India ratifies LBA after 41 years

It is interesting to see the excitement in Bangladesh over the ratification of the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) by India. There has been a flurry of phone calls from New Delhi to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina congratulating her on the LBA. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj called Sheikh Hasina who called the Congress leader Sonia Gandhi. The BNP leader Khaleda Zia also joined the congratulation fest with messages to the Indian leaders.
They all seem to have conveniently forgotten the background of the LBA. If they had not, their excitement should have been significantly dampened because India has kept Bangladesh waiting for 41 years to ratify the LBA. In 1974, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman signed the LBA agreement with the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for what became known as the Indira-Mujib Border Agreement of 1974. The Agreement had sorted out problems related to Bangladesh-India border and enclaves in each other's territories and land in adverse possession that were extremely complicated because of their physical nature. Bangladesh handed Berubari, the largest of the many enclaves, to India immediately after the LBA was signed in 1974. India allowed Bangladesh to retain the two large enclaves Dahagram and Angorpota but denied giving Bangladesh the 3-acre strip of land known as the Teen Bigha corridor to connect the enclaves to Bangladesh that India was required to do under the Agreement.
India then stalled the Agreement on two issues. It told Bangladesh that it needed to ratify the Agreement to implement its full obligations under the LBA. India further informed Bangladesh that it was unable to hand over Teen Bigha due to a case filed in the court.
Credit must go to the Awami League government   and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for taking up in earnest, after the Awami League came to power in January 2009, with the Congress government of the time the issue of full implementation of the Indira-Mujib Agreement of 1974. However, Dhaka had pushed New Delhi towards the full implementation of the 1974 Agreement both during the AL rule in 1996-2001 and BNP rule in 2001-2006 but found India more interested to keep the LBA pending as an irritant in the development of Bangladesh-India relations rather than resolve it to take these relations move forward.
During his visit in September 2011, then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohon Singh had signed the additional protocol to the 1974 Agreement. The protocol resolved, first, the 6.1 km of the un-demarcated border and second, identified and finalised the enclaves and land in adverse possession to be exchanged under which India would hand over to Bangladesh 17,160.63 acres and Bangladesh, 7112.2 acres to India to ease for India the ratification process of the 1974 Agreement. In fact, in his address in Dhaka University during that visit, Manmohon Singh had committed that immediately upon his return to New Delhi, his government would initiate the ratification process of the 1974 Agreement. He stressed his commitment more than was necessary because of his government's failure on that trip to sign the Teesta water sharing agreement due to the obstacle created by Mamata Banarjee after assuring that it was a done deal.
However, the Congress Government failed to deliver on its Prime Minister's promise over the next three years, blaming Mamata Banarjee for it but kept assuring Bangladesh that the ratification would be completed "soon." In the end, in Myanmar in February 2014, on the sidelines of the BMSTEC summit, Manmohon Singh finally regretted his government's inability on the LBA and asked Sheikh Hasina to pursue the matter with the next government. The failure of the Congress Government to deliver on the LBA as well as the Teesta deal was politically very embarrassing for the AL-led government. If the January 2014 elections were a participatory election, the AL would have been on the back foot due to Congress' failure on the two deals. The Congress, of course, made it up to the AL by supporting it with the one-party 2014 elections that helped it to return to power.  
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to office in May 2014 with a huge majority. Therefore, Mamata Banarjee was not a problem for the BJP Government as she had been for the Congress Government. Yet the BJP took nearly one year to ratify the LBA. And meanwhile, it came up with the same excuse as before, that Mamata Banarjee was creating problems for the ratification leading the Paschimbanga Chief Minister to publicly say in Dhaka in February this year that she had already communicated her no objection to New Delhi over the LBA. The BJP Government then wanted Assam out of the Agreement for the party's interests in Assam but gave that up in the end. Meanwhile, Narendra Modi gave Mamata Banarjee debt relief grant for her state that he had denied her earlier. Thus, the BJP Government, like the Congress Government, played politics with the LBA while keeping Bangladesh waiting to sort out its own interests in India's domestic politics.
Therefore, India should be defensive and apologetic to Bangladesh on the LBA issue. But that is hardly the case. Instead, Narendra Modi is spinning the LBA ratification to further his government's commitment to the SAARC spirit for taking South Asia forward to the world stage, a policy he had announced by inviting all the SAARC leaders to his oath-taking ceremony in May 2014. Recently, this policy has run into trouble in Nepal and Sri Lanka (after New Delhi had helped change the pro-China Mahendra Rajapaksa Government in election last year) and thus it has become necessary for the Modi government to come with something new to show South Asia and the rest of the world that India is proactively engaged with its South Asian neighbours. The LBA ratification has become handy to this objective.
It is therefore a pity that such is the nature of Bangladesh's politics that it is unable to tell India that it is late by 41 years in delivering a deal its Prime Minister had singed. Bangladesh is further unable for reasons of its politics to hold India responsible for the sufferings of thousands of people in the enclaves as well as for its negative impact in the growth of friendly Bangladesh-India relations. With the AL and the BNP both eager to attract attention of Narendra Modi for their respective and mutually conflicting and narrow political interests, the Teesta water sharing agreement appears to have been forgotten.
Bangladesh's unfortunate experience over the LBA notwithstanding, it is a case of better late than never, now that the problem is resolved. One would hope that this would encourage India to complete the Teesta deal without further delay. That deal is more crucial for Bangladesh given the fact that Bangladesh's future survival depends on India giving it fair share of the waters of the common rivers. The bottom-line in all these developments is that Narendra Modi would be visiting Dhaka like a hero seeking to enhance his position as a South Asian/world leader at Bangladesh's expense with history conveniently forgotten by both Bangladesh and India.
The writer is a former Ambassador.
 [email protected]