The Insane Complexity of the India/Bangladesh Border

this video was made possible by curiosity stream and nebula watch a full-length exclusive companion video to this one in my modern conflict series next on nebula which you can access by signing up for the curiosity stream nebula bundle deal for just 15 a year at curiositystream.com real life lore there's a lot of really bad really awful border situations in the world that at first glance don't really seem to make any sense why does the european union have cities and territories in africa why does france share her longest border with brazil why does namibia have this stupid arm i've made tons of videos about things like these in the past but there's one extremely insane border situation that i haven't made a video on yet and it's one that no matter how many glances you take at it it still doesn't make any sense this is the most complicated border that has ever existed in history the india bangladesh border today the border between these countries is still pretty weird but if you rewind the map back to just six years ago it was a lot more weird let me just take you on a tour across this section of the border here circa 2015. just look at all of this utter chaos this is the main border between india and bangladesh but there's a bunch of pieces of bangladesh inside of india and there's pieces of india inside of bangladesh and then there's pieces of india and bangladesh inside of those pieces of india or bangladesh inside of india or bangladesh these weird chunks of land on the wrong side of the border are called enclaves and looking at this complicated situation doesn't really help with the definition very much so let's look at it on a simpler level in its simplest form an enclave is a piece of a country that's completely 100 separated from the main part of a country so let's say you have country x over here and then there's another part of country x right over here inside of country y across their primary shared border that is an enclave and it's fairly simple to understand however in this situation between india and bangladesh there were 102 enclaves of indian territory located inside of bangladesh proper and a further 71 bangladeshi enclaves within india proper that's pretty complicated enough but that's really only the tip of the iceberg of this madness inside of an enclave can further exist what's called a counter or a second order enclave in this scenario imagine that country x has an enclave inside of country y and then country y has an enclave inside of that enclave so if you start in the middle and walk in a straight line out it would go country y then country x and then country y again it almost looks like a bullseye and as of 2021 only one example of a counter-enclave continues existing in the world here at nahua which is a united arab emirates village which is completely surrounded by territory belonging to oman which itself is completely surrounded by the united arab emirates understanding one of these like this is fairly easy but india and bangladesh didn't have one they had dozens inside of those 102 enclaves of indian territory inside of bangladesh were a further 21 bangladeshi counter-enclaves and inside of those 71 bangladeshi enclaves inside of india were a further three indian counter-enclaves and then to make matters even more complicated there was this nonsense what you're currently looking at is a small patch of farmland that belonged to india which was located fully within a village that belonged to bangladesh that was further located fully within a village that belonged to india which was further located inside of the bangladeshi mainland not to mention all of these other little enclaves surrounding it if you started here and walked in a straight line you'd begin in india then bangladesh then india then bangladesh then india then bangladesh then india then bangladesh then india and finally bangladesh and this whole line is only a few hundred meters long anyway this nonsense was the world's only third order enclave the india inside of bangladesh inside of india inside of bangladesh and after conducting a joint survey in 2011 india and bangladesh discovered that over 51 000 people were living across all of these confusing enclaves and life for nearly all of them there was pretty weird and challenging the smaller enclaves separated from their national mainland had little to no access to their homeland's logistics supplies or emergency services and neither side was particularly willing to assist so then why wouldn't these 51 000 people just walk out of their enclaves in order to get these services well mostly because they couldn't if somebody wanted to leave their enclave they would have had to have gotten a visa first which would have required a visit to their embassy which were all unfortunately in their country's mainland which means they couldn't visit to apply for a visa unless they had a visa which they didn't have and that my friends is some big brain bureaucracy so that was pretty much where the situation stood as recently as 2015 but how did this whole mess even begin in the first place local legend has it that centuries ago hundreds of enclaves were put up as stakes and card games and chess matches between two local kings and the modern nations which exist today simply evolved around their wins and losses however there isn't any historical evidence that provides any kind of proof for that so the most likely origin story was instead a peace treaty signed between the mughal empire and the kingdom of coach bihar in 1713. coach bihar lost the war and agreed to cede territory to the mughals but evidently they never really consulted a map or even formalized an actual border so the question of what land belonged to whom remained vague and then as with every dumb border situation that exists in the world today the british got involved when the british ruled india the former borders between different kingdoms didn't really matter as much but then all of a sudden in 1947 after centuries of rule the british finally decided to give india independence but they also decided to partition it between the state of india and the state of pakistan and they gave the job of drawing the border between them to this guy a british man who had never been to india before and who was only given five weeks to come up with something what he came up with was this which had pakistan in two different places separated by hundreds of miles by india the eastern half of pakistan's border was drawn here right along the vague old boundary between the mughals and coach bihar that included all of the enclaves which after centuries of not mattering all of a sudden mattered a lot thousands of indians and east pakistanis were all of a sudden trapped within their enclaves on different sides of the border and as relations between india and pakistan quickly deteriorated nobody really cared to solve it but then finally in the 1970s east pakistan became the independent state of bangladesh and new talks to fix up their border with india emerged in 1974 the indian and bangladeshi government signed a treaty that would exchange their enclaves with one another and generally tidy up their border and while bangladesh immediately ratified it india didn't for one reason remember that india had 102 enclaves inside of bangladesh while bangladesh had only 71 enclaves inside of india if they just swapped these enclaves it meant that india would be a net loser of roughly 40 square kilometers of land to bangladesh and to many indian nationalists that wasn't ideal keep in mind that india has ongoing major land disputes with both pakistan and china over in other places and them giving up 40 square kilometers of land to bangladesh might have been seen to them as a weakness and so india continued refusing to ratify the enclave exchange treaty for 41 years after signing it all the way until 2015 when circumstances within the indian government finally coalesced to make it possible at midnight on the 31st of july 2015 the enclaves were finally officially exchanged at the snap of a finger and the new indian bangladeshi border was fully demarcated roughly one year later in 2016 the over 51 000 residents who lived within them were each given the choice of either indian or bangladeshi citizenship and while most simply chose to remain in place at their homes and adopt the citizenship of whatever new country they found themselves in a few didn't roughly 1 000 people who once lived within the indian enclaves across the border in bangladesh chose to become indian citizens after the enclave transfers and they had to be resettled back over to the indian mainland and while a lot cleaner looking than before the new borders that exist today are still pretty wacky they zig and zag all over the place and meander into weird border peninsulas like here or here or here or here or here or really just everywhere but that's not all if you look over here you'll see that there's still one enclave that continues existing a piece of bangladesh inside of india which just happens to be the biggest single enclave that existed prior to the exchange treaty 17 000 bangladeshi citizens were living here trapped surrounded by india separated from the bangladeshi mainland by only 200 meters at the narrowest point here and so to help out india decided to lease this tiny strip of land to bangladesh in order to enable access between the enclave and the mainland which sort of makes it not an enclave at least in practice but if you were bangladeshi and living here and wanted to go visit a friend over here which is a distance of only four kilometers as the crow flies you would have to spend over two hours driving along this super convoluted route in order to remain inside a bangladeshi territory the entire way there for a lot of people the new cleaner borders are still kind of a mess but they're still much much better than they used to be and what's even more amazing is that even though it took decades to accomplish india and bangladesh solve their border issues through diplomacy and not through violence but that doesn't always happen so cleanly between countries with strange border disputes last year armenia and azerbaijan went to war over their own unresolved border enclaves and exclaves that primarily focused on this landlocked region in the middle of azerbaijan proper called nagorno-karabakh which both armenia and azerbaijan sort of claim the war was incredibly geopolitically complex with multiple other countries intervening lasted for six weeks saw the extensive use of drone warfare in emerging military technologies that ultimately resulted in a decisive victory for azerbaijan it's a fascinating subject that i'm sure you would probably want to watch but the video just wouldn't ever work on youtube youtube's terms of service specifically prohibits videos like this one about modern wars and conflicts from being monetizable which means that the youtube algorithm would intentionally never promote it to most of you who would be interested so instead of uploading it to youtube i decided to upload my long armenia azerbaijan war video to nebula instead in my new exclusive series there called modern conflicts as you've probably heard by now nebula is home to tons of exclusive ad-free content from tons of your favorite educational creators the reason that i and others are able to put exclusive companion videos over there like this armenia azerbaijan war one is because of the way that nebula works it doesn't have an algorithm that punishes us when we make something controversial or something that's different from our normal stuff and the direct subscriptions from users help to fund both these and other projects like our many nebula originals so if you're interested in watching all of this awesome exclusive content plus supporting loads of independent educational creators at the same time you can sign up right now by using the curiosity stream nebula bundle deal all you gotta do is go to curiositystream.com real life lore and sign up for any subscription they have but i'd suggest the yearly one since it's less than 15 a year and then you have access to both streaming sites and curiosity stream itself has awesome stuff too from more established names like david attenborough or richard hammond from top gear or almost hour-long extensive documentaries like king of cokeland the un's losing war on drugs that'll take you through yet another modern conflict in south america all told curiosity stream is awesome thanks to their seemingly endless library of top quality stuff while nebula is great thanks to its exclusive early and ad-free videos from the educational creators you already know and love curiosity stream and nebula together though are even better because it's only 15 a year for both when you go to curiositystream.com real life lore or by clicking the link down in the description and as always thank you so 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 1,613,184

Rating: 4.916256 out of 5

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, india, bangladesh, india Bangladesh border, enclaves, india enclaves, Bangladesh enclaves, borders, strange borders, weird borders, complex borders, complicated borders

Id: c4AfV0AECdI

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021