So many deeds cry out to be doneAnd always urgentlyThe world rolls onTime pressesTen thousand years are too longSeize the day, seize the hour!

THE politician in Atal Behari Vajpayee must surely have identified with the poetry of Mao Zedong when he directed the Foreign Office earlier this week to finally fall in line with Beijing’s formulation that the ‘Tibetan Autonomous Region’ was a part of China. By appearing to give more than he received — the reopening of border trade at Nathu La in Sikkim after 41 years, but no formal recognition of Sikkim’s 1975 accession to India — during his visit, the Prime Minister successfully broke the dysfunctional chain of mistrust that has characterised the non-relationship between Asia’s largest powers for the best part of their independent history.

Vajpayee’s Himalayan gamble will slowly unfold over the next few weeks and months as Beijing realigns its own maps with the rest of the world, rubs out the lines that show Sikkim as an ‘‘independent’’ nation and makes it a part of India. For the leader of a party that loudly cried foul when Jawaharlal Nehru sought to do a deal with China on this very issue in the late 1950s-early 1960s, Vajpayee seems to be keen on making amends for his party’s once-misguided passion by delivering his nation from the warts and all of history.

Weird though it may seem, India’s Nathu La problem with China can best be understood while floating down the Huangpu river in faraway Shanghai. On one side is the famous Bund, its utterly beautiful turn-of-the century art deco architecture glowing in golden pools of light, but still redolent with the willing abandon of its past. On the other side is Pudong, the new playground of the East Asian rich and infamous, feverish with the idea of making money by day and pleasure by night. In Communist Shanghai, the little red book has long, long ago been replaced by the crisp crackle of the convertible renmenbi. Who cares here whether China does or doesn’t recognise Sikkim? In fact, the more important question as night merges into day into night, is, where or what is Sikkim?

Back in Gangtok or even Changgu — denoted by both New Delhi and Beijing in their latest joint declaration as the border trade town — there’s so little to go around that most people have nothing to do except passionately discuss the imagined frog well of politics. In Changgu in fact, which has must arguably the most beautiful lake in the entire world, the common mode of transport is the yak. Big fat yaks with long, brown hair and colourful ribbons that must make for the quaintest touristy pictures. A few rides during the short summer earn their riders a handful of rupees... Clearly, Sikkim has been dying to do something with its statehood since it became a part of India, apart from proclaiming from the rooftops ever so often that it is.

A slice of some of the wealth that Shanghai has made — very differently of course — would help enormously. Reinventing the old Silk Route across Nathu La that leads onto Yatung and then Lhasa and onwards into China would not only galvanise the North-East but also bring it back onto the jaded subconscious of Middle India.

By persuading the Chinese to sign a border protocol with India, Vajpayee may be seen to have abandoned New Delhi’s precondition for a formal Chinese recognition of Sikkim — especially since China is the only country in the world that still refuses to do so. Interestingly, Foreign Office mandarins negotiated long and hard in Beijing, agreeing to the Chinese formulation that the ‘Tibetan Autonomous Region’ is a part of China, in return for reopening border trade.

The mandarins insist they haven’t sold India’s territorial integrity to the Chinese for thirty pieces of silver, pointing out that the border pact indicates implicit recognition of Sikkim. TAR, they point out, was only a recognition of the reality on the ground. External Affairs minister Yashwant Sinha added that New Delhi would never ask the Dalai Lama or the 100,000-odd Tibetan refugees to leave an India in which they had been living peaceably for 44 years.

Still, the fact is that although New Delhi had in some way or other recognised China’s claim on Tibet, this is the first time they have accepted the Chinese formula. Chinese analyst Ma Jiali who works on South Asia pointed out that New Delhi’s gesture would definitely ‘‘put pressure on the Tibetans in their ongoing dialogue with Beijing’’.

The diplomats also hint at other, bigger things to come — much bigger than Sikkim or border trade. Such as quickening the pace of resolving differences on the Line of Actual Control as well as the border, problems that have festered for decades. Freeing the East clearly means that New Delhi could turn its full attention to its western border. The possibility of reapplying the ‘soft border’ Nathu La solution on the Line of Control with Pakistan already seems quite high. Officials admit that creating border points on the LoC as well as on the International Boundary, would go a long way in resolving the trauma of the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan.