Chapter 12: South Asia
In the far north of West Bengal, the district of Cooch Behar runs up against the border with Bangladesh. Just beyond that border lie two villages, Dahagram and Angarpota. On paper they are Bangladeshi territory. On the ground they are ringed on every side by India.
Dahagram and Angarpota are enclaves — pieces of one country’s territory lying wholly inside another country. For decades the thousands of people who lived in them could see their own country only across a narrow strip of Indian farmland, about 178 metres long. That strip is the Teen Bigha corridor.
In 1974 India and Bangladesh agreed that India would lease the corridor to Bangladesh, so that the villagers could reach their mainland. The agreement then waited nearly two decades. Indian courts and Indian politicians argued over whether a state may hand any part of its territory to a neighbour, and on what terms.
When the corridor finally opened in 1992, it opened for only a few hours a day. A person who crossed too late could not get home that night. Only in 2011 did the two governments agree to keep it open around the clock.
Two governments, one narrow lane, and a question neither could avoid: where does one country end and another begin, and who decides? Map 12.1 shows the strip. This chapter asks the same question of much larger disputes.
Map
Map 12.1 Caption: The Teen Bigha corridor is the only link between the Bangladeshi mainland and the enclaves of Dahagram and Angarpota. Brief: Locality map of the Cooch Behar border area of West Bengal. Shade Indian territory in one tone and Bangladeshi territory in another; label the town of Patgram in Bangladesh, the enclaves of Dahagram and Angarpota, and the narrow Teen Bigha corridor joining them, drawn to scale so its narrowness is visible. Add a small locator inset of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with the Cooch Behar area marked. All boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India. Do not mark any part of India as disputed or ceded.
12.1 South Asia And India’s Neighbourhood
Every state has to live with the states around it. It cannot choose them, it cannot move away from them, and it cannot ignore what they do.
India’s neighbourhood is one of the most closely packed in the world. A river that rises in one country waters the fields of another. A road that once ran through a single province now crosses an international border twice.
This chapter studies three of these relationships: with Pakistan, with Bangladesh and with China. Each of them shows a different way in which neighbours can quarrel, negotiate and live alongside one another.
12.1.1 What The Region Is
South Asia is the southern part of the Asian landmass, marked off from the rest of Asia by mountains and seas. It is also called the Indian subcontinent.
To its north stand the Himalaya and the Karakoram, among the highest mountain ranges on earth. To its west lies the Arabian Sea, to its east the Bay of Bengal, and to its south the open Indian Ocean.
The region is usually taken to include eight countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is sometimes classed with Central Asia instead, so the list is not fixed.
Roughly a quarter of the world’s people live in this region. It is one of the most densely populated parts of the planet, and one of the youngest in age.
Map 12.2 shows the region and the borders that run through it.
Map
Map 12.2 Caption: South Asia and India’s land and maritime neighbours. Brief: Political map of South Asia. Label India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Afghanistan; also label China to the north and Myanmar to the east. Mark the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Pick out India’s land borders in a heavier line than the other borders of the region. Show the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. All boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India; no part of India shown as disputed or ceded.
One Country At The Centre
Look at the map again and one feature stands out. India shares a land border with Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and sea boundaries with Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
The smaller countries of the region, by contrast, mostly do not border one another. Nepal touches only India and China. Sri Lanka and the Maldives touch no one by land at all.
So the region is not a circle of neighbours. It is more like a wheel, with India at the hub and most of the spokes running through it. Almost every route, pipeline and river in South Asia has to reckon with Indian territory.
This shape has one important consequence. Relations in South Asia are largely bilateral — settled between two states alone, rather than by the region as a whole.
Borders Of Recent Date
Most of these borders are young. The subcontinent was under a single colonial administration until 1947, when British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan.
The new lines were drawn in a matter of weeks, across districts, river systems and farmland. In 1971 the eastern wing of Pakistan became the separate country of Bangladesh, and another set of boundaries acquired a new meaning.
Borders this recent tend to leave loose ends: villages on the wrong side of a line, a river shared by two states that did not exist when it was named, families with relatives across a fence.
12.1.2 Why Neighbourhood Relations Matter
A quarrel between distant states is a matter for diplomats. A quarrel between neighbours reaches into ordinary life, because so much crosses the border whether governments wish it or not.
Water is the clearest example. Great rivers such as the Indus, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra begin in one country and end in another, and no boundary can hold them.
People cross too. Trade, pilgrimage, marriage and the search for work all move across these borders, and so does the movement that governments try to stop.
Security is the third pressure. India and Pakistan both possess nuclear weapons, and India’s boundary with China has never been settled by agreement. A local incident here is never only local.
Size And Suspicion
There is one further fact that shapes everything else. India is far larger than any of its neighbours in territory, population and economic weight.
Size is not the same as influence, and a big state does not always get its way. But size does affect how each side reads the other’s actions.
What India sees as a reasonable concern for its own security, a smaller neighbour may see as pressure. What a smaller neighbour sees as an independent friendship with another power, India may see as a threat on its border.
Neither reading is simply wrong. Each follows from where the country stands, and the sections that follow show both at work.
12.2 India’s Relations With Pakistan
No relationship in South Asia has been studied, argued over and worried about as much as this one. The two states were created on the same day, out of the same territory, and have fought each other four times since.
They have also negotiated with each other repeatedly. This section follows both threads together: the wars of 1965 and 1971, and the agreements at Tashkent, Shimla and Lahore, ending with the fighting at Kargil in 1999.
12.2.1 The Inheritance Of Partition
In August 1947 British India was divided into two independent states, India and Pakistan. Pakistan itself came into being in two pieces, a western wing and an eastern wing, separated by about 1,600 kilometres of Indian territory.
The princely states, which had been ruled by hereditary rulers under British paramountcy, had to join one of the two new countries. This joining was called accession — the formal act by which a princely state’s ruler transferred certain powers to a dominion.
The ruler of Jammu and Kashmir did not accede at once. In October 1947 armed tribesmen from Pakistan entered the state; the Maharaja then signed the Instrument of Accession to India, and Indian troops were flown to Srinagar.
The fighting that followed ended in a ceasefire on 1 January 1949, after India had taken the matter to the United Nations Security Council, the body responsible for international peace and security. A Cease Fire Line was drawn through the state in 1949, leaving part of the former princely state under Pakistan’s control.
That unfinished dispute runs through everything in this section. It is worth noticing, though, that the two states also managed to agree on hard questions: in 1960 they signed a treaty dividing the waters of the Indus river system, and it has survived every later quarrel.
12.2.2 The War Of 1965
The second war between India and Pakistan was fought in 1965, mainly over Kashmir. It is sometimes called the second Kashmir war.
12.2.2.1 Causes Of The War
The first cause was the unsettled status of Jammu and Kashmir. Neither government accepted the other’s claim, and the Cease Fire Line of 1949 was a military line, not an agreed border.
The second was a smaller quarrel that came first. Early in 1965 the two armies clashed in the Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh on the Gujarat border where the boundary had never been properly demarcated.
That clash was settled without a full war. The British Prime Minister helped arrange a ceasefire in June 1965, and both governments agreed to send the dispute to an international tribunal. The tribunal gave its award in 1968, awarding most of the disputed area to India and a smaller portion to Pakistan.
The third cause lay in how Pakistan’s leadership read the balance of strength. India had been defeated by China in 1962, and its army was still being rebuilt. Pakistan’s government judged that a quick campaign in Kashmir might succeed before India could respond.
Acting on that judgement, in August 1965 Pakistan sent several thousand armed men across the Cease Fire Line in an operation code-named Operation Gibraltar. Disguised as local people, they were meant to spark a general uprising in the Kashmir Valley.
The uprising did not happen. Villagers reported the infiltrators to the Indian authorities, and the plan collapsed — the first sign that Pakistan’s picture of opinion inside the Valley was not accurate.
12.2.2.2 The Course Of The Fighting
India’s first response was to strike at the routes the infiltrators were using. In late August 1965 Indian troops crossed the Cease Fire Line and captured the Haji Pir Pass, a crossing point in the mountains. Map 12.3 shows the ground over which this and later fighting took place.
Map
Map 12.3 Caption: The ground fought over in 1965 and again in 1999. Brief: Map of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Label Srinagar, Jammu, Leh, Akhnoor, the Haji Pir Pass, and the Kargil and Dras sectors; mark National Highway 1A running from Srinagar through Kargil to Leh. Mark the Line of Control clearly as a line of military control, distinct in style from an international boundary, and label it as such. Show the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, with Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh shown as Indian territory; no area shaded or labelled as disputed or ceded. All other boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India.
On 1 September Pakistan launched an armoured attack in the Jammu region, code-named Operation Grand Slam, aimed at the town of Akhnoor. Its purpose was to cut the road link between Jammu and Srinagar and isolate the Kashmir Valley.
India then widened the war. On 6 September 1965 Indian forces crossed the international border in Punjab and advanced towards Lahore and Sialkot, forcing Pakistan to defend its own heartland.
The heaviest fighting was between tanks. At Asal Uttar, near Khem Karan, Indian defences halted a major Pakistani armoured attack; in the Sialkot sector the two armies fought another large tank battle at Chawinda. Both air forces bombed targets across the border.
12.2.2.3 The End Of The War
Neither army broke through. After about three weeks of full-scale fighting, both governments accepted a ceasefire called for by the United Nations Security Council, which took effect on 23 September 1965.
Two outside pressures pushed them towards it. The Security Council demanded an unconditional ceasefire, and the United States and Britain suspended arms supplies to both countries. The embargo hurt Pakistan more, because its equipment was largely American.
The war ended without a decision. There were no significant territorial changes and no settlement of the dispute — but Pakistan had failed in what it set out to do, since Kashmir neither rose nor changed hands.
12.2.3 The Tashkent Agreement, 1966
A ceasefire stops the shooting. It does not withdraw armies, reopen embassies or return prisoners, and all of those still had to be arranged.
The Soviet Union offered to help. Its Premier, Alexei Kosygin, invited both leaders to Tashkent, then a Soviet city and today the capital of Uzbekistan, and acted as mediator. Mediation is the work of a third party who helps two sides reach an agreement but cannot impose one.
On 10 January 1966 the Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and the Pakistani President, Muhammad Ayub Khan, signed the Tashkent Agreement.
What The Agreement Said
Both sides undertook to withdraw their forces, by 25 February 1966, to the positions they had held before 5 August 1965. In other words, the map was to be put back as it had been before the fighting.
They reaffirmed their obligation under the Charter of the United Nations not to use force, and to settle disputes peacefully. They agreed not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs.
They also agreed on the ordinary machinery of a working relationship: High Commissioners would return to their posts, prisoners of war would be repatriated, hostile propaganda would be discouraged, and meetings would continue.
Hours after signing, Shastri died in Tashkent. India lost a Prime Minister in the middle of a diplomatic success, and the agreement was criticised in both countries almost at once.
In India, critics objected to giving back the Haji Pir Pass, which soldiers had taken at some cost, and to the absence of any promise never to go to war again. In Pakistan, the agreement was widely seen as returning nothing on Kashmir, and the political damage weakened Ayub Khan’s position.
The Tashkent Agreement did what a settlement of a war can do: it ended the fighting and restored relations. It did not touch the dispute that had caused the war, which is why the next crisis was only five years away.
12.2.4 The War Of 1971
The third war was not fought over Kashmir. It began inside Pakistan, and it ended with the map of South Asia redrawn.
12.2.4.1 The Crisis In East Pakistan
Pakistan’s two wings had little in common except religion and a shared government. The eastern wing held slightly more than half the country’s population and spoke mainly Bengali; the capital, the army headquarters and most senior officials were in the west.
The first open conflict was about language. When it was announced in 1948 that Urdu alone would be the state language, students and teachers in East Pakistan protested; the language movement continued for years, and Bengali was finally recognised as a state language in 1956.
Economic grievances ran alongside. East Pakistan earned a large share of the country’s export income but received a much smaller share of public spending, and Bengalis were thinly represented in the army and the higher civil service.
In 1966 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the Awami League, put forward a six-point programme. It demanded a genuinely federal Pakistan in which the central government would keep defence and foreign affairs, and the provinces would control taxation, currency arrangements and foreign exchange earnings.
The crisis came to a head with an election. In the general election of December 1970 the Awami League won almost every seat in East Pakistan, and with them an absolute majority in the national assembly.
That majority was never allowed to govern. The assembly session was postponed, talks broke down, and on 25 March 1971 the army launched a crackdown, code-named Operation Searchlight, on the movement in East Pakistan.
Mujibur Rahman was arrested. In the months that followed large numbers of civilians were killed, villages were burned, and about ten million people crossed into India — into West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, which had to feed and shelter them.
Bengali soldiers, students and villagers organised an armed resistance, the Mukti Bahini or ‘liberation force’, which fought the Pakistani army inside East Pakistan.
12.2.4.2 India’s Involvement And The Course Of The War
India’s response had three parts. It sheltered the refugees, it supported and trained the Mukti Bahini, and it argued in every international forum that the refugee burden was intolerable and that the cause lay in East Pakistan.
That argument won limited sympathy. The United States and China both leaned towards Pakistan, and in August 1971 India signed a treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union, which gave it diplomatic cover if the war widened.
The war itself began on 3 December 1971, when Pakistan launched air strikes on Indian airfields in the west. India declared war and moved on both fronts at once.
In the east, Indian forces advanced with the Mukti Bahini towards Dhaka, while the navy struck the port of Karachi in the west. On 6 December India formally recognised Bangladesh as an independent state.
On 16 December 1971 the Pakistani Eastern Command surrendered at Dhaka. About 93,000 Pakistani military personnel became prisoners of war, and a ceasefire followed in the west on the next day. The whole war had lasted thirteen days.
12.2.4.3 The Birth Of Bangladesh
East Pakistan became the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Mujibur Rahman was released in January 1972 and returned to lead the new state.
For Pakistan the loss was enormous. It lost more than half its population and the argument that religion alone could hold a state together across a thousand miles of foreign territory.
For India the war ended in a clear military victory and confirmed it as the strongest power in the region. It had also, for the first time, used force to help create a new state — which is why other neighbours watched the outcome closely, and not always comfortably.
12.2.5 The Shimla Agreement, 1972
India ended the war holding some 93,000 prisoners and a good deal of Pakistani territory in the west. What it chose to do with that advantage is one of the most argued-over decisions in Indian foreign policy.
The two governments met at Shimla, in Himachal Pradesh. On 2 July 1972 the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and the Pakistani President, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, signed the agreement that the syllabus calls the Shimla Agreement and the document itself calls the Simla Agreement.
What Was Agreed
The central undertaking was about method rather than territory. The two countries agreed to settle their differences peacefully, through negotiations between themselves.
Second, the ceasefire line resulting from the fighting of December 1971 became the Line of Control — the military line dividing Indian-administered and Pakistan-occupied parts of Jammu and Kashmir. Both sides undertook to respect it and not to alter it unilaterally.
The wording repays a slow reading. ‘Without prejudice’ means that respecting the line does not amount to accepting it as a border, so both governments could sign without giving up anything they claimed.
That is the clause’s strength and its weakness. It made agreement possible in 1972, and it left the underlying dispute exactly where it was.
Third, forces were to withdraw to their own side of the international border, and India returned the territory it had captured in the west. The prisoners of war were repatriated over the following two years under later agreements.
Why Bilateralism Mattered
India’s main gain at Shimla was the principle of bilateral settlement. Since 1948 Pakistan had taken the Kashmir question to the United Nations and to other capitals; India wanted the question kept between the two governments.
Pakistan reads the agreement differently. Its position has been that bilateral talks were one route among others, and that the dispute remains an international question.
This disagreement about what was agreed has itself become part of the dispute. Both governments still cite the same document when they argue about who may sit at the table.
12.2.6 The Lahore Declaration, 1999
By the late 1990s a new element had entered the relationship. In May 1998 India conducted nuclear tests, and Pakistan tested within weeks.
South Asia now had two openly nuclear-armed neighbours with an unsettled border between them. Both governments described their weapons as instruments of deterrence — the attempt to prevent an attack by making its cost unacceptable to the attacker.
Deterrence assumes that both sides understand each other correctly, which between hostile neighbours is a large assumption. That worry, felt in both capitals and abroad, is the background to what happened next.
The Bus To Lahore
In February 1999 a bus service was opened between Delhi and Lahore. The Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, travelled on it to meet the Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, and on 21 February 1999 the two signed the Lahore Declaration.
The Declaration was mainly about reducing risk. Both governments undertook to take immediate steps to reduce the danger of accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons, and to talk to each other about their security thinking and nuclear doctrines.
Officials signed an accompanying memorandum on practical measures of this kind, including advance notice of missile flight tests. Steps like these are called confidence-building measures — arrangements that reduce the risk of misunderstanding between rivals without settling what they disagree about.
The two sides also agreed to intensify efforts to resolve all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, to implement the Shimla Agreement in letter and spirit, to avoid interference in each other’s internal affairs, and to condemn terrorism in all its forms.
It was, on paper, the most hopeful moment in the relationship for many years.
12.2.7 The Kargil War, 1999
Within three months of the Lahore Declaration, the two armies were fighting again.
How The Intrusion Happened
The Kargil district of Ladakh lies at very high altitude, and heavy snow makes some posts impossible to hold in winter. Both armies had long followed the practice of vacating such posts and reoccupying them in spring.
During the winter of 1998–99, soldiers of Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry, along with others, crossed the Line of Control and occupied vacated Indian posts in the Kargil–Dras sector.
The positions were well chosen. They looked down on National Highway 1A, the road from Srinagar to Leh, which carries supplies to Indian forces in Ladakh. Cutting it would have made the Indian position there very difficult.
India discovered the intrusion in May 1999, when local herders reported strangers on the heights and patrols were sent to check.
India’s Response
The army launched Operation Vijay to clear the intruders, and the air force flew in support under Operation Safed Sagar. Fighting was at altitudes between roughly 13,000 and 18,000 feet, on steep ground held from above.
The hardest battles were for the commanding heights: Tololing, Tiger Hill and Point 4875. Indian forces retook them over several weeks and at heavy cost.
One decision shaped the whole conflict. India used air power but kept its aircraft and troops on its own side of the Line of Control. Between two nuclear-armed states, that restraint was intended to keep the fighting from spreading.
How It Ended
Pakistan’s government at first said the men on the heights were independent militants, not its soldiers. Documents and equipment recovered on the ground, and later statements by Pakistani officers and politicians, indicated otherwise.
Internationally, this mattered more than the fighting. Most governments held that the Line of Control had been crossed, and pressed Pakistan to withdraw. On 4 July 1999 Nawaz Sharif met the President of the United States in Washington and agreed to pull the troops back.
The last positions were recovered by 26 July 1999, which is marked in India as Kargil Vijay Diwas, or Kargil Victory Day.
What Kargil Left Behind
In India the war led to a searching review of intelligence and border surveillance, and to changes in how the high-altitude frontier was watched.
In Pakistan the episode deepened the quarrel between the civilian government and the army; the army chief, General Pervez Musharraf, took power in a coup in October 1999.
The wider lesson was noticed everywhere. Kargil was the first substantial conventional fighting between two states that both possessed nuclear weapons, and it showed that such weapons do not by themselves prevent war — they only raise the price of letting one grow.
12.3 India’s Relationship With Bangladesh
India and Bangladesh began their relationship on friendly terms. India had supported the movement that created Bangladesh, and the two countries settled trade, transit and travel arrangements without great difficulty.
Yet neighbours who get on well still have to solve the problems that a border creates. Three of those problems have shaped this relationship: the sharing of river waters, the strange geography left behind by the boundary, and the movement of people across it.
None of the three is a quarrel about ideology or alliances. They are practical questions — water, land and people — which is exactly what makes them hard to postpone.
12.3.1 The Sharing Of River Waters
Bangladesh sits at the bottom of one of the world’s great river systems. Fifty-four rivers cross into it from India, and almost all of its water arrives from upstream.
Each of these is a transboundary river — a river that flows across an international boundary, so that what one country does upstream is felt by the other downstream.
This creates a permanent asymmetry. India can affect Bangladesh’s water by what it builds and draws; Bangladesh cannot do the same to India. Every agreement between them has to work within that fact.
Two rivers have caused most of the argument: the Ganga and the Teesta.
12.3.1.1 The Ganga Dispute And The Treaty Of 1996
The dispute over the Ganga is really a dispute about one structure. At Farakka in West Bengal, a short distance upstream of the border, India built a barrage — a low dam with gates that raises the water level so that some of the flow can be diverted into a canal.
The Farakka barrage began operating in 1975. Its purpose was to send water down the Bhagirathi–Hooghly channel, which had been silting up, in order to keep the port of Kolkata usable.
Bangladesh’s objection was straightforward. Water diverted at Farakka is water that does not reach Bangladesh, and the loss falls in the dry season, when the river is lowest and farmers need it most.
Downstream effects went beyond irrigation. Reduced flow made navigation harder, damaged inland fisheries, and allowed salt water from the sea to push further up the delta channels of south-western Bangladesh.
Short Agreements, Then A Treaty
For twenty years the two countries managed with temporary arrangements: a short-term understanding in 1975, an agreement in 1977, and memorandums in the 1980s. Each lapsed, and each was followed by a period with no arrangement at all.
The question was finally settled in December 1996, when the two Prime Ministers signed the Ganga Water Sharing Treaty in New Delhi. The treaty runs for thirty years.
Its method is to divide the flow at Farakka during the dry season, from 1 January to 31 May, in ten-day blocks, rather than to fix one annual figure. Flow is measured in cusecs; one cusec is a flow of one cubic foot of water per second, written \(1\ \text{ft}^3/\text{s}\).
For the most critical stretch of the dry season, between 11 March and 10 May, the treaty guarantees each country 35,000 cusecs in alternating ten-day periods. A joint committee of officials from both sides measures the flow and monitors the sharing.
The treaty is generally regarded as a success, because it converted an annual quarrel into a rule. Bangladesh has continued to raise a further concern: the guaranteed shares depend on how much water actually reaches Farakka, and that quantity is itself falling as more water is used upstream.
12.3.1.2 The Teesta Dispute
The Teesta rises in Sikkim, flows south through the northern districts of West Bengal, and enters Bangladesh before joining the Brahmaputra system.
Its dry-season water matters intensely to both sides of the border. In West Bengal it irrigates a cluster of districts in the north; in Bangladesh it supports the farming of the northern districts, which produce much of the country’s rice. Both countries have built barrages to draw from it.
A draft agreement was ready in 2011, when the Indian Prime Minister visited Dhaka. It was reported to divide the dry-season flow, with a somewhat larger share to India and the remainder to Bangladesh, and it was not signed.
The reason lay inside India. Water is largely a subject for the States, and the Union government negotiates treaties; an agreement on the Teesta therefore needs the consent of the government of West Bengal, which objected that the State’s own farmers could not spare the water.
The draft has been pending ever since. It is a good illustration of a general point: in a federation, foreign policy sometimes has to be negotiated twice, once with the neighbour and once at home.
Before comparing the two rivers, notice what they have in common. Both disputes are about the driest weeks of the year, and both involve barrages built for irrigation upstream. Table 12.1 sets out where they differ.
The comparison suggests a conclusion worth stating carefully. The Ganga treaty shows that these disputes can be settled; the Teesta shows that a settlement between two governments is not enough when a third set of interests has a veto in practice.
12.3.2 The Teen Bigha Corridor
The second problem was territorial. Along the border in the Cooch Behar area lay dozens of small pockets of land belonging to one country but lying entirely inside the other.
Their origin was old. They came from land arrangements made long before independence between the princely state of Cooch Behar and neighbouring territory, and had never mattered much while everything lay within one administration.
The boundary of 1947 turned them into international anomalies. A field or a cluster of houses now belonged to a country its residents could not legally reach without crossing a foreign state.
The largest such pocket was Dahagram–Angarpota, Bangladeshi territory surrounded by India, and the Teen Bigha corridor was the narrow strip of Indian land that could connect it to Bangladesh.
The Agreement Of 1974 And The Delay
In 1974 India and Bangladesh signed a Land Boundary Agreement to clear up the whole tangle. Under it the pockets were to be exchanged, India was to keep the southern half of South Berubari Union and certain adjoining areas, Bangladesh was to keep Dahagram and Angarpota, and India was to lease the Teen Bigha corridor to Bangladesh in perpetuity so that the enclaves could be reached.
Bangladesh approved the agreement quickly. In India it stalled, for a constitutional reason rather than a political one.
In 1960, in the Berubari Union case, the Supreme Court had advised that the transfer of Indian territory to another country amounts to cession — the giving up of territory by one state to another — and that this requires an amendment of the Constitution, not merely an executive agreement.
The 1974 arrangement therefore had to wait for Parliament, and it waited a long time. Meanwhile the residents of the enclaves lived without normal access to their own country’s schools, hospitals and police.
The corridor was leased and opened in 1992, at first for a few hours a day. In 2011 the two governments agreed to keep it open continuously. Timeline TL 12.1 sets out the sequence.
The Settlement Of 2015
The tangle was finally undone by the Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, 2015, which gave effect to the 1974 agreement and a protocol to it.
Under this settlement the two countries exchanged the enclaves along the border, and the residents were allowed to choose which country’s citizenship they would take. A boundary that had been impossible to administer became an ordinary one.
Dahagram–Angarpota remained the exception, as had been decided in 1974. It stays with Bangladesh, and the Teen Bigha corridor remains Indian territory under the Border Security Force, with passage guaranteed to Bangladeshi nationals.
12.3.3 Illegal Migration
The third problem is the movement of people. India and Bangladesh share a land border of about 4,096 kilometres, running through fields, villages and rivers that change course.
Long stretches of it cannot be fenced, and in places the boundary passes through a single settlement. Movement across such a border was ordinary life before 1947 and did not stop when the line was drawn.
Why People Move
The reasons for movement are mostly economic and environmental. Land in Bangladesh is scarce and holdings are small; wages are higher across the border; and the delta is exposed to flooding, cyclones and the erosion of riverbanks, which can destroy a family’s land in a season.
Ties of language, kinship and religion across the border make the move easier, and in the eastern States migration is not always a single journey — people cross to work and return.
India’s Concerns
India’s concerns are of three kinds. The first is security: an unmonitored border can be used for smuggling, trafficking and the movement of armed groups, and identity documents can be obtained fraudulently.
The second is the effect on the border districts, particularly in Assam and West Bengal, where sustained movement is said to press on land, jobs and public services and to alter the composition of local populations.
The third is political. Migration became a central issue in Assam from the late 1970s, and the movement there ended in the Assam Accord of 1985, which fixed 25 March 1971 as the cut-off date for identifying those who had entered afterwards.
Questions about who counts as a citizen, and how citizenship is to be proved, remain politically contested in India. What is not in dispute is that verification is difficult, because most of those concerned carry no documents on either side of the border.
Bangladesh’s Position
Bangladesh has generally denied that large-scale illegal migration of its nationals into India takes place. That denial makes deportation slow, because a person cannot be sent to a country that does not accept them as its national.
Bangladesh raises complaints of its own, chiefly about deaths of its nationals in shootings along the border, which cause resentment among its citizens and strain official relations.
How The Two Sides Manage It
Despite the disagreement, machinery exists. The Border Security Force of India and the Border Guard Bangladesh patrol in coordination and hold regular meetings to settle local incidents.
A joint working group deals with border management, and both governments have agreed on procedures for handing back people picked up while crossing, including victims of trafficking. Fencing, lighting and surveillance have been extended along the sections where they are possible.
The results are partial, and the honest conclusion is that this is a problem to be managed rather than solved. Its causes lie in poverty and in the physical geography of a delta, and neither of those is within the reach of a border agreement.
12.4 India’s Relations With China
India and China are the two largest countries in Asia, and for most of history they were separated by the Himalaya and by Tibet. They became direct neighbours only in the middle of the twentieth century.
In 1949 the People’s Republic of China was established, and India recognised the new government almost at once, exchanging ambassadors in 1950. In 1950–51 China established its control over Tibet, and the buffer between the two states disappeared.
That is the setting for the two events this section studies: an agreement in 1954 that promised a new kind of relationship, and a war in 1962 that ended it.
12.4.1 The Panchsheel Agreement, 1954
The immediate problem in the early 1950s was not the boundary. It was Tibet, where India had inherited a set of privileges from the British: trade agencies, military escorts, and postal and telegraph lines.
Those privileges now looked out of place. India was itself newly free of colonial rule and could hardly defend arrangements of a colonial kind on another state’s territory.
On 29 April 1954 the two governments signed an agreement on trade and pilgrim traffic between what the text called the Tibet region of China and India. India gave up the inherited privileges; in signing, it also accepted that Tibet was part of China.
The lasting part of this agreement was not its trade clauses but its preamble, which set out five principles for the conduct of relations between states. In Hindi these are called Panchsheel, meaning ‘the five virtues’ or ‘five principles’.
12.4.1.1 The Five Principles
The principles are listed in the preamble in a fixed order, and each of them is a statement about how one state should treat another.
Read one at a time, the five make a chain. Respect for territory and sovereignty comes first, because it is the condition of the rest; non-aggression forbids the use of force to change what the first principle protects.
Non-interference extends the same idea inwards: a state is to leave its neighbour’s internal arrangements alone. Equality and mutual benefit say that dealings should not be one-sided, which mattered greatly to countries only just out of colonial rule.
Peaceful coexistence, the fifth, is the conclusion. States with different systems of government — one communist, one a parliamentary democracy — can live side by side without either trying to remake the other.
That last point explains the appeal of Panchsheel far beyond the two signatories. It offered newly independent countries a way of dealing with the world that did not require joining either Cold War bloc.
Notice also what the document is and is not. It is a statement of principles inside a trade agreement; it names no boundary, fixes no line, and provides no machinery to decide who has broken which principle.
12.4.1.2 Influence And Limitations
The principles spread quickly. When the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, visited India in June 1954, he and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru issued a joint statement extending Panchsheel to relations with all countries, not merely with each other.
In April 1955 the Bandung Conference in Indonesia brought together twenty-nine countries of Asia and Africa, and its declaration set out ten principles of international conduct which took in the substance of Panchsheel.
The same ideas fed into non-alignment — the policy of not joining either of the Cold War military blocs while keeping the freedom to judge each issue on its merits. When the non-aligned countries met at Belgrade in 1961, Panchsheel was among the ideas they drew on.
In India these years were remembered in a popular slogan, Hindi-Chini bhai bhai, ‘Indians and Chinese are brothers’.
Where The Principles Fell Short
Three weaknesses became clear within a few years, and they were weaknesses of design as much as of conduct.
The first was the missing boundary. The 1954 agreement dealt with trade and pilgrimage but said nothing about where the two countries met on the ground, and neither government pressed the question while relations were warm.
The second was the absence of any enforcement. Panchsheel created no tribunal, no procedure and no penalty. It rested entirely on goodwill, and goodwill is exactly what disappears in a crisis.
The third was that the two sides may have meant different things by it. India treated the principles as a permanent code of conduct; critics argue that for China they were a useful arrangement for a particular period, especially while its position in Tibet was being consolidated.
The strain showed in 1959. A revolt in Tibet was suppressed, the Dalai Lama fled to India, and India granted him asylum; China treated this as interference in its internal affairs, and there were clashes along the border in the same year.
12.4.2 The Sino-Indian War Of 1962
12.4.2.1 Causes Of The War
The root cause was a boundary that had never been settled by agreement between the two governments. It was disputed in two widely separated sectors, shown in Map 12.4.
Map
Map 12.4 Caption: The two disputed sectors of the boundary with China. Brief: Map of India’s northern frontier. Mark the western sector, labelling Aksai Chin within Ladakh, and the eastern sector, labelling Arunachal Pradesh (called the North-East Frontier Agency in 1962) and the McMahon Line. Show Tibet and Xinjiang to the north, and the road built by China across Aksai Chin linking them. Mark the Line of Actual Control distinctly as a line of actual military control, not as an international boundary, and label it as such. Show the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh with Aksai Chin, and Arunachal Pradesh, as Indian territory; no area shaded or labelled as disputed or ceded. All boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India.
In the western sector the disputed area is Aksai Chin, a high, cold desert almost without population. India held it to be part of Ladakh; China claimed it as part of its Xinjiang region.
In the eastern sector the dispute was about the McMahon Line, drawn at a conference at Simla in 1914 and treated by India as the boundary. China rejected it, claiming the territory to the south of it, then administered as the North-East Frontier Agency and today the State of Arunachal Pradesh.
Talks were held: Zhou Enlai came to Delhi in April 1960, and officials of both sides examined each other’s evidence. Neither government would trade a claim in one sector for a claim in the other, and the discussions ended without result.
From 1961 India followed what came to be called the forward policy, placing small posts and patrols in areas it claimed, in some places beyond Chinese positions. The intention was to establish presence and prevent further advance; China treated it as encroachment.
The timing of the attack was also chosen. China launched its offensive on 20 October 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union were absorbed in a confrontation of their own and unlikely to intervene.
12.4.2.2 The Course And Outcome Of The War
The fighting lasted about a month, from 20 October to 21 November 1962, in both sectors at once.
India was badly placed for it. Troops moved to the frontier were equipped and clothed for lower altitudes, supply lines to the high passes barely existed, and command arrangements had not been prepared for a war on this scale.
Chinese forces advanced in the eastern sector through Tawang and towards Bomdila, and in the western sector consolidated their hold on Aksai Chin. The Indian Army suffered a clear defeat.
On 21 November 1962 China declared a ceasefire without being asked for one, and withdrew its troops in the eastern sector to positions near the McMahon Line. In the west it kept Aksai Chin, which was the territory it had wanted.
The line where the two armies actually stood became known as the Line of Actual Control — the line separating the areas each side controls, which is not an agreed boundary and is not marked on the ground in many places.
That line is still where the two armies face each other, and the boundary itself is still unsettled. This is why incidents on this frontier keep recurring: two armies patrol towards a line that neither has agreed to.
12.4.2.3 The Impact On India
The first effect was on thinking rather than on territory. The assumption that a shared history of anti-colonial struggle would keep two Asian neighbours at peace did not survive the war.
The second was political. The Defence Minister, V. K. Krishna Menon, resigned; Nehru’s authority was damaged, and he died less than two years later, in 1964.
The third was military. India expanded its armed forces, raised units trained and equipped for mountain warfare, increased defence spending sharply, and pushed road-building in the border districts.
The fourth touched foreign policy. India accepted military supplies from the United States and Britain during and after the war. It did not abandon non-alignment, but it learned that a policy of principle needs a capacity to defend itself behind it.
The fifth was regional, and the previous section has already shown it at work. Pakistan’s leadership concluded from India’s defeat that the Indian Army could be beaten, and acted on that reading in 1965.
The deepest effect was the least visible. A relationship that had begun with recognition, agreement and a slogan about brotherhood was replaced by a long-lasting mistrust, and the border between the two countries has been an unsettled question ever since.
12.5 Summary
The Region
South Asia is the southern part of Asia, bounded by the Himalaya and Karakoram to the north and by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. It is usually taken to include eight countries and holds roughly a quarter of the world’s people.
India lies at the centre of the region: it borders almost every other South Asian country, while most of them do not border one another. Relations in the region are therefore largely bilateral, settled between two states at a time.
These borders are recent, drawn at the partition of 1947 and altered again in 1971. Recent borders leave loose ends — enclaves, shared rivers and divided families — and much of this chapter is about clearing them up.
India is far larger than its neighbours in territory, population and economy. The same act can therefore look like reasonable concern for security from one side and like pressure from the other.
India And Pakistan
The accession of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 and the fighting that followed left a dispute that neither government accepted as closed. A cease fire line, not an agreed border, divided the former princely state from 1949.
The war of 1965 followed clashes in the Rann of Kutch and Operation Gibraltar, an attempt to spark a rising in the Kashmir Valley. The rising did not happen; India crossed the international border in Punjab; large tank battles were fought at Asal Uttar and Chawinda; a United Nations ceasefire took effect on 23 September 1965.
The Tashkent Agreement of January 1966, mediated by the Soviet Union, returned both armies to their pre-war positions and restored diplomatic relations. It settled the war but not the dispute, and was criticised in both countries.
The war of 1971 grew out of a political crisis inside Pakistan: the denial of power to the party that had won the 1970 election, a military crackdown in East Pakistan, and the flight of about ten million refugees into India. The thirteen-day war ended with the surrender at Dhaka on 16 December 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh.
The Shimla Agreement of 1972 committed both countries to settle differences bilaterally, and turned the ceasefire line of December 1971 into the Line of Control, to be respected without prejudice to either side’s claims. India returned captured territory and did not press its advantage for a final settlement.
After the nuclear tests of 1998, the Lahore Declaration of February 1999 concentrated on confidence-building measures — reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons and talking about doctrines — rather than on solving the dispute.
The Kargil conflict began with an intrusion across the Line of Control into vacated posts overlooking the Srinagar–Leh highway. India cleared the heights under Operation Vijay and Operation Safed Sagar while deliberately keeping its forces on its own side of the Line, and the fighting ended on 26 July 1999.
Taken together, these episodes show what agreements between hostile states can and cannot do. Each ended a war, returned prisoners and fixed a line; none of them settled what the two countries disagree about.
India And Bangladesh
Fifty-four transboundary rivers flow from India into Bangladesh, so what India does upstream is felt downstream. The relationship is friendly in general and difficult on the specific questions the border creates.
The Farakka barrage, operating from 1975, diverted Ganga water to keep the Kolkata channel navigable and reduced the dry-season flow into Bangladesh. After twenty years of temporary arrangements, the Ganga Water Sharing Treaty of 1996 divided the dry-season flow at Farakka in ten-day blocks for thirty years, guaranteeing each country 35,000 cusecs in alternating periods in the driest weeks.
The Teesta dispute is still unsettled. A draft agreement has been pending since 2011 because water is largely a State subject and the government of West Bengal has objected — foreign policy in a federation may have to be negotiated at home as well as abroad.
Enclaves along the Cooch Behar border, created by old land arrangements and turned into international anomalies in 1947, were to be exchanged under the Land Boundary Agreement of 1974. Implementation waited in India because transferring territory amounts to cession and needs a constitutional amendment.
The Teen Bigha corridor was leased and opened in 1992, opened round the clock in 2011, and the wider settlement was completed by the Constitution (One Hundredth Amendment) Act, 2015. Dahagram–Angarpota remains the agreed exception, reached through the leased corridor.
Migration across a border of about 4,096 kilometres is driven by scarce land, higher wages and a delta exposed to flood and erosion. India raises security and local pressure; Bangladesh denies large-scale illegal migration and raises border deaths. Both sides manage it through joint patrolling, meetings and agreed procedures rather than solving it.
India And China
India and China became direct neighbours only after China established control over Tibet in 1950–51. The agreement of April 1954 settled trade and pilgrimage in Tibet and, in its preamble, set out the five principles known as Panchsheel.
The five principles, in order, are mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. They spread to the Bandung Conference of 1955 and fed into non-alignment.
Their weakness was structural. They named no boundary, created no machinery of enforcement, and may have meant different things to the two signatories. Strain appeared in 1959, when the Dalai Lama was granted asylum in India.
The boundary was disputed in two sectors: Aksai Chin in the west, across which China built a road linking Xinjiang and Tibet, and the McMahon Line in the east. Talks failed in 1960, forward posts met each other from 1961, and China attacked on 20 October 1962.
India was defeated. China declared a unilateral ceasefire on 21 November 1962, withdrew in the east and kept Aksai Chin; the line the armies then held became the Line of Actual Control, which is not an agreed boundary.
The war changed India’s defence spending, its force structure and its border roads, cost the Defence Minister his office, and left a lasting mistrust. It also encouraged Pakistan’s reading in 1965 that the Indian Army could be beaten.
The Chapter In One Line
- Neighbours cannot choose each other. Every case in this chapter shows the same pattern: where the concrete question — a line, a share of water, a strip of land — was actually settled, the relationship became manageable; where only principles or intentions were agreed, the dispute returned.
12.6 Key Terms
Accession — the formal act by which the ruler of a princely state joined India or Pakistan in 1947, transferring specified powers to that dominion.
Bilateral — conducted or settled between two states alone, without a third party taking part.
Cession — the transfer of territory by one state to another; in India it requires an amendment of the Constitution and not merely an executive agreement.
Confidence-building measures — arrangements between rivals that reduce the risk of accident or misunderstanding, without settling what they disagree about.
Deterrence — the attempt to prevent an attack by making its cost unacceptable to the attacker.
Enclave — a piece of one country’s territory lying wholly inside another country.
Line of Actual Control — the line separating the areas actually controlled by India and China; it is not an agreed boundary and is unmarked on the ground in many places.
Line of Control — the military line in Jammu and Kashmir that resulted from the ceasefire of December 1971, which both sides agreed to respect without prejudice to their claims.
Mediation — the work of a third party who helps two disputing sides reach an agreement but cannot impose one on them.
Non-alignment — the policy of not joining either of the Cold War military blocs while keeping the freedom to judge each issue on its merits.
South Asia — the southern part of Asia, bounded by the Himalaya and Karakoram in the north and by the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean; also called the Indian subcontinent.
Transboundary river — a river that flows across an international boundary, so that what is done with its water upstream is felt by the country downstream.
12.7 Points to Ponder
Both governments cite the Shimla Agreement in support of opposite positions. Can an agreement that each side reads differently still be doing useful work?
A treaty on the Ganga proved possible; one on the Teesta has not. Is the harder obstacle to an agreement with a neighbour more often at home than abroad?
Nuclear weapons are held to deter war, yet fighting broke out at Kargil within months of a peace declaration. What kinds of conflict can deterrence prevent, and what kinds can it not?
The Teen Bigha corridor remains Indian territory, leased to Bangladesh in perpetuity. In what sense does territory remain yours once its use has been permanently given away?
India’s intervention in 1971 helped bring a new state into existence. On what grounds, if any, may one state assist the breaking up of another?
Every dispute in this chapter is with a neighbour. Does sharing a border make agreement more necessary, or does it make agreement harder?
12.8 Objective Questions
- The Tashkent Agreement was signed in the year
- 1965
- 1966
- 1971
- 1972 [1 mark]
- The line in Jammu and Kashmir that resulted from the ceasefire of December 1971 is known as the
- Cease Fire Line
- McMahon Line
- Line of Control
- Line of Actual Control [1 mark]
- Which of the following is NOT one of the five principles of Panchsheel?
- Mutual non-aggression
- Equality and mutual benefit
- Collective defence against aggression
- Peaceful coexistence [1 mark]
- The Farakka barrage was built mainly in order to
- generate hydroelectric power for West Bengal
- send water down the Bhagirathi–Hooghly channel and keep the Kolkata port usable
- irrigate the northern districts of Bangladesh
- control floods in the lower Ganga plain [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The Tashkent Agreement did not settle the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir. Reason (R): The agreement dealt with ending the war and restoring the positions held before 5 August 1965.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): An agreement on sharing the waters of the Teesta has not yet been signed. Reason (R): Water is largely a subject for the States, and the government of West Bengal has objected to the draft.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match the agreement in Column A with the year in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Panchsheel Agreement | i. 1996 |
| b. Shimla Agreement | ii. 1954 |
| c. Ganga Water Sharing Treaty | iii. 1999 |
| d. Lahore Declaration | iv. 1972 |
Fill in the blank: The Pakistani operation of August 1965, which sent armed men across the Cease Fire Line to spark a rising in the Kashmir Valley, was code-named __________. [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: The line separating the areas actually controlled by India and China, which is not an agreed boundary, is called the __________. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false: The Panchsheel Agreement of 1954 laid down a procedure for settling boundary disputes between India and China. [1 mark]
12.9 Check Your Concepts
Define an enclave, and give one example of an enclave discussed in this chapter. [2 marks]
State any two of the five principles of Panchsheel, in the order in which they appear in the agreement. [2 marks]
What is meant by a transboundary river? [2 marks]
Differentiate between the Line of Control and the Line of Actual Control. [3 marks]
Give reasons why Operation Gibraltar failed to achieve what Pakistan intended in 1965. [3 marks]
Explain briefly why the Teen Bigha arrangement agreed in 1974 took so long to be carried out on the Indian side. [3 marks]
Describe the main provisions of the Tashkent Agreement. [4 marks]
Explain, with an example from this chapter, what confidence-building measures are and what they are not intended to do. [4 marks]
Evaluate the claim that the Ganga Water Sharing Treaty of 1996 turned an annual quarrel into a rule. [4 marks]
Discuss the causes of the war of 1971 and its consequences for South Asia. [6 marks]
Describe the five principles of Panchsheel and examine why they did not prevent the war of 1962. [6 marks]
Compare the Tashkent Agreement of 1966 and the Shimla Agreement of 1972 as attempts to settle a conflict, and state what each left unsettled. [6 marks]
12.10 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- Study the following description of a cartoon and answer the questions that follow. Two leaders stand at a table, smiling and signing a large document titled ‘Principles’. Behind them, filling most of the frame, is a range of mountains carrying a signboard that reads: ‘Boundary — to be decided later’. A small crack is drawn running through the mountains.
- Which agreement between India and China does this cartoon comment on? [1]
- Explain the point the cartoonist is making about that agreement. [2]
- State one thing that a cartoon of this kind cannot show the reader. [1] [4 marks]
- Read the following situation and answer the questions that follow. Two neighbouring countries share a large river. The upstream country builds a barrage a short distance from the border and diverts part of the flow into a channel of its own, to keep a port usable. Farmers in the downstream country complain of shortage in the driest months of the year. After twenty years of short-term arrangements, the two governments sign a treaty dividing the flow in ten-day blocks for thirty years.
- Identify the barrage and the treaty in India’s relations with Bangladesh that this situation resembles. [2]
- Explain why disputes of this kind concentrate on the dry season rather than the year as a whole. [2]
- State one thing that such a treaty cannot guarantee, however carefully the shares are fixed. [1] [5 marks]
- Read the following situation and answer the questions that follow. An army vacates certain posts on a high mountain frontier each winter, because they cannot be held once heavy snow begins. In the spring its patrols find the posts occupied by soldiers from across the dividing line. The occupied heights look down on the only road that supplies its own troops in the region beyond.
- Which conflict does this situation describe, and in which year did it take place? [2]
- Explain why the heights that were occupied were of such military importance. [2]
- India chose to keep its forces on its own side of the dividing line throughout the fighting. Give one reason for that decision. [1] [5 marks]
- Read the following statement and answer the questions that follow. A student writes: ‘India and Pakistan fought again after every agreement they signed. The agreements were therefore of no use at all.’
- State two things that the agreements studied in this chapter did in fact achieve. [2]
- Do you agree with the student’s conclusion? Give reasons for your answer. [2] [4 marks]
12.11 Practice With Data
- Under the Ganga Water Sharing Treaty, flow at Farakka is measured in cusecs and shared in ten-day blocks during the dry season.
- State what one cusec measures. [1]
- If two countries receive a guaranteed share in alternating ten-day blocks over a span of sixty days, how many blocks does each country receive? Show your working. [2] [3 marks]
- The Ganga Water Sharing Treaty was signed in December 1996 and runs for thirty years.
- In which year does it fall due for renewal? [1]
- Explain why the approach of that date makes agreement on other shared rivers more urgent for both countries. [2] [3 marks]
- Study Map 12.4 and answer the questions that follow.
- Name the two sectors in which the boundary with China is disputed. [2]
- Name the line that India regards as the boundary in the eastern sector. [1]
- Which of the two sectors did China retain after the fighting of 1962, and why did it matter to China? [2] [5 marks]
- Study Map 12.3 and answer the questions that follow.
- Name the highway that runs from Srinagar through Kargil to Leh. [1]
- Using the map, explain why control of the heights above this road affects the position of Indian forces in Ladakh. [2] [3 marks]