Financial Times: Nathu-la

july 9th, 2006

one more step in making india a vassal state of the chinese.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brahma Chellaney
Date: Jul 6, 2006 1:55 PM
Subject: Financial Times: Nathu-la
To: Rajeev Srinivasan

After 44 years, border trade resumes along part of the old Silk Route

By Jo Johnson at the Nathu-La Pass, Sikkim

Published: July 6 2006 03:00 | Last updated: July 6 2006 03:00

It is 44 years since Motilal Lakhotia, 80, crossed the vertiginous Nathu-La Pass into Tibet. Part of the old Silk Route connecting ancient China with India, western Asia and Europe, the 4,545-metre-high track was abruptly closed in 1962 during a fierce border war between India and China. The closure put an end to his thriving business running mules laden with cloth from Sikkim, now part of India, to Lhasa.

Today, Mr Lakhotia and 50 other traders will take part in what he expects to be an "emotional" ceremony marking the reopening of Nathu-La - literally the pass of the listening ear. "I want to see old friends and start trading again," he says, recalling the days when there used to be 200 Indian shops in Yatung, an isolated Tibetan town supplied daily by 5,000 mules from Sikkim.

At the Nathu-La Pass, mist muffles the sound of last-minute preparations - bulldozers fixing the Chinese road to the border, bunting flapping in the wind. Next to the waist-high barbed wire that marks the international border, a sign gives Indian troops translations for a few friendly phrases: "How's the family? Wish you all the best." Until today, the only regular contact between the two armies has been on Sundays and Thursdays when, in continuation of an old military tradition, mail between China and India is handed across the frontier. That will all change now.

The latest attempt to normalise border relations between India and China will allow trade to resume today. Compared with the 1950s it will be severely circumscribed, with India consenting to imports of only 15 goods from Tibet, mostly animal items such as yak tails and goatskins, and China allowing in 29 products, including tea, rice, flour, clothes, shoes, blankets, kerosene and tobacco.

The border post will be open only to local traders, from June 1 to September 30 when the snows have cleared, and from Monday to Thursday. The pass will remain barred to tourists and limits will be imposed on traders. Indians may stay up to 30 days at the border market set up on the Tibetan side, while Chinese must return to Tibet the same day.

If a study for the Sikkim government predicting that Nathu-La trade will reach $1bn (€786m, £545m) by 2010 proves accurate, the reopening will play a part in strengthening ties between the regional rivals. Trade between India and China rose 37.5 per cent last year to $18.7bn and is expected to reach $30bn by 2010, when China may have replaced the US as India's biggest trading partner.

Removing the barbed wire at Nathu-La, a two-hour crawl from Gangtok and about 450km from Lhasa and Calcutta, serves an important political purpose for both countries. Coming days after China inaugurated the first Beijing-Lhasa train service, the reopening of Nathu-La would further "help end Tibet's economic isolation", said Hao Peng, the Tibetan autonomous region's vice-chairman.

For India, a resumption of the trade is evidence that China is at last taking concrete steps to reconcile itself to India's 1975 absorption of the Himalayan buffer state. India sees it as a confidence-building measure that will speed up resolution of a seemingly intractable dispute along the length of the Himalayan frontier.

But not everyone is optimistic. Brahma Chellaney, a foreign affairs analyst in New Delhi, warns India not to drop its guard against a country that has shown no serious intention of seeking an early resolution. India, he says, needs to face up to the reality that Beijing sees a strategic benefit in keeping hundreds of thousands of troops pinned down along the Himalayas.

"For 25 continuous years, India has been seeking to settle by negotiation with China the disputed Indo-Tibetan frontier and these are the longest border talks between any two nations in modern history," he wrote recently. "An unsettled border endows China with the option to activate military heat along the now-quiet frontier if India played the Tibet card or entered a military alliance with the US."

For Mr Lakhotia, now is not the moment for geopolitics. There is a market to be seized and the Marwari trading family, which owns a cinema in Gangtok, Sikkim's capital, wants its share. The family's old firm - the Sikkim Tibet Trading Company - is preparing for a new lease of life. "They can't get everything they need from Beijing," he says.