The Enclave Inside an Enclave Inside an Enclave
Until 2015, Dahala Khagrabari was a patch of India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh — the only third-order enclave on Earth.
For most of the 20th century, a village called Dahala Khagrabari existed as a 7,000-square-meter patch of Indian farmland completely surrounded by Bangladeshi territory, which was itself surrounded by Indian territory, which was itself surrounded by Bangladesh. The family that owned it grew jute. To reach their fields they had to cross an international border, then another, then another.
The region of Cooch Behar had been ruled jointly by a local princely state and the Mughal Empire, and the line between them was settled parcel by parcel over 18th-century gambling debts and land swaps. When India and Pakistan partitioned in 1947, Cooch Behar's irregular patchwork became international by accident.
The result, until 2015, was 162 enclaves: 111 Indian inside Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi inside India. About 50,000 people lived in them. They were effectively stateless — no school certificates, no passports, no hospitals — because the nearest office was across a border they couldn't legally cross.
On July 31, 2015, at midnight, India and Bangladesh exchanged the enclaves. Residents chose citizenship; most stayed where they were. The families who farmed Dahala Khagrabari became Bangladeshi. The third-order enclave ceased to exist as a legal object. It took 68 years after Partition to fix, and 50,000 people finally got birth certificates.
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