The controversy over the Dalai Lama’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh shows why it doesn’t take much for India-China conversations to break down. Both countries have all too often preferred to exhaust themselves by quibbling over trifles and in the process missing the big picture. Each stumble has taken relations into tiresomely familiar terrain and brought with it fresh panic attacks. It has also been embarrassing to watch both sides pat themselves for showing tact and restraint after every high-strung rerun. As they lurch from crisis to crisis, the question is: can India and China begin a bold new conversation of change?

This will depend on whether they can raise the bar on a possible new border imaginary. This will not be easy since territory has become something of a conversation-stopper. A limited territorial imagination has reduced the borderlands into being geographies of loss. This perhaps explains the incongruity that, despite the compelling immediacy of a 4000 km long border, when we think of India and China we typically think of New Delhi and Beijing and not locations across the border. So entrenched has this imagined reality been that border regions have become virtually invisible today in India-China relations. The repeated invocation of rigid notions of territoriality have meant that any talk of new border discourses to transcend this logic to mutual benefit have remained just that.

Some of this reductive logic is also more than evident in the fact that, even as bilateral trade is expected to surge to $60 billion by year-end, much of it has passed the borders by. Despite the fanfare that greeted the resumption of border trade at Nathu La after 40 years in 2006, two-way trade has not even reached a quarter-million dollars. India-China collective imaginations remain caught in a time warp with

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