This by itself may not reduce the tensions arising from sub-nationalism in India, Myanmar, and Tibet. Neither would it necessarily dampen the Sino–Indian geopolitical competition in south Asia, but it would certainly create a thick veneer of economic activity and prosperity, providing the region with a different hue and the two Asian giants an alternative view of their future.
Throughout history there was a great deal of cross-border trade and interaction across the Himalayas into Tibet, in Ladakh from Leh via Demchok and Nyoma to Rutog and Ngari, from Leh to Karakoram Pass and in Himachal Pradesh from Kashghar, Yamrangla, Shipki La, and in Uttarakhand through Niti, Mana, Kungri Bingri, Dharma, and Lipulekh. In western Arunachal through Tawang and Bum La, and in the eastern extremity through Walong and Kibithu, as well as through Mechuka, Taksing, and Tuting.
The principal connection between Lhasa and any sea port in China or South Asia is through Yadong and Nathula to Kalimpong and Kolkata, a distance of 1,400 km. This route was the one the PLA depended on for its supplies till the Indian embargo in 1959, which was followed by the 1962 war. Trade never recovered after that.
As of now, the slow Sino–Indian reconciliation has resulted in the opening up of some five border meeting points where the armies of the two sides hold meetings on ceremonial occasions. These are in Kibithu in the east, Bum La near Tawang, Nathula in Sikkim, Spanngur Gap near the Pangong Tso lake and Daulat Beg Oldi.
As for trade, it resumed in the early 1990s through Lipulekh in northern Kumaon and Shipki La in Himachal Pradesh. After the Chinese recognized Sikkim as part of India, the Nathula route was also opened up. The last named route is the only point where both sides have a motorable road leading up to the trading point. In the meantime, the Tibet–Nepal trade, which originally went through Kalimpong, started moving across the Kodari highway to Kathmandu. Smuggling also takes place via Nepal and the Chinese have encouraged illegal trade in Ladakh by opening marts proximate to the border in Demchok.
China’s and India’s efforts to consolidate themselves, the former in Tibet and the latter in the cis-Himalayan areas, led to the opening up of the region through roads and other administrative infrastructure, a process which still continues. Without the Chinese annexation of Tibet and the 1962 war, the Himalayan region may have arguably remained remote, with poor connectivity. It would have been serviced by mountain trails fit only for mules and other pack animals.
India’s problem has been the terrain in the last 200 km up from the plains to the border posts. For example, connectivity in Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh remains difficult. Even in the Kumaon and Garhwal regions and Himachal Pradesh, many of the roads planned in the more difficult northern areas have not come up. The same could be said of Bhutan. With a rough lag of nearly two decades, India continues to build and improve its mountain infrastructure in the form of railways, roads, tunnels and bridges. Railways have already reached Itanagar in Arunachal Pradesh; now they plan to link Misamari in Assam with Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh and Pathankot in Punjab with Leh in Jammu and Kashmir. The strategic railway line between Jammu and Srinagar is in the works.
Construction on both sides of the border will certainly enhance the military capabilities of both countries. On the other hand, the settlement of the border disputes with India and Bhutan opens up the prospect of extending the routes across the Himalayas to India and synergizing their economic ties.
In many places, all it would take is the construction or upgradation of existing dirt roads of around 10–50 km to create direct China–India links. One such place is Shipki La in Himachal Pradesh. In the Demchok area, a motorable road runs along the Indus from Ladakh into Tibet. With the construction of the Lohit bridge, and, more recently, the Bhupen Hazarika bridge over the Brahmaputra, the possibility of an all-weather link from Guwahati via Walong and Kibithu to Zayul (Rima) and Kunming in China has opened up.
The Nepal earthquake of 2015 shattered the old Kodari route into Nepal, so the Chinese have opened another border crossing to Raswagadhi. Plans are afoot to develop this and the route into Nepal as an important branch of the One Belt One Road plan.
In the wake of the 2015 blockade, Nepal has reached out to China and signed a far-reaching transit-and-trade treaty. The treaty allows Nepal to use China’s sea ports, which are, of course, more than 3,000 kms away. There is more gain for Nepal, though, to link with the Indian system and use Indian or Bangladeshi ports. There are grandiose plans to link the Lhasa railway to Kerung (Gyirong) near Ruswagadhi and then to Kathmandu. The Nepalese want to link the Kerun–Kathmandu railroad to the Indian railway system which is being extended to five points in the plains of Nepal. Equally ambitious are their plans to connect the eastern and western parts of their country through a railroad in the Terai region and to the Indian railway system towards Delhi in the west and Guwahati in the east, which could link to systems in Bangladesh.
Crossing the Himalayan barrier could give a fillip to the wider connectivity plans, for example, the Asian Trilateral Project connecting Moreh in Manipur with Mae Sot in Thailand via Myanmar. Even bigger schemes like the Trans-Asian Railway, linking Singapore with Europe, are no longer unthinkable in the era of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Chinese may not have spoken of it publicly, given India’s opposition to the BRI, but their southernmost link envisages a connection from Kunming through Mandalay in Myanmar, Sylhet, Dhaka, Kolkata, across India to Pakistan and beyond to Iran and Europe. Given its location, India could be a major beneficiary of these projects.
In a recent and important work, Bérénice Guyot-Réchard has focused on the manner in which India and China have met in the eastern Himalayas. The study focused on the people and societies as much as high politics. Unlike the western Himalayas, where the people and societies were fairly well integrated with those of northern and western India, in the east, the politics has been more about state consolidation than anything else.
Guyot-Rechard’s principal argument is that coexisting in the Himalayan area is difficult because of the imperial nature of the presence of both India and China in the eastern Himalayan region. Both have had to win the allegiance of the inhabitants of the region. In this, she says that the Indian strategy has been to emphasize ‘unity in diversity’ and give special privileges to the people of the region, while China views it as an imperial venture, seeking to assimilate the people through policies that promoted Han settlement, emphasizing Chinese culture and denying the locals their culture.
Due to this, the process of ‘nationalization’ of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and its transformation into Arunachal Pradesh has been smooth, while the Chinese effort to assimilate Tibet has been met with resistance and even today, despite much repression, China does not feel entirely secure there.
Tibet, its physical presence, economy and culture is spread across the Himalayan chain in its entirety and therefore has been a major factor in the history of the region. Developments, beginning with the Chinese decision to reassert military control over the country, the subsequent Tibetan rebellion, India’s decision to stop trade with Tibet, the current stand-off over the border and the incremental pace of normalization, have shaped the interaction. However, time has not stood still on either side of the Line of Actual Control. Indeed, it could be said that the area stands on the threshold of a new chapter in its ancient history which could completely overwhelm geography. Tibet could, if the borders were regularized, once again become a fulcrum of Himalayan economic and cultural life.
India and China need to resolve their long-running border dispute. Over the years, China has shifted goalposts on the border negotiations at periodic intervals and often it is not clear just why they have done what they did. Fully developed by 2017, the Chinese position now declares Arunachal Pradesh to be ‘Southern Tibet’ and says that India must at least concede the Tawang region to resolve the dispute. As for the Aksai Chin, the Chinese now pretend that it is not really a disputed area, since it is firmly under Chinese control.
The big question is: just what is it that China wants with the border? It is easy to figure out what it wanted initially – to establish and consolidate its position in Tibet and prevent any Indian interference in its affairs. But whether wreaking war on India to that end in 1962 has made its position in Tibet more or less secure is a moot question.
China has to decide how it wants to shape the future of Tibet. China’s physical control over the region is beyond question. It has developed road and rail networks that can easily reinforce its military might. Over the years, a significant proportion of Han nationality settled in Tibet and Chinese policy will succeed in eliminating traditional Tibetan culture. Yet, the feeling of vulnerability has not gone, as the campaigns against the Dalai Lama reveal. To allow the rich Tibetan culture to flourish requires a complete change on the part of China, which has traditionally emphasized assimilation of minorities, rather than allowing them space. China’s hard-line approach to the Uighyurs in Xinjiang is a case in point.
But perhaps control of Tibet alone no longer motivates China’s South Asia policy. With its massive economic lead over India and its growing military strength, it is an aspiring global power. Towards that end, India remains an obstacle. It is too big to simply coerce, as China seeks to do with smaller neighbours like South Korea, Japan, the Philippines or Vietnam. Indeed, the problem for China is that New Delhi views itself as a peer competitor and it has the economic and military potential to be one.
Beijing’s policy in South Asia is now suspiciously tantamount to a containment of India. It has already doubled down on its relationship with Pakistan and inaugurated a new era of connectivity and investment. It has also made significant outreaches to Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh. Eventually, it must decide what it wants to do with India. With the disputed border, it is easy to raise and lower tensions at will. But Beijing must calculate whether it wants to push India into the embrace of the US and Japan, and thus aid an adverse balance of power against itself. The answer to this will decide whether the Himalayan competition will assume a win-win outcome or a win-lose one.
References
Bhattarchaji, Romesh Dutt, ‘Of people & land routes to China’. Available at: http://bameduniya.tripod.com/karakorum.html
Garver, John W., Protracted Contest: Sino–Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001
Guyot-Rechard, Berenice, Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017
Kalha, Ranjit Singh, India-China Boundary Issues: Quest for Settlement. New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2014
Mathou, Thierry, ‘Bhutan-China Relations: Towards a New Step in Himalayan Politics’, The Spider and the Piglet: Proceedings of the First International Seminar on Bhutanese Studies. Thimphu: Centre for Bhutan Studies, 2004
Menon, Shivshankar, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy. New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2016
Saran, Shyam, How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2017
Woodman, Dorothy, Himalayan Frontiers: A Political review of British, Chinese, Indian and Russian Rivalries. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1969
LITTLE LHASA
Catherine Anderson
The monsoon had almost reached the north. It was May 2003 – perhaps early June – and the work in Gujarat had dried up. In truth I had also found the prickle and itch of a permanent heat rash on my pale Anglo-Saxon skin unendurable. In Ahmedabad – where I had been living and working for some months with a local NGO, rebuilding schools in the Kutch area – I would take a silk sleep-sheet and a folded blanket for a mattress into the cooler night air of my balcony, as did almost everyone else in the neighbouring apartment blocks. Inevitably the sun would rise, and any coolness bequeathed by the night breeze would vanish, bringing the daily sticky torpor in its wake.
So it was that I migrated northwards, to a place called McLeod Ganj. I did not at first comprehend that it was an island of Circe, whose siren song could lure the most resolute traveller from their path and hold them prisoner for years on end. Imagine a mountain eyrie, thousands of feet above the sea, beloved of sages and mystics. In this land of snows Shiva married Parvati, daughter of the mountain king Himavat. With Pakistan falling away westwards and Tibet to the east, its terrain was once accessible only by fatalists or dreamers, on foot from the south or across treacherous mountain passes from the north. In lofty valleys crystal-cut by crevasses were grassy meadows and alpine bugyal pastures of delphiniums and gentian, where blue sheep were said to roam. Here was the rift that segregated India from Central Asia, a passage on the Silk Road from Krishna’s birthplace in Mathura to Samarkand and Bukhara in the north. Its Gordian caravan trails were overgrown with cannabis sativa, so rampant you could stop to pluck it from the roadside. Here was a patchwork of fertile princely states slashed by the legendary river Hyphasis, whose waters repelled Alexander the Great and marked the eastern boundary of his conquests. Buccaneering imperialists waging a later, more determined campaign installed outposts of Empire here, building cantonments to house scarlet-jacketed officers and burying their tubercular dead in Victorian churchyards. Finally, its elevations were tamed by industrial-era modernizers who laid tracks for toy trains which steam-whistled through fragrant tea plantations; up, up from the lowlands, through boulder-strewn gorges, past forts prized by Afghans, Mughals and Sikhs.
These were the same elevations I traced as I journeyed there, crammed with my rucksack into the back row of a local Himachali bus. Rising above the luscious verdure of the Kangra Valley, McLeod Ganj – with its mountain sweetness and chill nights – was a sanctuary. The cockroaches were smaller there, too. Closer as the crow flies to Lahore than to Delhi, it remained a confluence of religious pilgrimage sites, a dharamshala, a devotees’ resting place or refuge. Semi-nomadic Gaddi shepherds continued to worship Lord Shiva. If anyone might truly call this place in the Dhauladhars home it was they, the tribe who had inhabited the site for centuries. Yet, in the twenty-first century they, too, had been invaded, this time by a stampede of humanity from every corner of the globe: humanity at both its best and very worst.
A mildewed former hill station of the British Raj, McLeod Ganj had felt the reverberations of almost every major event in modern Indian history, constantly reinventing itself in a cycle of death and rebirth. In 1905 it was all but flattened by an earthquake which claimed 10,000 lives and condemned the place as uninhabitable, cursed as it was by superstitious locals. It spoke of erstwhile grandeur, now decayed. One of the few buildings to survive the earthquake was the dark stone Gothic church of St. John in the Wilderness, where a sombre memorial stood to James Bruce, the eighth earl of Elgin and a former viceroy, who was buried there. The area was said to remind him, fondly, of Scotland. Inside the church square plaques lined the interior: one celebrated the life of a man who perished fighting a bear, another was erected by a young widow in memory of her fiancé, dead on the eve of their wedding. Unkempt graves, their headstones barely legible, marked childhood malaria, premature bereavements and the occasional demise of an aged 19th-century missionary.
Post-Partition, McLeod Ganj saw an influx of refugees from Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Lahore, and countless other communities along the north-west frontier, just as it witnessed a substantial migration of its inhabitants to Pakistan. But perhaps its most significant reincarnation came in 1959, when Nehru bestowed the land upon the Dalai Lama and, subsequently, the faithful 80,000 or so Tibetans who followed him into exile following his expulsion, altering the town’s character forever. Indeed, to me, in the beginning, McLeod Ganj was merely ‘where the Dalai Lama lived’. This was the so-called Little Lhasa, where the orange-and-maroon robes of hundreds of Tibetan monks of all shapes, sizes and ages coloured the ever-moving streets red. And it was crowned, literally, by a de facto living god. The Dalai Lama presided benignly over this ridge of higgledy-piggledy hideaways strung together with prayer flags, much as he had once presided over Tibet from the Potal
a Palace in Lhasa. Now he lived in a modest yellow-painted bungalow, surrounded by an impenetrable security detail that constantly combed the cedar woods leading down to his monastery and temple, the Tsuglagkhang. The place was said to be alive with Chinese spies.
Now it is not only a refuge for Tibetans but for Kashmiris too, economic migrants from a civil war that had crippled their families and ravaged their towns and cities. These handsome, green-eyed, vulpine men hawked their wares – papier-mâché trinkets, silver chains, gemstones, suede garments trimmed with rabbit-fur, crewelwork cushions, silk and pashmina shawls – with a fervour bordering on the unhinged. It is a honeymoon destination for Indian newly-weds, who arrive in their bangle-jangling coachloads from the plains in the hope of having their union blessed with Himalayan snow. It is a drinking destination for Punjabi party boys, whose SUVs blare bhangra tracks as they crawl the precipitous lanes, honking their horns and shouting lewd remarks at the nearest female passer-by.
And it is a refuge for an astonishing assortment of foreigners, such as I was: backpackers, dharma practitioners, writers, trekkers, photographers, activists, mountaineers, linguists, do-gooders, ne’er-do-wells, journalists, teachers, students, Falun Gong followers, depressives, entrepreneurs, tricksters, celebrities. Spiritually it draws Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Christians and everyone in between. Buddhist groups from Mongolia, Russia, Taiwan and Korea come to receive teachings from the Dalai Lama. A bona fide Jewish rabbi and his family cater to the itinerant Israeli population. It parades a mountain cosmopolitanism of boutique hotels, rooftop pizza parlours, wholefood stores, wine bars, coffee shops and restaurants tempting the hungry visitor with items such as ‘spogetti’, ‘babed beams’, ‘creapsuzate’, or ‘chiken dreamstick’.
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