Source: IMPHAL FREE PRESS
Posted: 2009-12-02

The recent hiccups in diplomatic relations between Indian and China over the disputed MacMohan Line in the event of the visit to the border town of Tawang and Bomdila by the Tibetan spiritual and temporal leader, the Dalai Lama who head the Tibetan Government in Exile in beautiful hill station of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh should be an eye-opener on not just how sensitive the international boundaries that “contain� the northeast region are but also however arbitrarily they came into existence with little or no consultation with the immediate populations along them whose lives would be profoundly affected by them. Apart from the MacMohan Line, there is also the Radcliff Line in the south and indeed the Indo-Myanmar boundary in the East. To begin with the last named, it is extremely ironic that if not for the executive whim of a single colonial officer in 1885, the British Secretary of State, Randolph Churchill, who decided not to treat the Ava Kingdom (Burma) as a princely state after King Thibaw was defeated and his territory annexed to the empire on which the sun once never set, for all that the history of the post colonial world has been witness to, India’s eastern boundary could have been very different from where it is now. Rather than keep it as a princely state, the Ava kingdom, like the Mughals in India in 1857, was systematically and totally dismantled and a new British administration put in its place. The last of the Burmese king was exiled without ceremony in Benares in India just as the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah was similar banished to Rangoon. Had the British officer decided to keep Burma as a princely state like Manipur and Tripura for instance, in all likelihood, at the time of the British departure, Burma could very well have ended up a state of India, leaving Thailand and Laos as India’s immediate eastern neighbours.
Down south the non-intrinsic nature of the border is again as pronounced when the manner in which the populous province of Sylhet came to be in Pakistan and not India in the 1947 Partition of India. A bitter entangle between linguistic nationalism and religious nationalism ensured that this Hindu majority province dominated by Bengali speaking population was left behind on the Muslim side of the Radcliff Line, although the Partition of India was on religious line. The only way Sylhet could have become a part of India was by its merger with Assam, but Assamese bitterly opposed such a move, for such a merger would have made Bengali speakers the majority in Assam. A letter by Gopinath Bordoloi to Jawaharlal Nehru while the Partition process was going on, melodramatically declared that every Assamese would resist a merger with Sylhet to the last drop of their blood. Nehru was known to have remarked in exasperation as to who the chief minister thought he was adding sarcastically that the chief minister might as well think Assam is an independent country. Like Sylhet, the Buddhist Chakma dominated Chittagong Hill Tract could and should have been on the Indian side of the Border as well. Had these been so, the Indian boundary in the northeast region would have been a lot different from what it is now.
In the north, the story of the MacMohan Line has its own share of arbitrariness. The line came into existence in 1914 after the Simla meet and it is actually a line drawn by the British colonial government as a boundary between Tibet and India, and not China and India. China walked out of the Simla meet claiming Tibet was an integral part of China and that the former is not authorised to enter into any international agreement independently. The line nonetheless was drawn. After Independence, India acknowledged Tibet is an integral part of China thus making the MacMohan Line even more ambiguous. Adding further to the complexity is that India went ahead to not only gave political asylum to the fleeing Dalai Lama in 1959, but also allowed him to set up a Government in Exile on its soil. Furthermore, the 1962 war between China and India ensured chances of sorting out these matters amicably were frozen. Besides the unfortunate political drama, what is also evident is, and what is relevant to the point we are making is, the arbitrary nature of this border too. Depending on the British colonial whims, this line too could have been very different. The dislocations to border populations these lines have caused are also well known.

 

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