Maritime ruling upsets Indian negotiators

The Calcutta-based English daily, The Telegraph in a report yesterday said India had lost to Bangladesh a swathe of sea larger than the area of Bengal in a landmark ruling by a UN tribunal.
The report headlined “Gone: sea larger than Bengal, UN Tribunal awards Dhaka marine chunk”, said the ruling came after decades of a tug-of-war rooted in the Partition of 1947.
The award prompted a dissenting signature from New Delhi's representative at the tribunal, but the emissary was outvoted.
The verdict denies Indian fishermen access to part of the sea lost to Bangladesh. It also means India cannot tap natural gas and oil reserves predicted in that region by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, read the report.
The contentions used by the five-member bench that heard the case have also upset Indian negotiators, apart from leaving sections of the foreign policy establishment worried about opposition from state governments on the eastern coast.
“This is very honestly a ruling that is not good for India,” a senior Indian official involved in the negotiations told The Telegraph. “The award of the area to Bangladesh is irrational in our view, and the arguments used to justify the decision quite frankly border on the absurd.”
After multiple rounds of unsuccessful negotiations, the government of current Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina approached the UN arbitration court in 2009.
India agreed to join the tribunal's proceedings and nominated Pemmaraja Srinivasa Rao as its member to the five-judge bench hearing the case. Bangladesh's nominee on the panel was Ghana's Thomas A Mensah. German international law veteran Rudiger Wolfrum headed the bench.
India, said the newspaper report, insisted that only the area just south of Bangladesh and Bengal ought to be considered while demarcating the maritime boundary. This area amounted to 172,220sq km -- just under twice Bengal's area of 88,752 sq km.
But Bangladesh demanded that parts of the sea close to the Odisha and Andhra Pradesh border, too, must be considered as disputed territory.
According to the verdict, India won a tiny island known as New Moore or South Talpatti that some satellite images suggest may have drowned in recent years. But New Delhi lost a bigger battle, over the geographic method the arbitration court would use to mark out the boundary.
Dhaka had suggested that the judges take a compass and pencil, and mark the maritime boundary by dividing the angle created by the abutting Indian and Bangladesh coasts equally.
In effect, this “180-degree principle” meant drawing a straight line down from the starting point of the demarcation, to a point where both nations accept that their EEZ ends.
India contended that the equal-angle principle could not be adopted because curves further down its neighbour's coast would effectively give Bangladesh greater sea territory than was fair, mentioned the report.
The maritime boundary defined by the UN court justified its order by calculating the ratio of the total areas it awarded to India and Bangladesh.
But the ratio -- India was awarded 300,220 sq km of the area, almost thrice Bangladesh's 106,613 sq km -- is misleading, according to Indian officials.
They said the maritime territory demarcated to New Delhi included a large chunk along its eastern seaboard that was never really under dispute.
For Bangladesh, the victory is the second of its kind in quick succession after it won a UN arbitration battle against Myanmar in 2012, also over the demarcation of its maritime boundary with that nation.