This is the script for my video posted on September 7, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
The border between India and Bangladesh is a mess. At first glance, it looks basically random, but when we dig into the history and geography of the region, we can find some really fascinating answers. So why are India and Bangladesh divided up like this?
Before 1947, British India covered the Indian subcontinent and beyond. But when Britain decided to decolonize and partition the region, they needed a neutral figure to draw new borders between the predominantly Hindu state and what would become West Pakistan and East Pakistan, which we now know as Bangladesh.
They tapped Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister with no prior experience in India, to be chairman of the new boundary commissions. Each commission, one for Punjab and one for Bengal, had four members split evenly between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, meaning that Radcliffe was the tiebreaker.
In the span of roughly five weeks, Radcliffe, who was suffering from dysentery much of the time, effectively divided up the former British Raj around contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. He was also meant to consider other factors like infrastructure, irrigation, and communications, but he was working from outdated maps and contested census data.
Some interesting decisions were made. Muslim-majority Murshidabad, for example, was given to India to preserve Calcutta and Hooghly’s access to the Ganges river system. The narrowly Hindu-majority city of Khulna went to East Pakistan as a counterweight.
Similar trades happened in other areas, and in general religion took priority, and though practical considerations did override it, this resulted in severed rail links, bisected river systems, and resources separated from the factories that could process them.
At one point, there were 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in India. These actually weren’t created by the Partition at all, but in the 18th century. The kingdom of Cooch Behar had fought numerous territorial wars with the Mughal Empire, and the treaties that ended those wars around 1713 froze a mess in place.
The Mughals couldn't dislodge some Cooch Behar chieftains from land they'd taken, and some Mughal officials held estates deep inside Cooch Behar. Those stranded holdings became the enclaves.
When Partition came around, the Princely State of Rangpur went to East Pakistan while Cooch Behar held out, merging with India in 1949. This is how to old enclaves became new ones, and it took until 2015 for them to be traded.
Only one anomaly survives today: Dahagram-Angarpota, a Bangladeshi exclave surrounded by India. It connects to the rest of Bangladesh through the Tin Bigha corridor, which is still Indian territory but is leased to Bangladesh in perpetuity Of course, East Pakistan and West Pakistan did not get along. West Pakistan was extremely dominant in the relationship and discriminated heavily against Bengalis, starting in the late 1940s with the attempt to make Urdu the sole national language. Despite sharing a Muslim majority, they were over 1600km from each other and had completely different cultures, traditions, and ethnic identities.
When the Awami League of East Pakistan won an absolute majority in the national parliament in 1970, the West Pakistani military establishment and political leaders refused to let Sheikh Mujibur Rahman take office as prime minister.
A few months later, on the night of March 25th, 1971, they launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown targeting civilians, students, and intellectuals. Estimates of the war's death toll run from hundreds of thousands to Bangladesh's official figure of three million. The violence led East Pakistan to declare independence, triggering a nine-month war for liberation and the founding of Bangladesh in December 1971 with backing from India.
The India-Bangladesh border is about 4100km long, making it one of the longest land borders in the world. The line runs through villages, paddy fields, and even houses, and though over 3000km of the border has been fenced with barbed wire, there are huge stretches that are effectively open.
Part of this is caused by terrain. 54 rivers cross the border, and over 900km of the line is riverine and can't be fenced. A 1975 agreement also bars construction within 150 yards of the line, and land acquisition disputes stall much of the rest.
The most critical of the rivers though is the Ganges, which India and Bangladesh have had to negotiate deals over for decades. Since 1975, India’s Farakka Barrage has diverted water from the Ganges to keep the port of Kolkata navigable, which Bangladesh attributes as the source of its dry-season loss of river flow and increases in coastal salinity.
In 1996 they signed the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty, but it expires in December 2026. Technical experts met in Kolkata in March, though India insists that negotiations run through the existing Joint Rivers Commission rather than fresh treaty talks. An agreement has yet to be reached.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh is pushing a major infrastructure agreement with China for work on the Teesta River, including massive dredging efforts, building and repairing embankments, constructing reservoirs, and reclaiming land to manage floods and droughts. The two sides agreed to a joint feasibility study in June 2026, so nothing is built yet. But the Teesta is a shared river that crosses the border, and the project sits within roughly 60 to 100km of India's Siliguri Corridor, the strip of land just 22km wide at its narrowest that connects mainland India to the northeastern states.
The border has seen decades of instability tied to migration. The 1971 war pushed around ten million refugees into India, but the movement since has been driven more by economics than persecution. Bangladeshi rights groups count over a thousand people shot dead by Indian border forces since 2000, with roughly as many injured, though Indian government figures are far lower.
Pressure goes the other way too, in part because of the cattle arbitrage economy. Bangladesh consumes a lot of beef while many Indian states restrict cow slaughter, so by some estimates a cow could fetch roughly ten times as much in Bangladesh as it can in India. Unofficial Indian government figures put the trade at up to 2m cattle per year before the mid-2010s crackdown.
But things are shifting between the two countries. In 2024, the Awami League government in Bangladesh fell from power amid a student-led uprising, and prime minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India. An interim government took over, and in November 2025 a tribunal sentenced Hasina to death in absentia. Bangladesh asked for her to be extradited, but India hasn't handed her over. Hasina also famously pledged in 2009 that Bangladesh would not be used for terror activity against India and handed over insurgent leaders, which India had not forgotten.
Bangladesh's interim leader, Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, told Chinese officials in 2025 that India's seven northeastern states are landlocked with no way to reach the ocean, that Bangladesh is the only guardian of the ocean for the region, and that this could allow for an extension of the Chinese economy. Days later India revoked the transshipment facility that let Bangladesh export to third countries through Indian ports and airports. India cited congestion at its own facilities as the reason, but nearly everyone read this as retaliation.
Around the same time, Bangladesh resumed direct government-to-government trade with Pakistan for the first time since 1971, after decades of goods moving only through third countries. Their militaries began exchanging high-level visits, and in January 2026 their air force chiefs discussed a possible defense pact and a potential sale of Pakistani JF-17 fighters.
Ties between India and Bangladesh frayed badly under the interim government. The Awami League was banned from contesting Bangladesh's 2026 general election, which saw the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, take a two-thirds majority. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the new prime minister and both sides have signaled a reset.
But Bangladesh has also seen how vulnerable India's northeastern states are, and the frictions over water, borders, and the tilt toward China and Pakistan haven't gone away. But while the Siliguri Corridor is vulnerable, Bangladesh is also surrounded by India on three sides, and India wields leverage over rivers and border control. It is genuinely unclear how things might evolve in the next few years as climate change and political dynamics shift.
Keep reading
- Why has tiny Bhutan managed to stay independent between India and China?
- How did Thailand survive being caught between Britain and France?
- How did Japan end up controlling China’s gateway to the Pacific?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.