Recent discussion within India and outside has examined whether in view of their economic importance to each other the border issue is still important. In June a conference at the University of Westminster in London brought together scholars from Australia, the United States, the UK, India and China, and Tibet. 'Why in London?' an Indian keynote speaker, Professor Alka Acharya, had been asked by her colleagues in Delhi, she assured us in jest. Was this another instance of the supposedly obsessive British post-imperial meddling in matters which no longer concern Britain? It seems not. One Indian scholar has seen equal or even more vivid interest in China-India issues at conferences held in Berlin or Paris. India's problems are now unequivocally of global significance.

But is the status of Tibet, and what happens there, still relevant to the relations between the two Asian economic giants? In one view the answer is that for both countries far too much is at stake. The cost for China of going to war with any one of its main trading partners has become prohibitive. In 1962 the Chinese quickly established military dominance, advanced as far as they wanted, stopped and withdrew unilaterally. Next time the conflict might not be so contained or end so quickly. That a border skirmish or diplomatic war of words could end in a nuclear exchange between India and China is, one hopes, an inconceivable prospect — less so perhaps than some future India-Pakistan flashpoint. The security community in India may still be exercised about the unresolved frontier issues, disproportionately in the view of some Indian observers. But Tibet and the border remain significant factors underlying relations between the two countries, with a potential for conflict. That at least was the conclusion of some of the experts assembled in London.

Things have come a long way since the time Mao Tse Tung complained that India, because of its century's old cultural links with Tibet, assumed that Tibet was properly within India's sphere of influence. But since 1962 the strategic stakes have been raised substantially on both sides. China has focussed on confining India's defensive or offensive room for manoeuvre to the Siliguri corridor, 25 km wide at its narrowest. Chinese troops can advance through Arunachal Pradesh and create a pincer movement east and north of Bangladesh and Myanmar, confident that India can have no agreed access to the region through either of their neighbour's territory. China moreover has a growing naval presence in the Indian Ocean with potential access to facilities in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and East Africa. In this scenario, the US naval and military presence in Diego Garcia and the Indian Ocean, once so much resented and criticised by India, looks like a useful reassurance.

On the diplomatic front, China having ruled out any Tibetan pretensions to independence, with the acquiescence of India and most western countries, is ironically in a position to pose as champion of Tibetan historic territorial claims to the Tawang tract, now part of India's Arunachal Pradesh. The valley had before 1950 been claimed by Tibet as part of its territory. It was the birthplace of a much-revered Dalai Lama in the 17th century. The present Dalai Lama himself, before the Chinese invasion — or re-assertion of military control — in Tibet in 1951, had protested to India about the Indian army and civil administration's move into Tawang which had preceded it. Subsequently in exile the Dalai Lama has withdrawn that claim. In any dialogue between Tibetan exiles and the Chinese government, China might and does argue that in disputing the status of Tawang as part of India, China is paying closer attention to Tibetan national aspirations than the exiles. Despite all the measures of rapprochement and normalisation of relation with China, India has consistently rejected formal negotiations, which even hypothetically could call the border into question in this area.

(Thankfully there seems to be no issue of ethnic or religious allegiance involved on either side in the border dispute. For India, as a nation that came into being as an independent state on the basis of a hurried and inevitably crude process of division, this is welcome. The 1947 partition line between India and Pakistan, in both Punjab and Bengal, was drawn for the most part on religious and communal criteria, a task impossible without deep controversy, and as it turned out catastrophic consequences. Both Indian and Tibetan scholars can agree that Bhutan and Sikkim and large parts of India's north-eastern territories bequeathed to it by the departing British, are culturally and ethnically linked to Tibet. But their status in relation to Tibet or China is not now actively in dispute.)

One of the positive aspects of an academic exchange is that sometimes experts, if they are not solely providing negotiating ammunition for their own side, may find a measure common ground. One such is noted in a recent book by two Indian scholars at The Delhi Centre for Policy Alternatives*. They point out that Chinese historians have argued the idea that the territorial concept of 'China' is not a static and permanent notion, as is sometimes argued, but one that has evolved over the millennia. History and national sentiment provide formidable constraints on policy options. Research by Indian historians has shown that the position the Nehru government took privately before the 1962 war were more flexible than was admitted in public. Since that war, India has been tied down by the pledges enacted by parliament on the non-negotiability of India's borders. In an era of global exchange and cooperation, the border issue may still be at the margins of the India-China relationship. But if it is not addressed, it will not just go away.

# 'Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India dominate the West?' by Prem Shankar Jha New York 2010

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