Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
dians can taste the benefits that a quiescent Afghanistan can bring them, even as it has been
violent for more than three decades. For a quiescent Afghanistan would spur road, rail, and
pipeline construction not only in all directions across Afghanistan, but across Pakistan, too,
and therein lies the ultimate solution to Pakistan's own instability. Though a region at peace
benefits India most of all, because its economy dwarfs that of any other state save for Ch-
ina.
But that is not the situation that currently obtains. For now, the Greater Indian Subcontinent
features among the least stable geopolitics in the world. The register of empires and inva-
sions constitutes a living history because of its relevance to deep-seated insecurities and
political problems of today. In many ways, Greater India is like a map of early modern
Europe, only worse because of nuclear weapons. In early modern Europe, there were com-
peting ethnic and national groups that were in the process of congealing into bureaucratic
states, even as they were engaged in complex balance of power arrangements that because
of their frequent interactions and subsequent miscalculations broke down occasionally into
open warfare. Modern nationalism was in a young and vigorous phase, as it is in South Asia
today. But unlike the multipolarity of early modern Europe, South Asia evinces a bipolar
struggle between India and Pakistan, with Afghanistan as one battleground, and the dis-
puted Himalayan state of Kashmir as another one. Unlike the bipolarity of the superpowers,
however, there is nothing cool, dispassionate, or ritualistic about this conflict. This is not
a clash of ideologies in which the opposing parties have no religious or historical hatred
for each other, and are separated by the wide berth of a hemisphere and Arctic ice. This
is a clash between a Hindu-majority, albeit secular, state and a Muslim one, both in full-
blooded phases of modern nationalism, and separated by a crowded, common border, with
capitals and major cities nearby. Less than two hundred miles separate Pakistan's Indus
else about this geography, it is a closed and claustrophobic one, the kind that Paul Bracken
describes well in his cogitation of a new nuclear age.
India desperately wants to escape from this geography and from this history. Its very
competition and fixation with China forms an element of this escape. India's rivalry with
China is not like the one with Pakistan at all: it is more abstract, less emotional, and (far
more significantly) less volatile. And it is a rivalry with no real history behind it.
It has been nearly half a century since India fought a limited war with China over a dis-
puted Himalayan border, in which combat occurred at altitudes of fourteen thousand feet in
the Aksai Chin region near Kashmir in the northwest and in Arunachal Pradesh near Bhutan
in the northeast. The background to this 1962 war, in which over 2,000 soldiers were killed
and 2,744 wounded, was the 1959 uprising in Tibet that sent the Dalai Lama into exile in
India, following the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet. An independent or autonomous Tibet
