Renegotiate Sino-Indian border lines

An explosive situation is building up on the Sino-Indian border in the north-east. If not handled with tact and diplomacy, it could precipitate another (after 1962) Sino-Indian border war which will destabilise the Indian economy and expose the vulnerabilities of the Indian Army. Although invested with courage, determination and a esprit de corps, the latter is at a disadvantage because of endemic corruption in armaments and equipment procurement.  In this connection it’s important to note that Indian troops are not dug in to defend our claimed territory but to protect the territory of our ally the Kingdom of Bhutan on the India-China-Bhutan trijunction. Apart from depriving Bhutan of its traditional grazing pastures, Chinese occupation of the Doklam plateau will enable it to dominate the 27-km Siliguri Corridor or ‘Chicken’s Neck’ which connects mainland India to the seven sister states of the north-east. Therefore, it’s of vital importance that the status quo is maintained in the Doklam plateau. However quite clearly, the way out of this impasse is not through force of arms but serious parleys between India and China.  Although it’s not politically correct in the current jingoistic climate to say so, the Sino-Indian border dispute which covers a large swathe of territory from Kashmir in the north-west to Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east, should have been patiently negotiated in the past half century. The British who ruled India for almost two centuries and dominated China for as long, had a notorious reputation for recklessly drawing and imposing arbitrary international boundary lines.  In the immediate aftermath of independence when Sino-Indian friendship was at its apogee, there was a great opportunity to negotiate and redraw the China-India border in a spirit of mutual give and take. But for inexplicable reasons India’s first prime and foreign minister Jawaharlal Nehru failed and neglected to renegotiate border lines. In the end his foolhardy ‘forward policy’ under which Indian troops were commanded to occupy Chinese claimed territory resulted in the India-China war of 1962 in which the People’s Liberation Army overran the forward outposts of the ill-equipped Indian Army and swept towards the Assam plains before calling a voluntary ceasefire and retreating north of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. And to this day there’s no officially demarcated border between India and China over a 4,500 km swathe of territory, but only a line of control. This is a shameful failure of Indian diplomacy, which is costing the nation a huge annual defence expenditure of Rs.2.74 lakh crore which the country can ill afford.  In the circumstances, there’s no alternative for both countries which have lived peacefully with each other for several millennia but to re-negotiate the entire border mile by mile in a mutual spirit of give and take. It will be a painstaking business, but there’s no alternative.    Necessary reintroduction of exams Union human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar’s recent statement in Parliament that the ministry is finalising an Amendment Bill to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE)…