Border disputes: The fraught lines within

Five villagers of Meghalaya were among the six who were killed when police personnel of Assam opened fire while trying to catch timber smugglers on November 22. The incident triggered tension between Assam and Meghalaya and once again brought to the fore the boundary dispute between them as the area where it happened is claimed by both the neighbouring states.

Closer to home, a college student in Belagavi in Karnataka was beaten up on November 30, for allegedly waving the yellow-red state flag during an event. The probe is still on, but the Kannada Rakshana Vedike (KRV) resorted to protests, blocking the highway to Goa on December 1. The incident rekindled the Karnataka-Maharashtra border row.

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India not only has boundary disputes with neighbouring China and Nepal, it also has contested lines within it. Eleven of its states and one of its union territories have boundary disputes among themselves. Assam has border rows with Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram. Himachal Pradesh has territorial disputes with Ladakh and Haryana. Odisha too has one with Andhra Pradesh. Maharashtra of course has all along been challenging the merger of Belagavi with Karnataka under the State Reorganisation Act in 1956.

Spotlight - State Border Disputes Box. Credit: DH Illustration

“Some northeastern states have fuzzy borders due to their civilizational links. So the administrative boundaries and community boundaries are not coterminous,” said Subhrajeet Konwer, an associate professor of political science in Gauhati University.

The disputes do turn violent often. A study by Rights and Risk Analysis Group (RRAG), a think-tank based in New Delhi, revealed that 157 people had been killed due to clashes over inter-state boundary disputes only in the north-eastern region since 1979 till 2021, with the Assam-Nagaland row claiming as many as 136 lives. The insurgency is on the wane in the region with the union government recently claiming an 80% decrease in the number of incidents related to militancy. But the inter-state boundary disputes continue to keep the region on the edge.

Tension often escalates along the Karnataka-Maharashtra border too, with protests and counter-protests on both sides. The Government of Karnataka this week asked the state police to tighten security in Belagavi, anticipating trouble ahead of hearing on the case in the Supreme Court as well as during the proposed visit of some ministers from Maharashtra on Saturday.

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Maharashtra has been claiming 7,000 sq km of the territory of Karnataka, including 814 villages and three towns —Belgaum, Nippani and Karwar. A commission set up in 1966 and headed by the former Chief Justice, Mehr Chand Mahajan, recommended transfer of 264 villages to Maharashtra, while Belagavi and 247 villages were to remain in Karnataka. It was accepted by Karnataka, but Maharashtra continued to protest and moved the Supreme Court in 2004.

Belagavi is one of the most politically significant districts of Karnataka, with as many as 18 assembly constituencies. The Suvarna Soudha, a replica of Vidhana Soudha of Bengaluru, was built in Belagavi in 2012, sending out the message that the border district was and would remain an integral part of Karnataka.

The district’s MLAs, irrespective of party lines, however, try to do a balancing act between their Kannada and Marathi voters.

The BJP last year swept the Belagavi City Corporation election winning 35 out of the 58 seats. Only two of the 22 candidates backed by the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti won, a total rout for the pro-Marathi outfit known for its clout on the city’s civic body.

“In Maharashtra, the border dispute is a political tool used by all parties,” Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai said. “Our stand is clear: Maharashtra's plea is not maintainable. This is what our lawyers will argue. Our stand is constitutionally valid”. He even went on to say that Jath, Solapur and Akkalkot in Maharashtra should be merged with Karnataka.

Bommai’s comment put his own party – the BJP – under pressure in Maharashtra. Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray said that Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis’s government might end up giving Akkalkot and Solapur to Karnataka to help the BJP win the assembly elections there next year. “Shinde might say if Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to get back Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, what the harm is there in giving 40 villages to Karnataka,” said the former chief minister.

“It is just a design to divide Maharashtra into several parts,” added Sanjay Raut, another leader of the Shiv Sena faction led by Uddhav and his son Aditya Thackeray.

Shinde’s Excise Minister Shambhuraj Desai, however, dismissed the apprehensions. “Today we have a Chief Minister (Shinde), who is serious on the issues of the Marathi-speaking people staying in Karnataka,” Desai said, referring to Shinde. “He is the only Chief Minister who had to go to jail for 40 days in Karnataka while raising the issue of Marathi-speaking people.”

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Desai is one of the two coordinating ministers of Shinde-Fadnavis government of Maharashtra to deal with the state’s boundary dispute with Karnataka.

Laxman Savadi, the former deputy chief minister of Karnataka, had earlier stirred up the hornet’s nest in January 2021, when he had said that Mumbai should be carved out of Maharashtra and turned into a Union Territory till it could be merged with his state.

Not only the Karnataka-Maharashtra row, but many other inter-state border disputes have also reached the Supreme Court. “If any of the states does not accept the recommendations of the boundary commissions, including the ones appointed by the Supreme Court, little progress can be made," said RRAG director Suhas Chakma. Assam and Meghalaya, like some other states, were holding talks to resolve the disputes. But Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma said that the November 22 killing of villagers of his state by the police personnel of Assam created a hurdle for the talks.

The Centre has been consistently maintaining that inter-state disputes can be resolved only with the cooperation of the concerned state governments.

“The Central Government acts only as a facilitator for amicable settlement of the dispute in the spirit of mutual understanding,” the union Ministry of Home Affairs stated in response to a question in the Lok Sabha. Home Minister Amit Shah, however, has on several occasions accused the Congress of pursuing a policy of “divide and rule” and not trying to resolve the inter-state border disputes despite being in power in the Centre as well as in several states, including the ones in the north-eastern region.