G. Kishore Babu
India’s northern frontier with Tibet was an inheritance from the British Raj-an inheritance more of ambiguity than of clarity. The British, ever guided by the winds of political expediency, drew lines on maps as it suited them, leaving India with a border more shadow than substance. The White Papers of 1948 and 1950 spoke with candour, marking the stretch from the Afghan to the Nepal trijunction as “Boundary undefined.” Even at the hour of the Panchsheel Agreement on April 29, 1954, the frontier remained a riddle unsolved. Soon after, on July 1, 1954, Prime Minister Nehru, directed that all antiquated maps be withdrawn and that henceforth the frontier be shown as firm and final-not a matter for parley, nor an open question to be toyed with.
The roots of this uncertainty run deeper still. By the Treaty of Amritsar (1846), Britain handed over Kashmir to Maharaja Gulab Singh but left its eastern boundary undefined. In 1873, the British proposed a watershed line along the Karakoram as the natural limit of India, yet the design was never ratified, leaving posterity to wrestle with the unfinished business.
India’s northern boundaries are a legacy of the British Empire-an inheritance more of shadows than of substance. In the western sector, the British, ever shifting with the political winds, alternated between the Johnson Line of 1865, which embraced Aksai Chin within the dominion of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Macartney-MacDonald Line of 1899, which yielded much of the desolate plateau to China. In due course, Sir John Ardagh’s redrawn frontier of 1897 sought to fashion a stronger rampart against the spectre of Russian advance, giving rise to the Johnson- Ardagh Line. China, long silent on these manoeuvres, unfurled its own claim line only in 1959, though it was drawn, as critics wryly note, “with a thick brush,” more suggestive than precise. In the eastern Himalaya, the McMahon Line, etched at the Simla Convention of 1914, cast its shadow across the frontier of India’s North-East Frontier Agency, now Arunachal Pradesh. While Beijing has since regularised its boundary with Burma on this basis, it brands the Indian alignment as the fruit of an “unequal treaty.” By contrast, the middle sector, some 625 kilometres in length, holds but trifling disputes, its cartographic puzzles more capable of being ironed out.
Thus, it is that India inherited a frontier at once undefined and unsettled-a bequest of unfinished business. The Chinese leadership has oft remarked, in tones both pragmatic and conciliatory, that “the border may be left to future generations; for the present, let us mind trade and friendship.” In other words, history may bequeath its burdens, but statesmanship bids us not to cry over spilt milk, rather to build bridges where walls once stood.
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