POLITICS: India-China Ties Hinge on Trade across Mountain Pass

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NATHU LA, India, Jun 25 2003 (IPS) - Relations between the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, hinge on the newly reopened cross-border trade across this snow-swept 4,545-metre high mountain pass, which provides a window into the once forbidden land of Tibet.

From time immemorial, yak and mule trains bearing anything from salt, gold, silk, cotton and Buddhist ideology have trudged up and down this gap in the formidably high Himalayas, a little more than 300 kilometres south of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.

But it took Britain, that ‘nation of shopkeepers’, to formalise and widen the trade through the Sikkim-Tibet Convention of 1890, which thereafter continued uninterrupted until the brief but bloody 1962 border war between yet new post-colonial republics of China and India.

This week, three decades after the war that saw deep incursions by China’s army into Sikkim – then a Buddhist kingdom and protectorate of India – Asia’s giants have decided to put aside their quarrels over real estate aside and get on with the business of mutual development through trade.

On Tuesday, as a highlight of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s six-day-long visit to China which ends Friday, leaders of the two countries signed documents that facilitate trade between ”Sikkim state” and the ”Tibet Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China” over the Nathu La pass.

While analysts in New Delhi are still wrangling over what exactly was agreed on and whether or not this would mean Beijing’s recognition of Sikkim, which merged with India in 1975 following a referendum, there is cause for local celebration.

”This is the best news we have had in a long time maybe there is now chance for the real development of this remote state,” explains Jigme N Kazi, a writer and historian based in Gangtok, the picturesque capital of Sikkim.

Until the 1962 war, Sikkimese like Kazi maintained close relations with people in such Tibetan towns that lead to Lhasa, such as the trading town of Yatung and that great centre of the Buddhist Lamaistic faith Xigatse.

”If nothing we can now visit those places my forefathers roamed not too long ago and even find brides,” says Kazi, who is himself married to a Tibetan, Tsering, a teacher in Gangtok.

Until recently Sikkimese, who formed part of Indian official delegations to China, were routinely denied visas. This week’s agreements fall short of open recognition for Sikkim as an integral part of India.

Excited by this week’s developments are the Indian traders from India’s eastern port city of Kolkata, who were encouraged to settle in Gangtok in the early part of the last century by the British in the hope that their renowned business acumen would further stimulate the cross-border trade.

”We have been waiting for the trade to revive for decades now,” says Bhaskaranand Aggarwal, whose family maintained shops in Yatung that had to be abandoned hastily on hearing the news that the Chinese army was sweeping down to the Indian border.

A keen photographer, Aggarwal’s prized possessions and memorabilia from the ”good old days” include amateur footage of the mule-back trade across Nathu La as it was conducted during the fifties.

”We even used to carry across knocked-down American automobiles and motorcycles, which were reassembled in garages in Tibet,” recalls Aggarwal.

According to Aggarwal and other traders in Gangtok, China would greatly benefit from revived trade because the high Tibetan plateau is better accessible from the Indian state of Sikkim, which is barely 500 km north of the bustling port of Kolkata.

Gangtok traders aver that long before the 1962 war erupted, the Chinese army actually used their services to stock supplies of rice and equipment brought in through Kolkata port, while Indian intelligence agencies believed they were meant to help with the ‘pacification’ of Tibetan rebels.

”Sikkim is the lifeline of Tibet. For the better management of Tibet, China needs to regularise food supplies through Sikkim,” explains K Srikanth, China scholar and researcher at the New Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), a government-backed think tank well-respected for its independent views.

Sikkim’s elected chief minister, Pawan Kumar Chamling, one of those who have been advocating the revival of the cross-border trade, is convinced that the future development of the state lies in trade and tourism. ”We have no industrial base here and there is no other scope for providing employment for our people,” he says.

Since the 1975 merger of Sikkim and the abolition of the monarchy, the state has depended on large amounts of development funds from the central government in New Delhi, a distant 1,500 km to the west.

Sikkim has no airport or railhead and the roads down into the plains are prone to blockage by perennial landslides.

”If there can be a bus route from New Delhi to Lahore then there is no reason why there cannot be a bus route from Gangtok to Lhasa,” says Palden Gyamtso, a member of India’s parliament and an influential bureaucrat.

But the opening up of Nathu La to trade holds out prosperity not only for Sikkim but for India’s entire north-eastern region, which has been ridden by insurgencies partly because of unreconciled ethnic differences with the bulk of India and partly because of sheer remoteness.

According to Alokesh Baruah, a well-known economist and expert on north-eastern affairs, the revival of cross-border trade could also greatly help with the rapid development of countries that surround Sikkim like Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

Baruah, who is working on a book on the trade history of the region, said China’s booming south-western province of Yunnan has long been seeking economic cooperation with the eastern parts of India, Bangladesh and Burma.

This, however, has been blocked by the unsettled border issue between India and China.

Yet following the liberalisation of the economies of both countries, bilateral trade has galloped at an extraordinary speed. Over the last three years, trade has been growing at a rate of 25 to 35 percent annually, touching 5 billion U.S. dollars in volume in 2002.

If Hong Kong and Taiwan are also included, Greater China would become India’s third largest economic partner after the European Union and the United States.

”With globalisation a fact of life, there is now no way of stopping the opening up of the floodgates of border trade between such giant economies as those of India and China – and allowing the entire region to benefit from it,” Baruah says.