Sunrise in empire’s shadow

THERE was a time when an unsettled frontier was an asset. Imperial statecraft valued ambiguity because it created room for manoeuvre. A frontier under permanent negotiation could be more useful than one settled. That was the logic of empire. It should not become the inheritance of Asia.

The eight-point consensus reached between India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the 25th round of Special Representatives’ talks is more than its provisions. New hotlines and meeting points matter. Better ways to prevent misunderstanding matter. But one phrase matters more: an “Early and Substantial Harvest” in boundary delimitation. After decades of managing the Line of Actual Control, India and China have tentatively reopened the harder question: can the boundary itself be settled?

The timing could hardly be more consequential.

A world coming apart

The order built after 1945 is under strain. American primacy is contested. China has risen without yet earning the trust that leadership demands. Europe is diminished. Wars are back in the vocabulary of great powers. Climate, artificial intelligence, pandemics and debt ignore borders even as nations retreat behind them.

The British left behind an unsettled line. Today’s global dynamics make its persistence more dangerous. In an era of escalating US-China rivalry and shifting Indo-Pacific alignments, an unsettled border remains permanently vulnerable to miscalculation.

I saw in 1971, on the march to Dhaka, how genocide turns political fracture into human blood. As the world fractures again, we cannot treat borders as a game of risk. The cost is always paid in blood.

Humanity is the ultimate global common. Yet it has no boundary, no Security Council veto, no bloc to defend it. Only human beings can join those dots.

For India and China, this fractured moment is not only danger. It is also opportunity.

The Third Pole: When nature roars

Climate is already reminding us that some lines on maps matter less than the forces moving across them. Carbon knows no sovereignty. Floods carry no passports. The vast Himalayan and Tibetan cryosphere, often called the Third Pole, holds the largest concentration of ice outside the polar regions and feeds Asia’s great river systems.

What happens there cannot remain the concern of one country because what begins there does not remain there. Geography may establish sovereignty. Nature establishes interdependence.

India and China share a Himalayan ecology in which rivers, glaciers and climate recognise no political line. Cooperation is its natural logic, but cooperation rests on reciprocity and responsible conduct. When either fails, it is human beings who suffer when nature roars.

Both nations now call themselves not merely modern states but civilisations returned to history. Yet they still pour military strength and political attention into an unsettled Himalayan inheritance. It is an irony history may not forgive.

2047 meets 2049

India will mark a century of independence in 2047; China, a century of the People’s Republic in 2049. For the first time in the modern era, the developmental clocks of Asia’s two giants approach their milestones together. That synchronisation can become a collision course or a strategic opportunity. The choice is architectural, not tactical.

When human beings are the central concern, ideology remains a civilisational choice, not a contest. India and China will remain competitors. India will guard its autonomy, China its own idea of power. But competition does not require confrontation.

Their strengths differ: India’s youth and market, China’s industrial depth. Yet neither can escape geography: the same sea lanes through Hormuz and Malacca, the same Global South whose markets they seek.

The sharpest geography is the mountain. The Himalayas they have militarised for sixty years are also the water tower of Asia. Their glaciers feed the rivers on which both civilisations were built.

China can patrol every peak and still lose the glacier. India can guard every pass and still drown in the flood. The water does not care about the Line of Actual Control.

That is why water must redraw the map. Two states that contest a ridge can together secure a river basin for three billion people. One is a quarrel. The other is a contribution.

Retire the inheritance

The Line of Actual Control should never become the permanent imagination of India-China relations. It is an instrument for managing an unresolved boundary, not a boundary itself. The dispute carries the residue of imperial cartography, competing claims and decades of mistrust. India and China did not create all of it. But after three quarters of a century, they own the responsibility for resolving it.

The British Empire could value unsettled frontiers because it would eventually leave them behind. India and China cannot.

In 2047, when India looks back on a century of freedom, and in 2049, when China marks a century of renewal, let the record show that two great civilisations did not merely manage an inherited line. They settled it and, having retired one of the last frontiers of another age, helped open the door to the next.

The fracture is upon us again. This time, those who see the dots must have the courage to connect them, not with wishful thinking, but with deadlines, verification and the recognition that sovereignty may divide the mountains, but responsibility for what flows from them is shared.

BRICS sunrise moment

Boundary peace is the beginning, not the destination. China cannot seek a transformed world order while treating India’s place in it as somebody else’s problem. A nation of 1.5 billion, among the world’s largest economies and a voice of the Global South, cannot forever sit outside permanent membership of the Security Council.

Beijing has for years treated India’s seat as a card to withhold rather than a cause to advance. For China, backing India’s permanent membership would be the single most convincing proof that its rise seeks a larger table, not a smaller one. A new world order cannot be built for all of us while being governed by only some of us.

India, equally, must separate accommodating China’s legitimate interests from acquiescing in Chinese primacy. The first is statecraft; the second would betray strategic autonomy.

The coming BRICS summit provides an opportunity for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping to shape a new compact: a 2030 horizon for boundary delimitation through statecraft, not surrender; Chinese support for India’s permanent place on a reformed Security Council; and an institutional compact to protect the waters of the Third Pole. These are not sequential bargains, but concurrent pillars of one strategic choice. Together, they could turn a managed rivalry into an architecture for coexistence and offer the world an example of two great Asian civilisations choosing resolution over inherited rivalry.

From frontier to future

When Swami Vivekananda reached Chicago in 1893, he carried neither an army nor an economic bloc, but a civilisational confidence able to accept difference without fearing it. Humanity was India’s first call long before border disputes or republic lines. China, too, draws upon a civilisational vocabulary older than the modern state.

Neither tradition requires sentimental friendship. States have interests and power matters. But civilisations should hold longer memories than governments and longer horizons than armies.

Human beings are the charge of civilisations, which cannot walk away from the consequences of their choices. A new world order, if it is to hold, must be built around human consequence, not inherited lines.

The Himalayas sustain billions of human lives. Borders are what empires leave behind; people are what civilisations are for.

That is reason enough to settle the last unsettled frontier; step from empire’s shadow into the sunrise.

The author led a tank squadron to Dhaka during the Liberation War in 1971