Will North India continue to have frozen borders when it needs to break out of isolation?

Nostalgia about past links can’t roll back layers of accumulated antipathy and misgivings.

Sandeep Dikshit

THE New Year generally brings good tidings. And an opportunity beckons to the people of North India, boxed in by the frozen international frontiers of China and Pakistan, to return to their natural trading habitats of Central Asia, China and beyond.It will not be easy for India to take advantage of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Successive Prime Ministers have hung back after promising to open the blocked borders of Punjab, Kashmir, Himachal and Ladakh, that compelled these people to change their mode of correspondence with the wider world: from their customary land-based caravan routes to sea-dependent lines of communication.Narendra Modi had promised to be different. A few months after taking over as Prime Minister in 2014, he declared in Tokyo, “I am a Gujarati. Being a Gujarati, money is in my blood…commerce is in my blood. Businesses do not need concessions. They only need the correct environment to flourish in.”This is all coming true for the people of Gujarat, as PM Modi himself underlined during the just-held state Assembly elections: Gujarat will be the major beneficiary of the Rs 88,000 crore Bullet Train loan from Japan; the first Japanese industrial park will also come up in Gujarat on the back of a $35 billion Japanese credit to improve infrastructure.North India, however, still awaits the Modi touch. From times immemorial, the Punjabi, the Ladakhi and the Kashmiri were connected to Central Asia, China, and even Russia, by trading caravans. Old-timers in the souks and bazaars of Kashghar and Samarkand can still point out an “Indian street” that retains the imprint of customs and architecture from the lands across the Indus.However, nostalgia about past links cannot easily roll back layers of accumulated antipathy and misgivings. The British had fed their paranoia about a Russian expansion by drawing firm, inviolable borders around colonial India, and arm-twisted Afghanistan into following suit; the volume and extent of trade came to be supervised by the colonial master to suit his manufacturing preferences back home as well as tailor it to the empire’s foreign policy. The violence of 1947 dealt the final blow to trans-regional trade. The residual civility that remained in cross-border movement such as a joint India-Pakistan passport vanished after the hostilities of 1965.Several political upheavals later, all attempts to make international border lawfully porous have run into dead-ends of suspicion and hostility; it did lead to restoration of some old trading routes in the divided Kashmirs and Punjabs, besides Sindh-Rajasthan. These few linkages, however, are hostage to the state of play in India-Pakistan relationship. They are a perfunctory exercise; sans the appendages of modern trading systems such as letters of credit, bank guarantees (BG), etc. Any concession to modernity is the scrupulous, painful but hi-tech scanning of a handful of people and a predetermined volume of goods permitted by either state to cross the border.In order to unlock the borders with China, Modi — the Gujarati with “money in my blood” — needs to first dismantle the colonial-imperialist baggage inherited by a substantial section of the policy-making elite about bigger powers in the neighbourhood. These suspicions have been reinforced by the continuing fiction in Indian strategic circles about China’s “creeping cartographic aggression” despite available evidence that there is no need for it to do so after capturing 60,000 km of Indian territory in one fell blow in 1962.To be fair, the hostile and unbending position on CPEC was bequeathed to it by the UPA government: New Delhi’s objection to the CPEC running through disputed Kashmir could be a riposte to the periodical Chinese hue and cry over developmental projects in Arunachal Pradesh, disputed between India and China since the 1962 war. Modi, the pragmatist that he is, would by now have realised that these are exercises in futility.At some stage India has to reconcile with the situation on the ground: Chinese objections have not stopped Japan from encouraging Asian Development Bank to undertake road construction projects in Arunachal Pradesh; Indian companies are happily constructing a caravan of dams on the tributaries of the Brahmaputra. The Twitterati may have hauled them on the coals, but the Abdullahs, son and father, were factually right when they said that India cannot win over the “other” Kashmir by military means. Once a territorial conquest is ruled out, it is better to make the best of the available opportunity rather than continue whistling in the dark.  India’s objections over the CPEC running can be understood from the need to formally footnote a protest in the long-running Kashmir dispute file. But it does not serve any other purpose; on the contrary, the hostility damages the prospects of India becoming a stakeholder in another China-backed project in the east — the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) corridor — that will unlock the potential of the North-East which is boxed in by rigid international borders, just like Punjab, Kashmir and Ladakh.India is trying to provide an alternative to the BCIM in the east by aligning with the US and Japan to build the “Pacific Corridor”. But India has limited stamina and influence to fashion an alternative to CPEC while India’s land route from Iran’s Chabahar port to Afghanistan can hardly compare or compete with CPEC.And last week, a new spectre was looming for South Block if it fails to take an early call on leveraging CPEC for geopolitical advantage: Afghanistan too is keen on signing up with CPEC. It will render India’s Chabahar link futile, perhaps to the secret delight of Iran as well because it is wary of getting caught up in India’s confrontationist anti-China/Pakistan narrative about this route.Modi, who has “commerce in his blood”, should realise these futile confrontations sap a nation’s collective energy without providing any concomitant returns. For North Indians, the shadow games between intelligence agencies have failed to improve their lot; it is debatable whether their exertions which have come at the cost of livelihood potential of people, have kept the borders completely inviolable. India desperately needs new breakthroughs in international trade to keep its economy ticking at a decent rate at a time when software exports have peaked and traditional markets face stagnation or recession.Modi the statesman is yet to make an appearance. Perhaps this could be the opportunity for him in the New Year?

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