India, Nepal must seek mutually acceptable solutions to controversy over new map | The Indian Express

India, Nepal must seek mutually acceptable solutions to controversy over new map | The Indian Express

Written by Shyam Saran |Updated: November 27, 2019 9:26:16 am

The writer is a former foreign secretary and senior fellow CPR. He was India’s ambassador to Nepal 2002-4.

India, Nepal must seek mutually acceptable solutions to controversy over new map

The India-Nepal border is unique in that neither country has allowed a political boundary to interrupt the age-old traffic of people who share ties of kinship, religion and culture.

Residual revolutionaries of the Left competed with the supposedly pro-India Nepali Congress to castigate India for releasing maps which showed Kalapani at the India-Nepal-China trijunction to the north and Susta to the south as Indian territory.

The notion of boundaries as lines drawn on a map is a recent concept — as is the nation state. This is particularly true in the Subcontinent, where empires and kingdoms shaded into one another across ambiguous frontiers rather than be separated by boundaries marking sovereign jurisdictions. The India-Nepal border is unique in that neither country has allowed a political boundary to interrupt the age-old traffic of people who share ties of kinship, religion and culture. This is now being threatened by territorial nationalism on the Nepali side and an emerging security state on the Indian side.