“The Chicken’s Neck and the Teesta: The next great test of Bharat-Bangladesh diplomacy”, Firstpost, Aug 19, 2026.
“here are nations blessed with geography, and India has inherited many an argument with it. In the east, our great nation narrows into a strip of land so slender that it seems less like a geographical feature than an act of cartographic monkeying around. Barely 20-22 kilometres wide at its narrowest point, the Siliguri Corridor, better known by its more ominous alias, the Chicken’s Neck, is the only land bridge connecting India’s eight northeastern states to the mainland. Every military convoy, every freight train, every strategic calculation destined for the Northeast eventually squeezes through this bottleneck.
The Siliguri Corridor is no common road in the Northeast; it has been affecting Indian defence strategists’ sleep for around eight decades now, and counting. That explains why New Delhi is watching the Teesta River with growing strategic interest. Not because rivers suddenly became political, but because they always were.
For years, the Teesta has been reduced to the language of cubic metres and water-sharing ratios, a bilateral disagreement trapped inside hydrological mishmash. That framing is now hopelessly inadequate. The Teesta is no longer just about irrigation schedules in Rangpur or inadequate seasonal flows into North Bengal. It has become the most consequential test of India-Bangladesh diplomacy since the landmark Land Boundary Agreement of 2015.
And unlike water, trust, of course, cannot be measured with gauges. Partition gave India the Siliguri Corridor. The 1962 war with China exposed its vulnerability. Bangladesh’s liberation in 1971 transformed India’s eastern strategic landscape, replacing an openly hostile frontier with a friendly neighbour. The Land Boundary Agreement four decades later achieved what many thought impossible: resolving one of South Asia’s most complicated border disputes through negotiation rather than conflict. It demonstrated that two neighbours burdened by history could choose political courage over inherited suspicion……………………….”
Read the full article at Firstpost.
