SINO-INDIAN BORDER

HISTORY LESSON: WHY CHINA AND INDIA WILL HAVE TO DO A SWAP

Firstpost, May 1, 2013

China and India both insist they share a border sanctified by centuries of custom-but their troops are facing off on some of the most brutal terrain in the world, unable to agree on it. The problem is simple. The two countries' claims rest on agreements arrived at by local rulers hundreds of years ago, when the only places in the Himalaya that mattered were the passes across the inner Himalayas-used by seasonal trading caravans that provided valuable taxes to local rulers. No one knew, or cared, where the line ran through the high mountains.

Elsewhere in the world, countries are fighting for territories with oil, gas or minerals. In this case, they're geo-strategic: China needs Ladakh's Aksai Chin area to link Tibet to Xinjiang, and India fears losing Arunachal Pradesh would make its entire North-East vulnerable.

Many experts say the two great Asian powers will eventually have to do a swap-in essence, that India will have to sacrifice its claims to Aksai Chin in Ladakh for China acknowledging Indian sovreignity over Arunachal Pradesh. Both sides have been engaged in talks that have skirted around this issue, but neither seems keen on expending political capital on such a deal.

In part, that's because the debate over the border is clouded by political grandstanding, and publics sometimes ill-informed about what the border dispute is actually about.

(...) [article here]