INFOCUS INDIA-CHINA defended by the Government of India from modifications showing the crown as Chinese or Pakistani held territories. Indians can scarcely stand to look at the map of India depicted minus these territories. It jars and looks unfamiliar, almost like looking at the decapitated body of something essential to ourselves. In our psyche, China took our territory of Aksai Chin. When we sought to retrieve our territory, the Chinese waged war on us. The collective Indian belief is that the Chinese don’t stop. They want territory in Arunachal Pradesh. They’re at it at Doklam. They aid the villainous Pakistan to wage its nefarious, endless war on us.
Indeed, all this is true. But again, it begs the question, how have India and China come to this after so many millennia? Well, for one thing, for the first time outside mythology, India developed a national self image during the independence struggle that spanned the subcontinent, a cohesive vision and voice of all the people speaking out of who they were (Indians) and what they wanted (freedom and self governance). This New Consciousness needed a precisely demarcated geographical space that defined India, the place where Indians lived, ruled themselves, and where it was their right to repel invasion and occupation. However, India had not yet made peace with its own history and had no idea how to do that, while clutching its national consciousness. While it was clear that Lahore, Delhi, Mathura, Agra,
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Patna, were all in Hindustan, the limits of the extent of Hindustan were not so clear. A number of minor and major kingdom states peppered the periphery of Hindustan. Some were clearly within the sphere of Hindustan. Others were outside it, only recently conquered and annexed by adventurers from Hindustan, or later by the British. How India’s borders got defined by events prior to independence set the stage for the conflict with China. In the 19th Century, the British were paranoid, justifiably, that the borders of Tsarist Russia, expanding rapidly
into Central Asia, swallowing up Khanate after Khanate, were steadily drawing closer to the Crown Jewel of Britain’s empire, India. If the Russians took Afghanistan, or found routes into Kashmir across the unknown passes of the unexplored Himalayas, Punjab – and thence the great flat expanse of the heart of Hindustan – would lie open for Russian forces determined to take Britain’s prize. British victory against such an invasion by Russia was by no means a sure thing. The British decided that the Russians would have to be met in the mountainous barren wilds that surrounded India to the North and West, before they ever made it to Kashmir or Punjab. So started The Great Game, the race between Russians and the British to take control of territories holding the routes that Russian cavalry possibly could take into Punjab. The Great Game led Britain to its history with Afghanistan. It led the British to take Gilgit and Hunza, which were notionally under the suzerainty of the King of Kashmir, but were in reality quite fiercely independent, protected by ferocious mountains, and also a propensity of the leaders for violence and
▪ May-June 2018
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