How British ambiguity about frontier between India and China paved way for a post-colonial conflict

What is the dispute over which 20 Indian soldiers lost their lives in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley last fortnight? According to reports, they were fighting Chinese incursions across the Line of Actual Control, which is meant to section off Chinese-occupied territories from the Indian side. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared to claim no one had “intruded upon our borders”, the Chinese media gleefully agreed. Since the entire Galwan Valley belonged to China, they asserted, there was no dispute at all.

In seven decades, independent India and communist China have not been able to agree on a fully demarcated border. Both India and China claim the Aksai Chin plateau, part of the western sector of the frontier region. India considers it part of the Union Territory of Ladakh, which was carved out of the state of Jammu and Kashmir on August 5 last year. China’s considers the plateau part of its Xinjiang province and Tibet. In the eastern sector, China claims Arunachal Pradesh, marked on its maps as South Tibet.

These two sections of the Indo-Chinese frontier have been major flashpoints over the decades. In 1962, they triggered a border war.

Although the border dispute with Pakistan has figured the most in India’s national imagination, the...

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