From Lhasa to Kandahar and from Myanmar to Balochistan, India’s borderlands are aflame. For the last few days, it has been the extraordinary political revolt in Tibet that has weighed on India’s mind. A few weeks ago, it was the Madhesis threatening the peace process in Nepal. A few months back, it was the defiance of the military regime by Buddhist monks in Myanmar that demanded India’s attention. A couple of years ago the uprisings in Balochistan and Nepal caught our eye. The Pashtun insurgency across the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan has steadily gained momentum since the ouster of the Taliban from Kabul in 2001. Each of these crises underlines the more profound structural crisis that has engulfed India’s borderlands.

The expansion and contraction of various empires — in the Subcontinent, China, and Eurasia — left many nationalities with deeply felt grievances. Trapped unhappily behind borders that they did not make, the frontier peoples have repeatedly challenged the existing territorial order.

Whether we like it or not, the construction of modern India contributed to the creation of these problems and New Delhi must necessarily play an important part in finding solutions for them.

Many of these issues could be traced back to the unique system of a three-fold frontier built by British India. Imperial Calcutta drew what it called an “inner line” behind which it exercised full sovereignty. It also delineated an “outer line” and claimed it as its territorial boundary. In the space between the inner and outer lines, British India exercised only loose control and relied on a special set of arrangements with the tribal communities that populated these regions.

... contd.