The Chicken’s Neck

The 22-km-wide Siliguri Corridor, which connects the Northeastern region to mainland India and is often referred to as “the chicken’s neck”, has been in the news again. The history of the Siliguri Corridor – the northern part of Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur district and the southern part of the Darjeeling district – is rooted in colonial-era divisions and the 1947 partition of India, which created this narrow strip of land linking India’s northeastern states to the rest of the country. It is not only the only link between the Northeast and the rest of India, which facilitates the movement of people and goods, but is also crucial from the defence point of view. On one hand, it is through this corridor that movement of military personnel and equipment takes place to the eastern boundaries. Moreover, being sandwiched between Nepal and China on the northern side and Bangladesh on the southern side, it has tremendous importance as far as ensuring security of the Northeastern frontier is concerned. Gen (Retd) SK Sinha, a former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Indian Army, in his capacity as Governor of Assam, had in his famous report to the President of India in November 1998 expressed grave concern for the Siliguri Corridor. As he had put it, “The long-cherished design of a Greater East Pakistan/Bangladesh, making inroads into the strategic land link of Assam with the rest of the country, can lead to severing the entire landmass of the Northeast, with all its rich resources, from the rest of the country. They will have disastrous strategic and economic consequences.” It was last week that Assam Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma had pointed out that fundamentalist groups in Bangladesh have been working overtime to inject anti-India feelings among the residents of the Siliguri area in West Bengal. It may be recalled that, like the border districts of Assam, those districts of West Bengal bordering Bangladesh have also undergone tremendous demographic change in the past five or six decades. Once part of the great Koch kingdom of Naranarayan and Chilarai and inhabited by the Koch-Rajbangshi people till independence, the Siliguri area has been the target of a dangerous conspiracy of Islamist forces. Most people who had fled from East Pakistan during the Bangladesh liberation movement and taken shelter in the Siliguri area had also not returned home, thus further impacting upon the demography of the region. That the radical Islamists have a big dream to cut off the Northeast from the rest of the country by choking the vulnerable ‘chicken’s neck’ had become clear once again recently from Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus’ reference to it during his recent China visit. Yunus, who is fully in the grip of anti-India Islamist radicals, had referred to India’s Northeast as “landlocked”, implying its dependence on transit routes through Bangladesh.