As it turned out, not only does the Indus watershed limit not coincide with the ring of mountains that formed his proposed eastern border, but subsequent surveys and satellite images revealed that much of his sketched ring of mountains did not even exist," he noted, revealing the callousness of the British surveyor.ĭeliberating upon the science of border-making, Gardner said that by the early 20th century, colonial officials like Henry McMahon made a distinction between "delimiting" and "demarcating" borders. "Johnson, however, did not identify water-partings, nor did he do more than sketch a perimeter of mountains. The resulting map, published in 1867, formed the first instance of the shape of the Aksai Chin that subsequent maps would depict," he chronicled in the ORF article. "Unlike the more precise trigonometric surveys carried out across much of the subcontinent by the Survey of India, Johnson made a single north-south 'traverse survey' of the Aksai Chin. The first map to represent India's northern and eastern Himalayan borders came from a survey in 1865, carried out by British surveyor William Johnson, which, according to Gardner was faulty and unreliable. While the British Empire could tolerate the ambiguity this problem produced, the newly-independent Republic of India could not," Gardner noted in the ORF piece. "These maps were the result of a border-making principle centered on watershed limits that worked better in theory than in practice.
Particularly in terms of Aksai Chin, the series of proposed lines (Johnson and Macartney-MacDonald lines) and borderless maps India inherited from the British reflected limited surveying and a faulty belief that the edge of the Indus watershed aligned with a clear ring of mountains," he further explained in an interview to The Times of India. "In the precise sense of the term 'border,' India did not inherit a complete northern border at all. The British Empire bequeathed to India official maps that were in many cases literally borderless," he wrote. In 1947, the newly-independent "India inherited substantial territorial baggage at independence. Gardner described the China-India border dispute as a British "colonial legacy" in an article for Observer Research Foundation (ORF). The snow-peaked Himalayan frontiers in the western sector of China-India border areas, formally known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC), have witnessed an unprecedented level of military deployment on both sides amid the rising border tensions since May this year.Īfter several rounds of diplomatic and military talks, Beijing and New Delhi have " agreed to stop sending more troops to the frontline, refrain from unilaterally changing the situation on the ground, and avoid taking any action that may complicate the situation," according a joint statement by the Chinese and Indian defense ministries released on Tuesday, a day after the sixth round of the military commander-level meeting was held. If the British Empire still existed, it would undoubtedly deserve to be hauled into international court for this and many other reasons," he told an Indian newspaper. "We are seeing this summer a tragic manifestation of the absence of an agreed border… It is fair to say the root problem here – the absence of an accepted border – is largely the fault of the British Empire. Gardner, a non-resident scholar at George Washington University's Sigur Center for Asian Studies, also contended that the erstwhile British Empire, that governed India as its colony between 18, can't avoid the blame for the recent escalation and military clashes along the China-India border. Poor mapmaking by the British is the root cause of the longstanding China-India border tensions, according to Kyle J Gardner, American scholar and author of the forthcoming book, "The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846-1962."