The Sino-Indian Boundary Issue continues.....

The process inexorably led to the arbitrary

Durand Line separating British India and Afghanistan, which Afghanistan even today does not accept as the boundary between itself and Pakistan, which was drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand.

A certain Capt. Henry McMahon, who had been a member of Durand’s 1893 mission to Kabul, then went on to spend the next two years physically demarcating the Durand Line on the ground for most of its 2,400 km length. In due course the process led to the Foreign Secretary of the Government of India, at that time McMahon himself, attempting another ‘Durand Line’-type of exercise, this time to create a buffer-statein Tibet. The various lines discussed at times are:

1. The Line of Actual Control (LAC): The ‘Line of Actual Control’ (LAC) is not a mutually-agreed line. It has never been delimited or de-lineated (i.e., defined in words and geographical map references), nor demarcated (i.e., physically marked) on the ground, by a joint survey team of the two countries.

The Chinese Government’s stated position is that it is the line between the positions held by the forces of the two countries as on 7th November 1959. The Indian position is that China has not defined the LAC yet. (See discussion in ‘Sino-Indian Border

Negotiations’)

2. The ‘McMahon Line’: The ‘McMahon Line’ is actually two lines. They derive from the Shimla Conference convened on 13th October 1913, and the practically unilateral de-lineation of the boundary between British India and Tibet on 27th April 1914 by the Foreign Secretary of the British Indian Government, Col. Sir Henry McMahon (the same person who twenty years before had worked on the Durand Line, at Kabul and on the ground). A blue line separated an ‘Inner Tibet’ under Chinese administrative control, and an ‘Outer Tibet’ under British influence. A red line separated India and Tibet, and also continued further to separate the northern parts of British-heldBurma from the Chinese province of Sichuan, continuing even further to delineate the British view of the entire external boundary of Tibet.

To be continued...