A raja’s whims and Aksai Chin

Indian and Chinese troops are in yet another face-off in the Aksai Chin region. How this cold and wind-swept desert became a seemingly intractable dispute is a tale worth telling. It was the ambitions of two Kashmir Maharajas that saddled India with its two biggest security challenges. We know how Hari Singh’s vacillation led to the invasion of his realm by the Pakistani raiders in 1947. But what is not so well known is how the ambition of Maharaja Ranbir Singh led to the cartographic annexation of Aksai Chin into the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.

On March 16, 1846, the British ceded to Gulab Singh, the Sikh state’s feudatory, as reward for his treachery towards his masters in Lahore, the lands they had thus acquired — the territories of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh “for the sum of '75 lakhs”. He in turn acknowledged the supremacy of the British government. Article 4 of the Treaty of Amritsar stated: “The limits of the territories of Maharaja Gulab Singh shall not at any time be changed without concurrence of the British government.” But this is exactly what the Maharaja did and saddled posterity with the Aksai Chin problem.

Aksai Chin covers an area of about 14,380 sq miles. The area is largely a vast high-altitude desert with a low point on the Karakash river at about 14,000 feet above the sea level. In the southwest, mountains up to 22,500 feet extending southeast from the Depsang plains form the de facto border (Line of Actual Control) between India and China. When Jawaharlal Nehru told the Parliament that it was “a place where not even a blade of grass grows”, the Congress MP Mahavir Tyagi riposted that the Prime Minister’s head did not have a single hair, but that didn’t make it useless.

In this context W.H. Johnson’s controversial “advanced boundary line” of 1865 merits attention, especially since thereafter, the Johnson boundary continued to be shown in one trans-frontier map after the other. India’s claims to the Aksai Chin plateau rests squarely on Johnson’s map. This boundary line first found concrete shape in the Survey of India’s 1868 map and the Kashmir Atlas. It was based on the Kashmir Maharaja’s outpost at Shahidullah. This made Johnson opt for the Kuen-Lun watershed as the divide.

It has been suggested that Johnson, a civil sub-assistant at the Survey of India, while at Leh on the eve of his historic journey to Khotan in 1865, colluded with the Kashmir Maharaja’s Ladakh wazir, who provided him with money, a sizeable retinue for safe conduct, apart from generous supplies of transport and food. Then there was the matter of some silver ingots the Khan of Khotan had given him to be carried as a gift to the Viceroy, but which never got that far. In 1872, Johnson quit to join the Kashmir ruler’s service as wazir of Ladakh.

If the above presumptions are true, Johnson emerges as a double dealer who, while on an intelligence mission for the British government, proceeded to “show more than the usual zeal” in the cause of his future employer, the Maharaja of Kashmir. The fact remains that the map prepared on his return showed the entire plateau area in the Maharaja’s province of Ladakh.

The survey itself is not without controversy. To have completed the journey to Khotan, which lay beyond the formidable Kuen-Lun range, and to return to Leh in the time he did, would have required Johnson to cover 30 km per day on the Aksai Chin high plateau without halting once. Even if that frenetic pace in thin air were possible, experts were always doubtful that any serious survey would have accompanied it.

Others of that time were also skeptical of this border. Viceroy Lord Lansdowne even minuted on September 28, 1889: “The country between the Karakoram and Kuen-Lun ranges is, I understand, of no value, very inaccessible and not likely to be coveted by Russia. We might, I should think, encourage the Chinese to take it, if they showed any inclination to do so. This would be better than leaving a no-man’s land between our frontier and that of China. Moreover, the stronger we can make China at this point, and the more we can induce her to hold her own over the whole Kashgar-Yarkand region, the more useful will she be to us as an obstacle to Russian advance along this line.”

On the other hand, responding to Captain Francis Younghusband’s report on his famous meeting with his old Great Game rival, the Russian explorer Colonel V.L. Grombchevsky, near Yarkand in 1889, Major General John Ardagh, director of Military Intelligence at the War Office in London, recommended claiming the areas “up to the crests of the Kuen-Lun range”, i.e. the W.H. Johnson line. However, in 1890, before Whitehall could make up its mind, the Chinese occupied Shahidullah.

Following this occupation, it is instructive to note the opinion of the secretary of state for India in Whitehall, Lord Curzon: “We are inclined to think that the wisest course would be to leave them in possession as it is evidently to our advantage that the tract of territory between the Karakoram and Kuen-Lun mountains be held by a friendly power like China.”

In 1893, Hung-Ta Chen, a senior Chinese official at Kashgar, handed a map of the boundary proposed by China to George Macartney, the British consul-general at Kashgar. This boundary placed the Lingzi Thang plains, which are south of the Laktsang range, in India, and Aksai Chin proper, which is north of the Laktsang range, in China. Macartney agreed with the proposal and forwarded it to the British Indian government.

A border along the Karakoram Mountains was suggested and supported by the British for a number of reasons. The Karakoram formed a natural boundary which would set the British borders up to the Indus river watershed, while leaving the Tarim river watershed in Chinese control. Besides, Chinese control of this tract would present a further obstacle to the feared Russian advance from Central Asia.

The British presented this line, known as the Macartney-MacDonald Line, to the Chinese in 1899, in a note by Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister to the Qing dynasty empire of China. The Qing government did not respond to the note and the British took it as Chinese acquiescence. Although no official boundary had ever been negotiated, China believed that this had been the accepted boundary. It may be pointed out that the 1899 Macartney-MacDonald Line by and large corresponds with the Chinese claim line.

In 1941, Military Intelligence in Delhi got reports of Soviet troops garrisoning in Xinjiang. It was then decided to push the boundary outwards to the old Ardagh-Johnson line, after which Aksai Chin once more became part of Jammu and Kashmir, though it was just on some maps only. The India map of the original Constitution of India adopted in 1950, the longest written Constitution of any sovereign country in the world, containing 448 Articles in 25 parts, 12 schedules, 5 appendices and 98 amendments, leaves the boundary between India and China at Aksai Chin as an airbrushed blank without a line running through it.

In 1962, the People’s Liberation Army advanced to a line which more or less coincides with the Macartney-MacDonald Line. However, the present dispute between the two sides mostly stems from overlapping perceptions of where the LAC stands. And this is where both countries stand now!

The writer, a policy analyst studying economic and security issues, held senior positions in government and industry. He also specialises in the Chinese economy.