<b>Deepak Lal:</b> India's frontiers: A razor's edge

The frontiers of the Raj were progressively dismantled after 1947, and India is still living with the consequences

In my earlier column on war and peace, I had emphasised the importance of empires in maintaining peace ("The dove and the wolf", September 21, 2013). One of the central concerns of every imperial system has been the need to define and protect its frontiers against external threats to its hegemony. In his 1907 Romanes lecture, Lord Curzon, the predominant geo-politician who concerned himself with the security of the Indian empire, discussed the nature of frontiers: "Frontiers are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations" (Frontiers, Clarendon Press, Oxford). 
 

Curzon distinguished between natural and artificial frontiers. The former were defined by geographical features, which, in order of their degree of impassability, were the sea, deserts, mountains and rivers. Amongst the artificial barriers, he discusses the modern idea of a "deliberately neutralised territory or state or zone … to keep apart two Powers whose contact might provoke collision", as in the guarantee by Britain and Russia "to the independence and integrity of Persia, creating a buffer state between their two dominions". 

For the Indian empire, however, the modern expedient was a policy of protectorates reminiscent of the Roman empire. This meant the creation of buffer states to separate the spheres of other great powers. Curzon, again: "The result in the case of the Indian empire is probably without precedent, for it gives to Great Britain not a single or double but a three-fold frontier, (1) the administrative border of British India, (2) the Durand Line, or frontier of active protection, (3) the Afghan border, which is the outer or advanced strategical frontier". Furthermore, "to the east and north the chain of protectorates is continued in Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan". As he later noted, this Indian frontier system was the most highly organised in the world and a counterpart to the frontier system of Rome. He, of course, does not need to mention India's maritime frontier, since this had been breached to acquire India and thereafter secured by Britain's worldwide naval supremacy. This frontier heritage of the Raj was progressively dismantled with the end of the British empire, and India is still living with the consequences. 

The first was Partition, which led to the dismantling of Curzon's threefold frontier preventing the usual route of invasions from the West. There is now a nuclear-armed irredentist power on the traditional invasion route to the north Indian heartland. Jawaharlal Nehru, conscious of the geopolitical requisites of Indian security even as he agreed to Partition, believed that the needs of a common defence might lead gradually back to a reintegration of India. "I have no doubt whatever," he wrote to K P S Menon in April 1947, "that sooner or later India will have to function as a unified country. Perhaps the best way to reach that stage is to go through some kind of partition now" (Jawaharlal Nehru, S Gopal). As an Indian Foreign Service probationer listening to one of his last speeches in the Lok Sabha in April 1964, I heard him say that he "continued to cherish the hope that India and Pakistan would be able to come together, much closer, 'even constitutionally closer' ". He told The Washington Post correspondent in December 1962: "confederation remains our ultimate goal. Look at Europe, at the Common Market. This is the urge everywhere. There are no two peoples anywhere nearer than those of India and Pakistan, though if we say it, they are alarmed and think we want to swallow them'" (S Gopal).

However, after 60 years, this hope is still belied. Just as the fall of the Roman empire and the dismantling of its frontiers led to centuries of bloody warfare among its successor states - including two world wars - for the mastery of Europe, till Germany found a peaceful path to establish its dominance by promoting the European Union, will Nehru's hope fructify only after such a bloody denouement? 

The second was Tibet. In his little gem on Indian geopolitics, (Geographical Factors in Indian History), K M Panikkar noted that it was not the Himalayas themselves, with a width of 150 miles, but the Tibetan plateau behind it that provided India's northern shield. With "an elevation of about 15,000 feet and ... guarded on all four sides by high mountains ... the vast barren upland behind the Himalayas provides India with the most magnificent defence in depth imaginable". The Himalayan passes opening out to the Indian plains were not penetrated for an attack "because the Tibetan plateau was never in the past organised as a great military state". But Panikkar noted that although the Chinese had been unable "in the past to organise a strong military area in Tibet [this] should not blind us to such possibilities in the future". And this has come to pass, because of Nehru's naivete (as even his official biographer, S Gopal, admits) and his misreading of Chinese intentions.

Nehru's appeasement of China began soon after a Chinese attack to "liberate Tibet" became imminent in the autumn of 1950, never having "taken seriously suggestions, made even by Panikkar during the civil war in China, of establishing an independent Tibet" (S Gopal). Reluctant to ask for military help from the United States or Britain in spite India's own military weakness, because of his policy of non-alignment, he only sought to express India's interest in maintaining Tibetan autonomy "whilst recognising China's suzerainty over Tibet". But even this stance was undermined by the official Indian statement in which "by an oversight the word 'sovereignty' had been used instead of 'suzerainty' and, though it was later decided to correct this error, the Chinese were never formally informed of this correction", misleading "the Chinese about India's understanding of the status of Tibet" (S Gopal).

With the Chinese invasion of 1962, the shades finally dropped from his eyes. Nehru asked for Western military aid and "sought to strengthen political ties [with the US] even though his hands were tied to some extent by the need to maintain a public posture of non-alignment". But non-alignment was, in effect, dead, "as facilities were granted to U2 planes to land and refuel in India on their way into Tibetan airspace", and the US was permitted "to attempt to install a remote-sensing device operated by a nuclear battery near the peak of Nanda Devi, to secure information about the development of missiles by China". 

With the breaching of its imperial frontiers and the strategic alliance between the two hostile powers on its western and northern frontiers, an understanding of Chinese intentions, which Nehru had so fatally misjudged, becomes of vital importance to Indian security. This is the subject of my next column.