Dahagram / Angarpota exclave- area 18.7 km2

 protected area, enclave

Bangladeshi enclave completely surrounded by India. Access to the mainland through a narrow strip of land measuring 178 x 85 metres through Indian soil 'Teen Bigha Corridor' has been accorded in the boundary pact with India. Indian authority is yet to allow people unfettered access to and from the enclaves to mainland more than 12 hours a day.

The history of these enclaves: Cooch Behar, formerly an independent principality on the Indian subcontinent and now a district in the Indian state of West Bengal, possesses 106 enclaves in Bangladesh, totaling 69,6 km². Of those, 3 are counter-enclaves and 1 a counter-counter-enclave. The biggest Indian enclave is Balapara Khagrabari (25,95 km²), the smallest Panisala (1.093 m²).

Conversely, Bangladesh possesses 92 enclaves inside India, comprising 49,7 km². Of these, 21 are counter-enclaves. The largest Bangladeshi exclave is Dahagram-Angarpota (18,7 km²), the smallest is the counter-enclave Upan Chowki Bhaini (53 m²), the smallest international enclave in the world.

For the origins of most enclaves, we have to go back to 1713, when a treaty between the Mughal Empire and the Cooch Behar Kingdom reduced the latter’s territory by one third. The Mughals didn’t dislodge all Cooch Behar chieftains from the territory thus gained; at the same time, some Mughal soldiers retained lands within Cooch Behar proper while remaining loyal to the Mughal Empire. This territorial ‘splintering’ was not so remarkable in the context of that time: the subcontinent was extremely fragmented, most enclaves were economically self-sufficient and the fragmentation caused no significant border issues, as Cooch Behar was nominally tributary to the Mughals anyway.

In 1947, the formerly Mughal territories became part of the eastern part of Pakistan.
Cooch Behar acceded to India only in 1949, as one of the last of the 600-odd pre-independence Princely States to do so. In 1971, East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh.

Attempts in 1958 and 1974 to exchange enclaves across the international border proved more elusive despite Bangladesh's transferring of largest enclave 'Berubari' to India as a gesture of goodwill.

Internationally, these enclaves made administering extremely unworkable, and thus such an exchange would be more useful. For the border situation has often made it impossible for people living in the enclaves to legally go to school, to hospital or to market. Complicated agreements for policing and supplying the enclaves had to be drawn up (a 1950 list of products that could be imported into the enclaves contained such items as matches, cloth and mustard oil).

Classic example is the residents of enclaves need visa to cross the other country’s territory towards the ‘mainland’, but since there aren’t any consulates in the enclaves, they should go to one in the ‘mainland’ – which they can’t because they don’t have a visa. Illegal border crossings were frequent, but dangerous – a number of transgressors have been shot by border guards.

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