The Sino-Indian Boundary Issue
continues....

Part of the reason for China not accepting the McMahon Line is that it does not accept the validity of any direct negotiations with Tibet by British India.

To complicate matters, Britain had, in fact, agreed by the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1906 ‘not to annex Tibetan territory’, and by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 had agreed ‘not to enter into negotiations with Tibet except through the intermediary of the Chinese Government.’ Survey of India maps of the 1930’s showed the McMahon Line with the description ‘Boundary Un-
demarcated’, and these maps were in use till 1954. They were then replaced with maps showing India’s interpretation of the Mcmahon Line in the east, and the Johnson-Ardagh line as the international boundary with China in the Ladakh region of J&K.

ETHNO-CULTURAL PERCEPTUAL PROBLEMS

There are many areas in the Himalayan regions of both India and Nepal where Tibetan and mixed Indo-Tibetan cultures happily co-existed.

This in turn has had a practical effect on the question of the conversion of the ‘customary’ or ‘traditional’ border with Tibet into a precisely defined Sino-Indian border. The main problem area originally was the undefined border in the frontier region between Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang) and the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the west. Less of a problem was the status of the land of the Buddhist Monpas in the Kameng area in the east, generally called the Tawang Tract. Even less of a problem are the small disputed areas of the Central sector.

Aksai Chin: The name of this inhospitable and uninhabited highaltitude plateau is of Turkic origin, meaning ‘whitish plain’, thus indicating that the area has not been part of Tibet, or for that matter of Ladakh proper, which also has names with a Tibetan cultural affinity.

Various other names in the area are also of Turkic provenance, or of mixed Turkic ancestry, e.g, Daulet Beg Oldi, where the ‘Beg’ is Turkic and the Daulat of Persian derivation, and Qizil Jilga, where the ‘qizil’ is a common Turki word for ‘red’. If this disputed area is considered negotiable by India, it could be considered as not part of Ladakh.