Bordering on skulduggery

When it comes to delicate mappings on the border, it is the legacy of our colonial masters that keeps India and China endlessly dragging on. Hardnews explains

PRASENJIT CHOWDHURY/ Hardnews KOLKATA

SIXTY-ONE YEARS after Indian Independence, a historical reappraisal of what followed since the British left and the ramifications of the 200 years of British rule, shows the lacerations caused to our body politic because of Partition and its fallout in the carving out of Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh. At another level, there is a gnawing, unresolved story. It is the intractable, insoluble and seemingly unending Indo-China border dispute. We have been bequeathed with the pathogens of an ill-defined border by no other than the British.
So far, thanks to the ‘revisionist' account of Neville Maxwell's opus India's China War, 1970, (and our free-wheeling Communists) which blamed Nehru for arrogance and obduracy in the face of Chinese efforts to seek a negotiated solution, we thought that it was India which put paid to the final settlement of the border dispute. During the last two decades, a few former Indian defence officials, including the faculty at the Indian Defence Academy like Parshotam Lal and Srinivas Raghavan, offered a counterfoil to Maxwell. The publication of Steven Hoffmann's account in 1990 is an important corrective to the revisionist thesis by capturing Indian perceptions more closely. But in almost all the accounts, we can trace back the problem to the colonial days that left our ungovernable and inhospitable areas to seeds.
Come to think of the Great Game. China accuses India of possessing some 90,000 sq km of Chinese territory in the eastern sector over a region included in the British-designated North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), mostly in Arunachal Pradesh. The Chinese also lay claim to the western sector, in Aksai Chin in the northeastern section of Ladakh district in Jammu and Kashmir. The western sector consists of the boundary of Ladakh with Sinkiang and Tibet. Here, both India and China claim the Aksai Chin plateau and the territory south and south-west of it. The eastern sector comprises the boundary between Tibet and Arunachal. Here, both sides claim Arunachal. The dispute in the middle sector, along the boundary between Tibet and Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh is a minor one. China laying a claim on a fingertip in Sikkim is the recent one.
The Indo-China frontier was mapped and the line drawn by Captain Henry McMahon of the Indian Army, starting in 1893. Following this the border was known as the McMahon Line. China has remained disdainful of the demarcation. It did not control Tibet then. The situation changed when the Chinese communists seized power in Peking and occupied Tibet in 1950. While there have been questions over the disputed territories, the fundamental problem has been that before the British came, there had been no precise frontiers; each State's power extended only as far as it could march an army. The British then pushed their armies as far as civilisations settled in the mountains, which meant along the foothills. Finally, McMahon, being a tidy-minded British cartographer, drew his line along the crest of the mountains. China rejected this extension of the British territory, which the British never policed, and insisted that the frontier should remain in the foothills.
The British had sought to maintain Tibet as a buffer state, free of external influences, particularly Russian. Hence, they only acknowledged China's ‘suzerainty' - as opposed to sovereignty - over Tibet. In practice, this meant that British India maintained direct diplomatic ties with Lhasa, and enjoyed other privileges. The Chinese government repeatedly averred that it would not recognise any agreement reached between Tibet and Britain without its concurrence.
Though India claimed to assert its control over what was perceived as a Tibetan enclave in the south side of the line, in the east the ‘Tawang tract', things became hot when China required a corner of the western end of the border for a road into Tibet. That uninhabited province was called Aksai Chin (a part of Tibetan plateau) which China needed because it was the only practical route to Sianking, its westernmost province, beyond which lies the intractable Gobi desert of Tibet. There matters stayed right till 1956 when China built the 1200 km-long road, of which some 180 km was claimed by India. What is ironical is that the Indians found out about the road the next year, by reading Peking newspapers of this ‘remarkable' piece of engineering. Aksai Chin was of little significance to India, while to China it was the vital link between two historically troublesome regions - Sinkiang and Tibet. The peculiar geography of the area is such that it is only through Aksai Chin that this link is possible.
While China extended de facto recognition to the McMahon Line in 1950, it was found that the frontier was not based on any legally valid treaty. However, Nehru told Parliament on August 13, 1959: "The McMahon line is the firm frontier, firm by treaty, firm by usage, firm by geography." As a geographical boundary, the McMahon line, roughly following the crest of the Himalayas, might be regarded as the natural division between India and China in the eastern sector. But up to 1947, it was not regarded as a ‘firm' frontier, either by treaty or usage. Throughout the 19th century, the British favoured the Karakoram boundary, which gave Aksai Chin to China. Nehru claimed the Kuen Lun boundary which included Aksai Chin in India. As the Russian threat waned, Aksai Chin essentially remained a border only on the map, and the truth is that neither British India nor Tibet attempted to exercise any effective control over this inhospitable region that proved to be of no strategic significance.

IN THE LATE 1930s, an attempt was made by some Indian officials under the inspiration of Sir Olaf Caroe, deputy secretary in the imperial Foreign and Political Department, to give the McMahon line an ex post facto legal basis by making changes in Volume XIV of the 1929 edition of the Aitchison's Treaties. This contained the original official version of the proceedings of the Simla Conference, as follows: "In 1913, a conference of Tibetan, Chinese and British Plenipotentiaries met in India to try and bring about a settlement in regard to matters on the Sino-Tibetan frontier; and a Tripartite Convention was drawn up and initialled in 1914. The Chinese government, however, refused to permit their Plenipotentiary to proceed to full signature."
The authentic volume was withdrawn from circulation in 1938 and replaced by a fake version with an imprint of 1929. Thus the true position of the British Raj in regard to the northeastern frontier has remained fuzzy. Due to machinations of Caroe, the original records of the abortive Tripartite Simla Conference (1913-14), which dealt only with the Sino-Tibetan boundary and were printed in the Aitchison Treaties, Vol. XIV in 1929, was suppressed. In this book it was falsely presented that the McMahon line running along the Himalayan watershed was based on a tripartite treaty arising from the Simla conference.
The official British maps have been found to be self-contradictory. There were two versions of the northern and eastern frontiers of Kashmir, one proposed by Sir John Ardagh (1897), and the other by Macartney-(Claude) Macdonald (1899), which tried to push the Kashmir frontier beyond the Karakoram ranges. The Ardagh alignment of 1897 included the Aksai Chin area within the territorial boundaries of India, while the MacDonald note of 1899 placed it within China. China spurned MacDonald's offer which led the British to make further unilateral alterations as dictated by their changing security perceptions. The undefined boundary in the western sector reflected the failure of British attempts to secure a frontier agreement with China.
Scholars note that up to 1938, in the western sector of the northern frontier, the boundary was shown along the Karakoram Watershed Line, leaving Aksai Chin beyond the Indian territory. In 1945, Caroe tried to push the northern frontier east of the Karakoram Pass to register a claim up to Kuen Lun mountains (with a tag carried by the Survey of India map ‘Boundary Undefined'). In July 1954, the Indian government, following the advice of the north and northeast border committee, published a new official map of India showing a boundary line in the Kashmir-Ladakh sector which took the crest of the Kuen Lun range, and placed within the Indian territory, for the first time, the whole of Aksai Chin area (with the tag ‘Boundary Undefined' removed). As Aitchison's Treaties, Engagements, etc. recorded (1929), "The northern as well as eastern boundary of the Kashmir state is still undefined." The two white papers on Indian states (1948 and 1950) had maps -- more than one - all reflecting that position.
Between 1956, 1960 and 1962, as the Chinese forces captured new territory across the Kuen Lun, the Aksai Chin plateau and the Karakoram ranges, Chinese maps showed three distinct and advancing Line of Actual Control (LAC), especially in the Ladakh sector. Though the LAC established after the 1962 war has remained more or less stable, it has not been demarcated. Now, since the Sino-Indian border dispute centres on the remote areas of Aksai Chin lying north of Ladakh, the origin of the Indian border being placed on the remote Kuen Lun mountains goes back to the early 20th century. This is phase when the British, afraid of Russian expansion in the east and a possible Russo-Tibetan alliance, placed a wedge of Aksai Chin between Sinkiang and Tibet.
Why does China refuse to formally accept the McMahon Line? Strategic observers like Srinath Raghavan think that if China does so, it would be tantamount to accepting that Tibet had enjoyed de facto independence at the time of the Simla conference, thereby weakening its claim that Tibet has been an ‘inalienable' part of China. And lest we forget, only after China became communist Tibet was used as another convenient handle between the east and the west.
It is claimed that Zhou en-Lai was prepared to give up China's claim to the NEFA in return for India's acceptance of the status quo in Ladakh, even though this would mean giving up ‘vast territories that historically belonged to Tibet'. In 1960 there was a dim hope that a settlement could be reached under which the Chinese government would recognise the McMahon line (which no previous Chinese government had recognised) in return for some recognition on our part of Chinese claims to the ‘disputed' Aksai Chin area.
It is the legacy of skullduggery of our colonial masters that keeps the two nations dragging on and on. Nehru must be turning in his grave. As
successor states to the British Raj, the governments of the day have to accept the correct position and not the British legacy in regard to the border, as in regard to other liabilities to unravel the tangled skein of obfuscation. Indeed, a mature and reasonable solution is possible. Or else, intransigence and inflexibility would keep our border dispute
unresolved, perhaps till the time we celebrate a century of our Independence.