First line of defence: The role of border villages as custodians of India’s frontiers

Rajnath Singh: “Our aim is to ensure infrastructure and socio-economic progress in border areas”

Photo: A grazier village (credit Ajai Shukla)

 

By Ajai Shukla

Business Standard, 17th Sep 24

 

Echoing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stated commitment to holistic development of villages located close to the Sino-Indian border, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has described these villages as not just remote habitations but also the country’s first line of defence.

 

Addressing a Border Area Development Conclave in New Delhi on September 11, Singh said the best way of dealing with the multiple challenges posed by India’s geo-strategic location was to ensure border area development. 

 

In underlining the role of border villages as custodians of India’s frontiers, New Delhi is following the example ofChina in Tibet, where President Xi Jinping has personally directed a new border village policy since 2017. 

 

China in Tibet

 

China’s new border village policy, which is aimed at setting up Tibetan villages in disputed border areas, was announced with great fanfare at the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2017. In May 2021, noted Tibetologist Robert Barnett described the working of Xi Jinping’s resettlement policy in an article in Foreign Policy magazine. 

 

Barnett’s article details the experience of four Tibetan nomads from the remote Beyul Khenpajong region, which remains disputed between Bhutan and China. Until 1995, like other yak graziers living along the border, the four spent their summer grazing their herds in the Beyul, before returning to their village in Tibet ahead of the winter snows. 

 

In 1995, however, the local CCP officials told them Beyul was Chinese territory and it was their duty to guard it for China by physically remaining there through winter. For the decades that followed, the four graziers spent the bitter winters alone in the Beyul, in harsh and primitive conditions, with no contact with the outside world.

 

Once the Chinese completed a road to their tiny settlement, over the Himalayan crest line, a larger village was rapidly built up. In April 2020, the Communist Party Secretary of Tibet, Wu Yingjie, trekked all the way to the new grazier village, now named “Gyalphug”, to hail the graziers as heroes of China. 

 

Each summer, CCP officials organise the herders to carry out small tasks to reassert China’s claims. Barnett writes: “These included driving yak herds over land grazed by Bhutanese herders in the Beyul, demanding tax payments from the Bhutanese herders, planting Chinese flags on peaks and painting the word ‘China’ on rocks throughout the area.” 

 

An estimated 250,000 Tibetans have been resettled thus along the border. In effect, this has transformed local Tibetan histories of border grazing and monastic claims into state-level territorial claims by China.

 

In July 2021, Xi Jinping visited Tibet for three days, with his focus squarely on the Tibetan town of Nyingtri (Nyingchi in Chinese). Beijing regards Arunachal Pradesh as a southward extension of Nyingtri Prefecture.

 

Development work

 

India’s defence minister, speaking at the Border Area Development Conclave, pointed to the development work carried out in India’s border areas during the last decade. He cited the construction of 8,500 kms of roads, 400 permanent bridges, and three major tunnels: Atal Tunnel, Sela Tunnel, and Shikun-La Tunnel, with the third currently the world's highest road tunnel.

 

The defence minister also cited the connection of border areas in Ladakh with the National Electricity Grid, and the provision of high-speed internet to over 1,500 villages, mainly in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, through the Bharat-Net broadband project. 

 

Singh said the government’s special emphasis on border area tourism was catalysing the development of the region. “Tourism has immense potential in border areas, but it could not reach the desired heights due to lack of infrastructure. Things have changed since this government came to power… From 2020 to 2023, the footfall of tourists in Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh increased by 30 per cent… We are taking consistent steps to make J&K a tourist hotspot,” he said.

 

Economic development of the border areas, he said, was triggering “reverse migration”, such as in Huri village in Arunachal Pradesh, where villagers who had migrated to the hinterland were returning to their original homes.

 

Speaking at the same conclave, army chief General Upendra Dwivedi described border area development as “a core component of national security.”

 

New flashpoint

 

Like New Delhi, Beijing supports its graziers with incentives, including financial ones, to equip them for spending long periods in high-altitude pastures along the McMahon Line border. Unlike New Delhi, however, Beijing has not shrunk from using armed force in the form of border guards and frontline soldiers to intimidate and bully Indian graziers.

 

Indian military commanders believe Beijing covets Beyul Khenpajong as a bargaining chip to offer Bhutan in exchange for Doklam, a disputed pocket of land at the tri-junction of Bhutan, China and India.

 

India regards Doklam as militarily vital, being located less than 100 kilometres from the strategic Siliguri corridor, a narrow, 25-kilometre-wide strip of land that connects India’s seven north-eastern states to the Indo-Gangetic heartland. Bhutan has always been careful of India’s concerns vis-à-vis Doklam.

 

“China doesn’t need the land it is settling in Bhutan: Its aim is to force the Bhutanese government to cede territory that China wants elsewhere in Bhutan to give Beijing a military advantage in its struggle with New Delhi,” wrote Barnett, in Foreign Policy.

 

Since 1990, Beijing has been offering to give up its claim to 495 square kilometres in the north of Bhutan, provided Thimphu yields 269 square kilometres in the west. The territory in north Bhutan that China is offering to give up includes the Beyul Khenpajong.

 

The creation of border infrastructure is the new flashpoint between China and India. Among the causes cited for intrusions by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into Eastern Ladakh in the summer of 2020, the construction of the 255 kilometre-long Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Oldi (DSDBO) road by India’s Border Roads Organisation is possibly the most convincing. Following clashes between the PLA and Indian troops in the Galwan River Valley in June 2020, China’s foreign ministry identified the creation of the DSDBO road as a trigger for the clash.

 

Clearly, New Delhi will have to walk a fine line between developing India’s border infrastructure on the one hand and assuaging Beijing’s border sensibilities on the other.