Military tension between India and Bangladesh eased yesterday, with the neighbouring states agreeing to revert to the positions they had occupied earlier on the disputed frontier. Eighteen soldiers have died this week.
"It has been agreed that status quo on the India-Bangladesh border would be restored," a Foreign Office spokesman in New Delhi said. However, both sides continued to exchange sporadic mortar, rocket and small arms fire, forcing thousands to flee their homes in north-eastern India's border states of Assam and Meghalaya.
A Bangladeshi military official said India's Border Security Force (BSF) had agreed to take back the bodies of 16 of its personnel killed on Wednesday in a nine-hour gun battle with the Bangladesh Rifles who lost two men.
Minor skirmishes are frequent between the states, which share a 2,480-mile border. However, the latest incident is the worst since India helped create Bangladesh 30 years ago.
The dispute centres on what both sides call "adverse possession land" - small enclaves, which, despite the border demarcations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, are held by one side but inhabited by citizens of the neighbour state. After independence in 1947, Pakistan was divided into two halves. The predominantly Bengali East Pakistan rose in revolt in 1970 over what it claimed was unjust political and ethnic domination by West Pakistan. India intervened, providing covert help for the Bengali underground fighters and, after the 1971 war with Pakistan, East Pakistan declared itself the separate state of Bangladesh.
Bilateral relations in the first few years were cordial, but they grew sour in the mid-1970s with Bangladesh characterising India as a regional bully. This was exacerbated by unresolved territorial problems: 125 km of the frontier adjoining India's eastern and north-eastern states of Bengal, Assam, Mizoram and Tripura are still disputed.
