Thaindian News

Dhaka/New Delhi, Sep 6 (IANS) Legend has it that chess games between two kings in which villages were placed as wagers resulted in the formation of many of the enclaves on the India-Bangladesh border that have become a bone of contention between the two countries.

Apparently, the Maharajas of Cooch Behar, now in India, and the Rajas of Rangpur, now in Bangladesh, used to play chess. They would wager villages and this led to the kings owning areas within each other’s land.

But that’s the legend.

“That legend is a myth,” Arup Jyoti Mazumdar of the Cooch Behar Heritage Society, told IANS on phone.

“As far as we know, nothing like that happened,” he stressed.

The enclaves issues is a key matter that will be discussed during the two-day visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that concludes Wednesday.

India and Bangladesh are expected to sign a deal to swap 162 enclaves to resolve their decades-old border dispute.

The enclaves are islands of land resulting from traditional ownership arrangements that survived both the partition of the sub-continent after the end of British rule in 1947 and Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

A joint census of 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladeshi territory and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in Indian territory concluded July 18. The survey showed 51,000 people lived in these landlocked islands.

Diptiman Sengupta, joint secretary of India-Bangladesh enclaves coordination committee, said that earlier too attempts had been made to sort out the issue.

“In 1958, 1974 and 1992, decisions regarding the enclaves were taken. But, ultimately it is the implementation that matters,” Sengupta told IANS.

“The government must declare in how many days will the agreement be implemented,” he added.

Noting that the issue has been hanging fire for the past 64 years, Sengupta said: “Three generations of people are living in the enclaves. It is not just about land, it is about people.”