Indo-Bangladesh Border:Radcliffe's Ghost

Cyril Radcliffe, who headed the Boundary Commission to partition India in 1947, botched up the job in the east by drawing a straight line through villages and rivers, houses and marketplaces Neither did the Indian members of the commission at that time, nor did their successors who came to rule the country later, care to undo the damage by rationally demarcating the border. As a result, border conflicts continue to plague India and its neighbour Bangladesh – the latest being the tragic clash between the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) on the Meghalaya and Assam border.

First, before blaming each other, let us try to get the facts straight by disentangling the web of confusion created by Indian media reporting and government official briefings. They have mixed up two separate, though interrelated incidents, and fudged the issue of a longstanding dispute over the affected villages. The first incident occurred on the night of April 15 when the BDR occupied Pyrduwah village in Meghalaya (which the Bangladesh government calls Padua and claims to be a part of its territory). Explaining the debacle, the directorgeneral of our BSF, Gurbachan Jagat, was reported to have said that some 30 odd BSF personnel guarding the border outpost there were encircled and outnumbered by three BDR battalions. His counterpart, the BDR chief Fazlur Rahman, predictably gloating over the triumph, announced in Dhaka: “We have just completed a mission to restore our territory and sovereignty. We did not have to fire a single shot during the operation.”