China border dispute: India must map out strategy

There is a need to deal with preposterous irrdentist claims and new-fangled maps designed to obfuscate narratives

We seem to be hopelessly out of joints to wriggle out of the mess created by our colonial rulers responsible for having to bequeath a legacy of skulduggery that keeps us claiming each other’s territories. It was no other than a tidy-minded British cartographer Captain Henry McMahon of the Indian Army who first mapped the Indo-China frontier, a piece of cartography starting in 1893, following which the India-China border was known as the McMahon Line.

That seems to be the beginning of the cartographic war that has enveloped the Indian sub-continent, with nations – India, China, Pakistan and Nepal – making overlapping claims. To put things in perspective, the McMahon Line that forms the northern boundary of Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern Himalayas administered by India but claimed by China was the area of focus in the 1962 Sino-Indian War.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan recently issued a map that shows the Indian Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh as well as territory in Gujarat as part of Pakistan, a move that is in response to a map that India issued in October last year that showed Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Gilgit-Baltistan as well as Aksai Chin as Indian territory.

Nepal recently rejigged the country’s political map by incorporating three strategically important areas – the Lipulekh pass, Kalapani and Limpiyadhura in western Nepal – by amending its constitution, a move that has strained the bilateral relations with India.

Both Nepal and China have clearly been piqued by the new map of the border region issued by New Delhi, after it divided Indian-administered Kashmir into Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The map incorporated some of the territories disputed with Nepal inside India's borders.

Neville Maxwell, a pro-China propagandist, says that McMahon's map, which was presented to the Tibetan delegation to the Shimla Conference at a meeting held in Delhi, was done without the participation or knowledge of the Chinese conferees. The Tibetan delegation “conditionally agreed” to the alignment drawn by McMahon in red ink on a two-sheet map of a scale appropriate to the purpose.

That alignment purported to shift the external border of “(British) India some 60 miles to the north of where the Chinese claimed (and until that point the British had accepted) it lay, at the foot of the hills rising from the Brahmaputra valley”. Their action was immediately repudiated by their masters in Lhasa. According to him, the McMahon alignment has no legal validity as a Sino-Indian boundary but smacked of an “imperial expansionism”.

Observers like Srinath Raghavan think that the reason for China not accepting the McMahon Line is because once it does so, it can no longer claim Tibet to be an inalienable part of China and that it had enjoyed de facto independence at the time of the Shimla conference. Besides, there would be domestic trouble because this would make China veer away from their stated assumption that the McMahon Line is a relic of imperialism.

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 LACs, especially in the Ladakh sector. Though the LAC established after the 1962 war has remained more or less stable, it has not been demarcated.

With a context as fraught as this, we get to see China coming up with newer maps in consistent but sporadic intervals. Not to be undone, we now see Nepal and Pakistan following suits. It is interesting to note that Pakistan’s new map extends Islamabad’s territorial claim north-eastward up to the Chinese-held Karakoram Pass.

Aksai Chin

Curiously, in April 2019, the map used for unveiling of the BRI plan not only showed Aksai Chin as part of India, but entire Jammu and Kashmir (now Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh) and Arunachal Pradesh as Indian territories.

About Nepal, New Delhi published a new map that showed Kalapani within its borders, much to the protestation by Kathmandu which, it claimed belonged to it as per the Sugauli Treaty of 1816. Differing perceptions, even if they existed, did not come to the surface as long as India’s relationship with Nepal did not nosedive which, many say, are happening because of China’s manipulations.

And as for Pakistan’s claims, just two things could be cited. The August 13, 1948 UN resolution on J&K had implicitly recognised the Indian “sovereignty” over the J&K territories, acknowledging that Pakistan had occupied “illegally” urging it to vacate the “occupation”, a pre-condition to conduct a plebiscite then, while Junagadh that served as a bargaining counter to secure J&K, with a Hindu maharaja and a majority Muslim population held a referendum on February 20, 1948 with 91% of the electorate voting for accession to India.

The arbitrary, rigid, and perpetually contested borders on South Asia’s political maps might point to the expediency of mapping South Asia afresh to prevent the region’s geographically contiguous nations from making contentious and overlapping claims.

The irony is that while China considers McMahon Line as an instance of imperial expansionism, the Communist Party of China uses cartography as an important tool for Chinese expansionism. “Age of expansionism is over,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi pompously declared in a stern message to China. But grandstanding apart, it is about time we mapped out a strategy to deal with such preposterous irredentist claims and new-fangled maps designed to obfuscate narratives.