Line on the map spilled ink on either side of the border and those drops became the enclaves. Sir Cyril Radcliffe may not have had a hand in their creation at all.

Locals say the enclaves were the outcome of chess games played between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the Mughal Governor of bordering Rangpur in the 18th century. After the Partition, when Cooch Behar joined India, the ownership of some pieces of land remained with zamindars across the border; likewise, the papers of many pieces of land in East Pakistan remained with zamindars in Cooch Behar — that’s how, the locals believe, the enclaves were born.

“Whenever they sat down to play, they would put the most fertile lands in their territories at stake. If you get the soil tested, you will find the chhits to be more fertile than other lands,” Diptiman Sengupta, chief coordinator of the Bharat-Bangladesh Enclave Exchange Coordination Movement, an NGO, had told me earlier in the day when I called on him at his home in Dinhata.

 

[Hindustani78]

SC notice on excluding India-Bangladesh enclaves' residents | Zee News
Last Updated: Thursday, September 24, 2015 - 20:12

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the central and West Bengal governments on a petition that said residents of enclaves exchanged between India and Bangladesh were wrongly excluded during a survey in 2011.

The bench of Justice T.S. Thakur and Justice V. Gopala Gowda issued notice to the external affairs ministry and the home ministry after counsel Colin Gonsalves, appearing for NGO Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha, said the affected people were eligible residents of enclaves on both sides of the border but were wrongly excluded from the 2011 survey, thereby leaving them in a stateless position.

The counsel told the court that after the 2011 survey, there was no forum to raise objections to their exclusion.

Former judge of the Sikkim High Court and the Calcutta High Court Justice Malay Sengupta is the chairman of the NGO.

Supporting the recent exchange of enclaves between India and Bangladesh, Gonsalves contested the veracity of the 2011 survey and another exercise undertaken in July 2015, saying "no formal survey was conducted" and the lists were drawn up on the basis of "ad hoc intelligence reports".

The petition by the NGO and some of the affected residents says: "The people were never consulted and have no idea at all as to when the so called survey was conducted. The survey lists are kept top secret."

The "bonafide" residents of the enclaves on both sides of the border whom Gonsalves said the NGO had personally spoken to claimed that they have now learnt that certain officials visited their areas from July 6, 2015 onwards and the names of many of them were not included in the lists even though they were bonafide residents and were living there since long.

Responding to a query by the court as to "who are these people", Gonsalves said the list was drawn up by local organisations and the petitioner NGO held meetings with them and verified evidence supporting their claim of being bonafide residents of the enclaves but were excluded from the surveyed list.

Describing the exclusion as because of "inadequate clarity and transparency" on the vital issue, the petition described it as a "violation of their human rights".

The NGO and the affected people urged the court to direct the central government to "disclose the list of eligible residents of the enclaves on both sides of the border and to give an opportunity to those who claim that their names have been illegally and wrongly omitted to make a representation to the authorities".

The petition also sought direction to the government to consider representations of the enclave dwellers and pass reasoned orders accepting or rejecting them in accordance with law.

IANS