Bangladesh and India settle 70-year border dispute

Enclave system affected more than 50,000 people

Just after midnight on Saturday, one of the most perplexing border disputes in the world officially ended. India and Bangladesh began the exchange of more than 160 enclaves — small areas of sovereignty completely surrounded on all sides by another country — and in so doing ended a dispute that has lasted almost 70 years.

This act will have a major effect on the lives of more than 50,000 people who resided in these enclaves in Cooch Behar. Where they had been surrounded by a country they didn’t have citizenship in for decades, now they will finally gain access to things such as schools, electricity and health care.

For curious cartographers and others obsessed with geopolitical oddities, however, it’s an end of an era. The exchange between India and Bangladesh means that the world will not only lose one of its most unique borders, but it will also lose the only third-order enclave in the world: an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by another state.

It’s confusing. Dahala Khagrabari, the third-order enclave in question, was a part of India, surrounded by a Bangladeshi enclave, which was surrounded by an Indian enclave, which was surrounded by Bangladesh.

Modern scholars believe that the enclaves are the result of the Mughal empire’s failed expansion into the kingdom of Cooch Behar in the 18th century.

After the partition of India in 1947, the problems with this arrangement became apparent: The people who lived in these enclaves weren’t stateless people, but they might as well have been.