Sino-Indian Relations Redefined

By Seema Sengupta

KOLKATA ― U.S. President Barack Obama's much-hyped visit to China has recently created a flutter in the Indian establishment. Apparently, it is the bracketing of archrival India and Pakistan in the Sino-U.S. joint statement that has virtually put the strategic and foreign policy mandarins in a tizzy.

But the reason behind this consternation and lividness is far from the re-hyphenation of the two South Asian quarrelling neighbors in U.S. foreign policy objectives. President Obama's discreet acceptance of Chinese hegemony in South Asia will radically alter the balance in the ongoing Indo-China border talks tilting it in favor of Beijing.

This is exactly why New Delhi is venting its sense of outrage at every possible level. After all Britain's sudden and explicit acceptance of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet has already put India, the largest Commonwealth member state, in a spot.

Not many are aware of the fact that since the days of British imperialism, London has played a crucial coordinating role on the issue of Tibet having a stake in the region. Such is the secrecy that even the original map of the region has been marked classified and is out of bounds for common people.

The lingering dispute on sovereignty over two separate pieces of the territory is essentially the bone of contention between India and China though Beijing considers the entire length of the British delineated Indo-Tibetan border to be disputed.

One of them is Aksai Chin, part of the erstwhile Indian province of Kashmir that was annexed into the Xinjiang autonomous region by China in the 1950s.

This huge tract of land was originally within the ambit of the Sikh Confederacy of the Punjab region in India until their defeat at the hands of the British Army in 1846. It is a sparsely inhabited desert area of salt flats situated about 5,000 meters above sea level that falls within the historical Kashmir-Tibet trade route.

However, to be fair to the Chinese, the then Indian political leadership gave a silent nod to Aksai Chin's annexation. Indian troops manning the Indo-Tibetan border were discouraged from venturing into the area in the absence of a legitimate map.

Moreover, the Chinese were engaged in constructing a physical infrastructure under New Delhi's nose. It was a settled issue even before partition and the rabble rousing over it that saw the Indian Parliament passing a resolution to recover every inch of lost territory was all for public consumption.

India having inherited her territorial limits from the British Empire is under an obligation to preserve the sanctity of international agreements related to border disputes that were signed on behalf of the British monarchy.

Accordingly, New Delhi was obliged to accept the MacCartney-Macdonald Line that surreptitiously awarded most of Aksai Chin within the Chinese territorial limit as per the 1899 agreement between British India and China.

Imperial Britain's strategic objective of preventing Russian access to Central Asia instigated this move of placating China with such a territorial gift. In fact, this line corresponds to the present day Line of Actual Control that demarcates Indian and Chinese territory.

The other dispute involves the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh regarded by China as South Tibet. This region having references in Hindu scriptures is usually believed to have been a vassal state of Tibet.

Some of the families living there retain their ancestral tax papers stamped by the Lhasa headquartered Tibetan government even today. Part of this territory was administered by the Bhutanese Kingdom and erstwhile Myanmar (Burma) till the complete annexation of India by the British in 1858.

It was a gateway to Lhasa and an important trading route connecting Tibet to the nearest port at Kolkata. The sixth Dalai Lama was born in a place called Tawang in the northwestern part of the province and the problem of sovereignty lies with the Chinese claim over Tibet.

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in China, Tibet declared itself an independent nation in 1913 and British India formally delineated the Indo-Tibetan boundary.

The 13th Dalai Lama ceded this tract to British India as a goodwill gesture. His representative Lonchen Shatra signed a bilateral accord in 1914 defining Tibet's border with China and India.

However Sir Henry McMahon, the British plenipotentiary dealing with the issue ensured that Tibet was divided into an outer and inner zone. The outer zone covering the present day Tibet Autonomous Region was to be governed exclusively by the Tibetans from Lhasa with the Republic of China retaining some suzerain rights.

As the Nationalist and the Communist government of China consistently refused to accept this position, the formation of the McMahon Line was neither published nor put into effect.

India, however, being the heir, decided to push for the maximum the British territorial claim allowed in spite of not being an expansive nation.

Now that London has suddenly shifted the goalposts virtually disowning the 1914 treaty due to geopolitical and economic considerations, New Delhi's claim over the north eastern territories is bound to be compromised.

It remains to be seen whether a defensive Indian government is able to extract the maximum out of this game of wits.

Seema Sengupta is a journalist based in Kolkata, India. Her articles have been published by The Tribune, The Telegraph, The Pioneer, The Asian Age and other newspapers. She can be reached at seemasengupta@vsnl.net.