Shyam Saran is spot on in urging the re-framing of our border policy and making it people-centric (“Re-imaging India’s borders,” June 24).
The 10-year old Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) forum is one acid test. It seeks congruence between the neighbouring regions of China (especially the Yunnan province), India’s north-east and West Bengal, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Its focus is on roads, “multimodal connectivity”, trade, societal issues common to this region, culture and people-to-people cooperation. Though three of the countries in the forum want a parallel inter-government dialogue mechanism to pursue cooperation, India drags its feet.
The problem is an old world view of security that is predicated on exclusion of “the other” and preservation of “control”. Alas, as Saran stresses, trade flows and growing communication linkages from our north-east region into Myanmar renders such notions pointless. Security, now, has to be found in building our own “back-linkages” to the north-east and in treating its inhabitants as “owners” of a unified India.
Kishan S Rana, New Delhi
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