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 November 21, 2007: We were all at the weekly meeting of the BJP members of Parliament. L.K. Advani was presiding. Two of our colleagues represent Arunachal in the Lok Sabha — Tapir Gao and Kiren Rijiju. They drew attention to the fact that Chinese incursions into Arunachal were not just continuing — these were becoming more frequent and the Chinese soldiers were coming in deeper into our territory. They pointed to the statement of a senior official heading our force that is deployed on the border: the official had felt compelled to disclose in a public statement that there had been 146 incursions in just 2007. The MPs — who know the area well, who tour extensively across the state, to whom local inhabitants regularly and naturally bring information — said that the Chinese were now preventing locals from going up to regions where they had been taking their animals for grazing; that they were being supplied goods from Chinese shops...

They drew even sharper attention to an incident that had occurred just three weeks earlier. For as long as anyone could remember, there had been a statue of the Buddha — well inside Indian territory. Local inhabitants used to go up to it — pray, make their offerings. The local commander of the Chinese troops had told Indian soldiers that the statue must be removed. Our soldiers had pointed out that the statue was well within Indian territory, and so there was no question of removing it. The Chinese had come, and blown off the statue...

I raised my hand for permission to speak. It so happened that I was half-way through a book, Why Geography Matters, by the well-known geographer, Harm de Blij. Setting the stage, Blij points to the clues that one can get from maps, and why it is important to pay attention to them — especially when governments publish them. He recalls ‘a telling experience’ he had in 1990. A colleague of his, working then at the University of Baghdad, had sent him an official map that had been published by the Government of Iraq. The map showed Kuwait as the 13th province of Iraq. At a meeting in Washington, Blij had drawn the attention of the then chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives to the map and its implications. The gentleman had told Blij not to worry, the US Ambassador, he said, was on top of things... A few days had not passed, and Iraq had marched its armies into Kuwait... The first Gulf War...

But it was the passage that followed that was of urgent interest to us, and I sought Advani’s permission to read it. The passage is as follows — please do read it carefully:

‘Cartographic aggression takes several forms. Some overt, as in the case of Iraq, others more subtle. In 1993 I received a book titled Physical Geography of China, written by Zhao Sonqiao, published in 1986 in Beijing. On the frontispiece is a map of China. But that map, to the trained eye, looks a bit strange. Why? Because in the south, it takes from India virtually all of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, plus a piece of the state of Assam. Now this book is not a political geography of China, nor is the matter of appropriated Indian territory ever discussed in it. China’s border is simply assumed to lie deep inside India, and the mountains and valleys thus claimed are discussed as though they are routinely a part of China. Make no mistake: such a map could not, in the 1980s at least, have been published without official approval. It should put not just India but the whole international community on notice of a latent trouble spot.’

BJP members of Parliament are acutely sensitive to national security issues. Here were two colleagues from the state testifying to what the Chinese were doing in Arunachal, and now here was a book that was warning about what was afoot — a book published far away, a book written by an author who had no interest in either running down China or upholding India’s position on anything. The effect was palpable. Advani said that the two MPs and I should attend the BJP press conference that afternoon, and draw the attention of the media to the facts. Advaniji said that, in addition to explaining the background, I should read out the passage too.

When Parliament is in session, the press conference is held every afternoon. The large room was packed with journalists. After Sushma Swaraj and Vijay Kumar Malhotra had dealt with events of the day, Tapir Gao and Kiren Rijiju narrated the facts. I set out the context — and read the foregoing passage.

I had hardly concluded that the usual clutch — pro-Congress, pro-Left — was up in arms. ‘When was the book published?’ one demanded. I couldn’t get the relevance of the question: what has the date of publication got to do with the warning that the author had penned, even more so with the facts that the MPs have set out? ‘No, no. As the book must have been available even during the NDA regime, what did your government do about the matter?’ I hadn’t looked up the date of publication. I did now. The edition I had in hand had been published in 2007! It records that the book was first published in 2005! The journalist subsided. In any case, I pointed out, trying to soften the deflation-by-date, the vital thing is not what the book says — the passage from the book just illustrates that, while others are concerned, we continue to sleep. The thing of vital consequence is what is happening on the ground, and this is what my colleagues here — who represent the area in Parliament — have just narrated.

‘But what did the NDA do about the incursions?’ another member of that clutch demanded. First, the head of the force at the border has spoken about the incursions that have taken place this year, in 2007, I pointed out. What could the NDA government have done about them? But assume that incursions were taking place then, and that the NDA government did nothing. Does that in any way become reason for not doing anything today? Please do have some mercy on our country, I said. Here is China claiming our territory; here it is, having begun that well-rehearsed series of steps which precede a grab. Are we going to divert ourselves from that reality by the usual ‘tu-tu, mein-mein, NDA vs UPA?’