The recent controversy over China’s provocative denial of a visa to an Indian general and New Delhi’s measured but firm response to the snub is one more pointer to the unsettled nature of political relations between our two countries.
As we all painfully remember, we went to war in 1962 — a decisive triumph for China, which wrested 23,200 square kilometres of Indian territory. At the same time, Beijing has seemingly gone out of its way in the last couple of years to remind India that it still claims a further 92,000 square kilometres, mainly in Arunachal Pradesh. It doesn’t help that our two countries share the longest disputed frontier in the world, since the Line of Actual Control (LAC) has never been formally delineated in a manner accepted by both sides. India’s borders were defined by British imperial administrators in the 1913 MacMahon Line, which China rejects (though it accepts that line as its frontier with Burma, which was in those days part of British India).
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