GAMES WITH FRONTIERS
DOKO LA IS ONE OF MANY PLACES THAT HAD FALLEN OFF THE MAP OF INDIAN PRIORITIES. NOW IS A GOOD TIME TO REMEMBER SOME HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
THE BORDER BETWEEN India and China is an extreme place. Some 3,500 km where the world’s most populous republics—and the tectonic plates they occupy—grate and gnash against one another on the rim of the world’s highest mountain range. A ‘natural frontier’ if ever there was one, but also an impossible object, depicted in the hallucinatory official maps of India and China that routinely claim enormous tracts of land neither country has ever really held.
For more than half a century now, the 1962 war with China has been remembered in India as a national tragedy—which may
be why we seem so eager to see history repeat itself as an almost comical video of unarmed soldiers engaging in dhakka-dhukki in the mists (and the endearing plea, “This is not the way! Don’t use force”). Popularly perceived as footage of the dangal of Doko la, government sources now dismiss this as ‘archival’. Either way, it joins an existing library of popular videos depicting similar confrontations.
Despite this element of slapstick, the Doko la incident was marked by one unsettling detail—that the Chinese had been building a military grade highway in the disputed area (see map: Crossing Lines)—which will have a troubling resonance for anyone who remembers how India lost Aksai Chin. Given that China’s claims to, and incursions into, Bhutan have been causing discreet alarm in military circles for several years now, it was remarkable that it took most of us several days to work out where and what the hell Doko la/ Donglang/ Doklam was in the first place. Everyone from geopolitical pundits to IAS crammer websites consistently misplaced this strategically crucial territory, confusing it with a wart of disputed land on Bhutan’s western cheek that does not abut India at all. So last week’s rude awakening to this dispute and its mysterious location is also a marker of our collective amnesia about these border regions, their history and their geography.
The ancient quarrels here resolve themselves in the vanishing points of history’s lost kingdoms and armies. The rise and fall of the southern Tibetan realm of Guge and its capital, Tsaparang, for example, erased from the map by Ladakhi warriors in 1630. Or the cautionary tale of Bakhtiyar Khilji (a Turkic general of Delhi’s Mamluk ruler Qutb-ud-din Aibak) who was so emboldened by his swift advance to the gates of Kamrup (Assam) that he turned north to invade Tibet in 1206. Only to see his proud army annihilated by hill tribes whose names history does not record.
But such stories are just entertaining preambles to the living history of the border dispute that we know today. A dispute built on a chain of surviving documents, maps and surveys, treaties and correspondence, which date back to 1842 at least, when the Dogra vassals of the Sikh kings of Punjab concluded a treaty on behalf of their tributary state Ladakh with the government of Tibet and its sometime suzerain, the Chinese Empire, promising eternal friendship and respect of ‘ancient boundaries’ in ‘accordance with old custom’.
THE CHEERFULLY imprecise document (apparently still on display at the Jokhang temple in Lhasa) now acts as a crumbling foundation to a patchwork edifice concealed in the archives of the two neighbours. It recalls Kafka’s sly and wise fable of The Great Wall of China: a perennial task, destined to be always incomplete, but one whose very futility is in some sense a raison d’être of the empire or empires that commission it.
Kafka’s parable suggests a refreshing perspective on the dismal machinations in the 19th and early 20th centuries along what is now the India-China frontier. These geopolitical manoeuvres have generally been gilded in the narrative of the ‘Great Game’ and the swashbuckling hijinks of its heroes, a clutch of imperialist adventurers, explorers and spies. For most of the last 55 years, however, the Great Game has been mired in a sullen stalemate. This resentful but mostly placid standoff resulted from the border war of October-November 1962. Both countries have struggled desultorily for the moral high ground ever since. But in effect the conflict seared each nation, India and China, with contrasting reputations, for democratic slovenliness and decisive brutality which remain part of their respective national branding to this day.
In many ways, the stalemate is welcome: for one thing, the highly charged border dispute has receded in public perception as the flashpoint of rivalry and tension with China. In its
Nehru’s dismissive description of Aksai Chin—“not a blade of grass grows there”— chimes nicely with Mao’s remark that “this is an argument over inconsequential pieces of territory”
place we have such questions as the perceived ‘encirclement’ of India by Chinese infrastructural and strategic alliances with our neighbours—all our neighbours, except Bhutan—and India’s counterbalancing accords with the United States, Australia, Japan and even Vietnam to check China’s billowing maritime claims in the South China Sea. More recently, of course, China is perceived to have played spoiler to India’s attempt to win a seat at the table of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in Seoul. Nonetheless, China is also well established as India’s premier trading partner, with bilateral trade valued at over $70 billion. Virtually none of which is conducted over that impressively lengthy Himalayan boundary.
So does the border even matter anymore? Not so long ago, the question would have been absurd, and geopolitical pundits still invoke the ringing words of that Great Gamer, Lord Curzon: “Frontiers are indeed the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations.” But it’s hard to ignore the dusty breath of a mouldering colonial sabre-rattler in such utterances. Things seem very different on the northern LAC today. “No one has been killed on this border since October 1975,” said former foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon, in a conversation with india today last year, “it’s peaceful, nothing goes wrong.”
Much of the credit for this tranquility goes to Menon and other mandarins on either side, who have struggled for decades to construct a framework for stability and the future resolution of the disputed border. It remains in limbo despite their efforts, thanks to the lack of political will (or perhaps political incentive) in either government. A peaceful agreement would inevitably involve some give and take and exchange of territory not unlike the ‘enclaves exchange’ concluded with Bangladesh in 2015. But the political consequence of such a deal for the governments of India and China remains a perilous prospect. All the more so now that their rivalry has sharpened on the global stage.
AS A RESULT, the border regions remain in many ways an abstraction of the national imaginations of both countries, something leaders on either side have described both as sacred and worthless by turns. In this respect, Jawaharlal Nehru’s notoriously dismissive description of Aksai Chin, “not a blade of grass grows there”, chimes nicely with Chairman Mao’s remark that “this is an argument over inconsequential pieces of territory”.
Reassuring as either of those quips might have been—had they actually led to a resolution of the border—they also reflect the statist hauteur with which both governments have ignored the lives, economies and potential of border communities. Anyone who has travelled along the heights of this frontier will have encountered a saga of disrupted lives, divided families, lost fortunes and devastated towns. This writer was particularly struck by the dereliction of Kalimpong. Once the ‘Harbour of Tibet’, it is now a dystopian bidonville, enlivened only by the provincialism of Gorkhaland politics, which has replaced the town’s lost cosmopolitan glamour. A hundred kilometres north of Kalimpong, and very close to Doko la, lies the ramshackle hamlet of Nathang, from which the British empire launched a series of military assaults to bring Tibet to heel between the 1880s and the early 1900s. Today, the old barracks are in ruins like much else in Nathang but that’s not what old-timers in this frigid corner of the country lament. What they miss is the trading caravans that enlivened the town and employed their families.
Today, as China dusts off its copy of the 1890 Tibet-Sikkim convention between the Qing Dynasty and the British Empire, it’s hard to avoid the uncomfortable sense of a reversal of geopolitical fortunes. It is now China that is playing a great game; it certainly holds a better hand. Much as British India once set the terms by building roads and railheads over the mule tracks of the old highway to Lhasa, China has now extended its railways to Xigatse at the top of the Chumbi valley. Its highways already cross the Himalayas and the Karakoram, drawing Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar into its silken web of belts and roads. Could Bhutan be next? No outcome is off the table but India has just been reminded that it needs to take its neighbours (including China) as well as its border regions and their inhabitants a little more seriously. The metaphor does get wearying, but the game, if you like, just got real.