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NO ENCLAVE AFTER TOMORROW

Set to end is life of nonexistence

Inam Ahmed
For his entire forty years of life, Nurul Islam's existence was nothing but a sorry tale of shame and fear, obscurity and deprivation, inconvenience and void. He and 51,448 other people like him who live in enclaves in Bangladesh and India are just like that. And now only two days are left before this misery would end.
Nurul Islam of Pashchhim Dashiarchhara, an Indian enclave within Bangladesh - a piece of Indian land encircled by Bangladesh, finished primary school but he had to use a fake address. He did not disclose that he is actually an Indian citizen living in an enclave because that would disqualify him from attendinga Bangladeshi school.
When his son was very ill with a mysterious fever and diarrhea, he sought treatment at Kurigram government hospital under a different identity. But
ultimately they found out the truth and so the hospital refused to treat his son.
Every time he goes out of the enclave to Bangladesh land, and this he is bound to do forsurvival because all around his small village is Bangladesh, he has to be cautious. Once he went to sell his cow in the Bangladeshi cattle market, there is no such thing within the enclave, some locals seized his cow because he is an Indian and so cannot trade in Bangladesh territory.
This and many other things are the everyday life for the 'Chhit people' -people living in the enclaves. Way back in 1947, a British barrister named Cyril Radcliffe sat in a quaint bungalow on hot summer days and hurriedly drew up a line, covering 30 miles a day, splitting homes and kitchens, paddy fields and orchards, bedrooms and drawing rooms, parting lives and livelihood of 88 million people living in Bengal and Punjab, which were to be divided in two parts. One would go to India and the other to Pakistan.
He had to hurry because Great Britain was leaving India very soon as a great human disaster of religious riot loomed real. The last viceroy of India lord Mountbatten on his return from naval battles in World War II had been tasked by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to see the partition of India as the Muslim League wanted a separate state for the Muslims.
And so Radcliffe was picked up, probably because of his absolutely no knowledge about India so that he could accomplish the job without prejudice.
Even before that the miseries of the enclave people were probably written when the Dutch traders increased the price of pepper by five shillings, creating a deep resentment among the Londoners and 24 merchants then set
up their own company to carry out spice trade, the East India Company, in 1599. Their first galleon, a 500 -ton vessel named Hector, berthed at Surat of Bombay in 1600, triggering the rest of history for the subcontinent - the start of the British rule and then the parting.
But now as Radcliffe drew the line, he was probably not aware of an intriguing problem, or even if he was aware of it he did not have time to address it as the partition date of August 15 was only weeks away, that Bengal had its own peculiarity.
The maharaja of Cooch Bihar and the Fauzdar of Rangpur were serious gamers in their time, madly in love with checkers and often betted with their lands. As they won and lost, pieces of land on both sides of the boundary fell into each other's hands. Or as the historical records say these pockets were the confused outcome of a treaty between the Maharaja of Cooch Bihar and the Mogul empire in 1713 according to Wikipedia.
Whatever could be the reason, as Radcliffe drew the line, partitioning Bengal, attaching Cooch Bihar with India and Rangpur with Pakistan the fate of these patches remained unresolved. Thus 111 Indian enclaves were created within Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi ones in India.
Trapped within such prisons are Nurul Islam and over fifty thousand more. Their wait is almost over now as at the strike of midnight July 31, two days from today, the status of the enclaves would end.
All Indian enclaves within Bangladesh would become part of us and all Bangladeshi enclaves within India would become part of them - a simple job it sounds, but that simple job took 68 years and many lost lives.