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The India–Bangladesh Enclaves
The 162 Cooch Behar enclaves, including the world's only third-order enclave, exchanged in 2015
Until 2015, the border between India and Bangladesh near Cooch Behar was the most tangled on Earth. Scattered on either side were 162 enclaves, 111 pieces of India inside Bangladesh and 51 pieces of Bangladesh inside India, many of them containing enclaves of their own. The most extreme was Dahala Khagrabari, a patch of Indian farmland inside a Bangladeshi enclave inside an Indian enclave inside Bangladesh, the only third-order enclave ever known. For the roughly 51,000 people who lived in these pockets, the geography was no curiosity. Cut off from their own state, they often lacked schools, clinics, police, and legal papers, until the two countries finally swapped the enclaves at midnight on 31 July 2015.
The enclaves lay along the northern stretch of the border, in India's West Bengal district of Cooch Behar and Bangladesh's Rangpur division, around districts such as Lalmonirhat, Kurigram, Nilphamari, and Panchagarh. Most were small clusters of rice and jute fields and villages, some only a few hectares. Indian enclaves in Bangladesh covered about 69 square kilometers and Bangladeshi enclaves in India about 29 square kilometers. Inside them were 24 counter-enclaves, 21 Bangladeshi pockets within Indian enclaves and 3 the other way around. Dahala Khagrabari covered less than one hectare. Not all oddities were resolved: Dahagram–Angarpota, a Bangladeshi territory linked to the rest of Bangladesh by the Tin Bigha Corridor, which India has leased to Bangladesh in perpetuity since 1992, remains in place.
Local legend says the enclaves were stakes won and lost in card or chess games between the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and the Faujdar of Rangpur. Historians trace them instead to a vague 1713 treaty between the Koch kingdom and the Mughal Empire that left landholdings intermingled. The 1947 partition turned these estates into international territory, first between India and Pakistan and, after 1971, between India and Bangladesh. A 1974 land boundary agreement promised a swap but stalled in India for four decades. A 2011 protocol and India's 100th constitutional amendment, passed in May 2015, cleared the way. At the exchange, about 14,000 people became Indian citizens and some 36,000 became Bangladeshi, while about 1,000 moved to India.