Talk:Ardagh–Johnson Line

Why this page now?

The Discoverer, I am not sure what the point is for spinning this subject off into a separate page. Also, if this were to be a page, then its title should be Johnson–Ardagh Line, as it is state in the RS. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 16:22, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Hello Kautilya3, I had intended to write a note on your talk page regarding this article. The articles Aksai Chin and Sino-Indian border dispute have the same sizeable section about the Johnson Line but I feel that they still didn't do justice to the topic. For instance, here are some aspects that are not explained properly:

• The description of the Johnson Line proposed by Johnson.
• The difference between the Johnson Line and the border as claimed by India.

There are articles for all the other boundary lines of India viz. Radcliffe Line, McMahon Line and Macartney-MacDonald Line. If we have a separate article for the Johnson Line, then we can reduce or remove the content related to this topic from other articles.

I have no problem with renaming the article as 'Johnson–Ardagh Line'

The Discoverer (talk) 18:51, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

No, I don't think this topic exists. Johnson's was an early survey (with significant limitations), which basically said this is where Kashmir's boundaries are. Even calling it a "Johnson Line" is a misnomer.

Moreover, you have copied here the same dubious content that I had tagged as being POV based unreliable sources (like Gurswamy, Calvin etc.) We don't want problematic content copied and duplicated all over Wikipedia. I suggest you draftify it and work on improving the content using better sources.

By the way Hoffmann calls it "Ardagh–Johnson line".-- Kautilya3 (talk) 20:23, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

If you agree, what I propose is, that we can remove all the duplicated and dubious content related to the Johnson-Ardagh Line from articles (I think that it's mainly in Aksai Chin, Sino-Indian border dispute and Sino-Indian War), and work on it in this article. The Discoverer (talk) 08:08, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

I can agree only if the content is drastically improved. It is one thing for lousy content to be buried somewhere in a humongous article, and it is another thing to highlight it as an independent article on its own. That is why I recommend draftifying it and improving it before putting it up for display. We should not treat Wikipedia as a private notebook! -- Kautilya3 (talk) 12:27, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

References

Johnson's map

Please note also that the "Johnson Line" covers the entire border of Kashmir, not just Aksai Chin. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 13:28, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

This means in particular the northern boundary, which he places at some place called "Walabot pass 16,760", well to the north of Shahidulla. It might be the Sanju Pass, going by the location and the height. No Indian government or Kashmir government has put the border that far north. Shahidulla as about as far as the Kashmir government claimed, as marked in the "traditional boundary". -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:39, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

The 1909 "Outer Line" mentioned on the Sino-Indian War page is at the Yarkand river. It does not even go up to Shahidulla. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:42, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

If we don't have an article here, then people looking for information about the Ardagh-Johnson line are redirected right into the midst of the dense wilderness of pages like Aksai Chin, Sino-Indian border dispute and Sino-Indian War and then have to read that lousy content. The understanding of what I think is the vast majority of people, is that Johnson proposed some 'absurd' boundary, and independent India claims that same boundary as it's border. That, of course, is far from the truth, but I don't think that one could understand that from any of the articles. These details can be explained in this article.

It seems to me that there are two strategies to proceed with: one is that we remove all the problematic content from all the articles and bring them here and trim and work on them. This would require more effort. The second is that we build from scratch and keep only good, well-sourced content on this page, even if it means that this page remains small. This would be the easier way.

The Discoverer (talk) 17:52, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Look, Johnson is entirely irrelevant. India never claimed that it was using Johnson Line or any other line. India only said, "these are our borders" based on the local knowledge they had. Had Britain established an agreed border with China, India would have stuck to it. If they hadn't, whatever imperialist ruminations they might have had were entirely irrelevant to India. You are just madly chasing neo-imperialist commentators, who are annoyed that India didn't follow their imperialist policies. You need to junk them. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 18:27, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

I will tone down some of my criticism because it does seem to be correct that the Republic of India inherited the Ardagh-Johnson Line. Hoffmann says:

An Indian scholar who helped devise the official view of the Nehru government after independence has argued that, during the last two decades of British-India, a version of the Ardagh-Johnson line came to be accepted as a matter of policy. He says the final British acceptance of such a line came in 1936.[5: G. Narayana Rao, pp. 59-60.] These assertions must remain speculative so long as independent scholars do not have ready access to the records of that period in Government of India archives. But scholarly opinion is supportive in a general way. Alastair Lamb, for example, reports that after World War I British-India emerged with an Ardagh-Johnson boundary so far as the Aksai Chin was concerned. A 1927 decision to drop any claim to Shahidulla fort north of Karakorum Pass (and thus beyond the Aksai Chin) left intact the claim to the Aksai Chin itself, either because the British had no reason to set a new policy for it, or because they wanted to retain it as a buffer between India and a possibly Russian-dominated Sinkiang.[6: Lamb, China-India Border, pp. 110, 112-114; Ladakh, p. 14]

I don't think Hoffman is well-versed in history (e.g., the decision to give up Shahidulla was sealed by 1892, not 1927), but he is at least able to present Lamb's historical observations filtering out the "neo-imperialist" polemics that go with them.

However, India did not blindly follow the inherited border. It put it to its own rigorous analysis.

Presently Nehru declared India’s stance on the boundary in a statement in parliament [in 1951]. The frontier from Ladakh to Nepal was defined “chiefly by long usage and custom.” In the east it was “clearly defined by the McMahon Line which was fixed by the Simla Convention of 1914 ... that is our boundary—map or no map.”

So the two parts of the border were treated differently. Where there was an agreed border (McMahon Line), India followed it. In other places, it didn't. Only after India convinced itself of the "long usage and custom" in Ladakh did it fix the border.

At this juncture [after the Kongka Pass incident] the director of the MEA’s historical division, Sarvepalli Gopal, returned from London where he had been studying the basis of India’s claims in British archives. Gopal thought that India had a sound historical case for Aksai Chin and conveyed it to Nehru; but it was only in February 1960 that Gopal took Nehru through all the evidence and finally convinced him that India’s claims to Aksai Chin were strong.[99: Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis, 82–3] The available evidence suggests that until this point Nehru was thinking of Aksai Chin as a bargaining counter. As R.K. Nehru recalled, “until 1960, we ourselves were not sure that the territory belonged to us and we were thinking in terms of giving up our claims as part of a satisfactory settlement.”[100: “India & China: Policy Alternatives,” R. K. Nehru Papers, NMML.]

-- Kautilya3 (talk) 12:34, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Kautilya3, thank you for your commitment to accuracy and to resist any distortion of history. This excellent explanation that you have presented in your reply above is part of what I think we must try to explain in this article.

May I suggest the following way to move forward: Let's delete all the dubious and uncertain content in this article, and only keep what we know to be reliable facts. Let's keep all the hoopla about Johnson to the absolute minimum, and focus on the Ardagh-Johnson line and its relevance or irrelevance to independent India's border claim. I am not at all interested in propagating any neo-imperialist views, but these views do exist in readers' minds, and we have to deal with them. By saying 'deal with them', I mean that we have to state the correct facts which may be counter to popular perception.

So, if the perception is that 'Johnson proposed something stupid, and independent India blindly adopted that', or 'India used so-and-so line to fix its border', then this is the place to state the facts that India did not base its border upon this line, and that India's border is different from the Johnson line. Otherwise, a reader would read the section about the Johnson line in any other article and go away without being wisened to the fact that this is not really the basis of India's border.

On the other hand, even though India did not base its border in this area upon the Ardagh-Johnson line, understanding the basis behind and the development of this line is still important in order to understand how independent India fixed it's border in this region.

The Discoverer (talk) 06:24, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

No, it doesn't work like that. The above discussion only goes to show that India's border is not Ardagh-Johnson, at least it does not derive from Ardagh-Johnson. You cannot write an article based on what something is not. You can only write it based on what it is.

So an article on Ardagh-Johnson has to squarely deal with the imperialist politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially why Shahidulla was given away etc. I really don't have an interest in doing that right now. The modern Indian history that I covered above can only be the postscript for the real story of Ardagh-Johnson. It is not the centre of the matter.

By the way, right now, I am working on the Demchok sector, which is in my view, much more important than Aksai Chin. People live there, and it is the route to Kailas-Manasarovar. It has a thousand years of history. And all our maps don't even mark the line of control there. Nobody knows its status. See the discussion at Talk:Jammu and Kashmir and the new page on Charding Nullah. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:15, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

And also, for anybody that knows the history of Ladakh, it is as plain as white snow that Ladakh's northern border has always been the Kuen Lun rang. See the new page on Maryul. Equivalently Xinjiang's southern border was Kuen Lun range, as it is still is beyond Aksai Chin. Ardagh and Johnson were merely discovering this traditional border. They didn't create it. Alastair Lamb is a disturbed soul. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:49, 22 October 2019 (UTC)

Kautilya3, I agree with your comments above. The only thing I would add is that even though the modern Indian border is not central to this article, I think that it's important to mention and clarify that to a reasonable extent.

You are doing an excellent job on the articles related to Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Thank you for your work.

The Discoverer (talk) 13:24, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Right, the modern Indian border is not the point of this article, but Johnson's line is. So, what is the nature of the Johnson's line?

• It is bordered by the Changchenmo valley in the south (already surveyed by plenty of other teams including Johnson and Goodwin-Austen), and by the Kun Lun mountains in the north. Once these two are fixed, you have the Aksain Chin plains in the middle with a bunch of lakes, with streams flowing into them from the Kun Lun mountains and other little hills and mountains within Aksai Chin. Johnson put his boundary on the watershed of these streams. This is perfectly the normal thing any surveyor would do. So, all this criticism of Johnson, which even D. K. Palit parrots, is just politically motivated mumbo-jumbo.
• The only question regarding Johnson's boundary is whether the choice of Kun Lun mountains is a reasonable one. Note that A. H. Francke, who only studied Ladakh's history and died long before there was any Sino-Indian dispute, has also put Ladakh's northern border along the Kun Lun mountains. It cannot be anywhere else, once we understand that Maryul was an offshoot of West Tibet. Just as Tibet's northern boundary is along the Kun Lun mountains elsewhere, so it is with Maryul/Ladakh.
• Secondly, Shahidulla, which is at the foot of Kun Lun mountains was already under the control of Kashmir. According to Parshotam Mehra, the Dogras took control of Shahidulla as soon as they conquered Ladakh (even before the British were involved). So, the Maharaja of Kashmir didn't need Johnson's help to acquire the northern border. It is possible that the eastern border was a surprise to him, because nobody would have ventured into that barren country before. But since it is barren country, the actual gain from it was very little. So, I can't understand how people can talk as if the Maharaja had bribed Johnson to create an "extended boundary" for him.

The Macartney-MacDonald Line is based on a different principle, which is to use the water-parting line of the Indus waters and the Tarim basin waters. On the face of it, there is nothing unreasonable about this line either. The choice between the two boils down to a political issue. Just as the British gave away Shahidulla on political grounds, they were also prepared to give away the northern Aksai Chin. If the Chinese negotiated in good faith, there is a good chance that Indians would have agreed to it. G. F. Hudson writes:

In view of Nehru's friendly attitude towards the Chinese People's Republic it seems very probable that Peking could have obtained an adjustment of the frontier by negotiation, but it preferred to present India with a fait accompli by surreptitious construction of the road and after the inevitable disclosure to behave with a peremptory arrogance incompatible with any peaceful settlement. Mr. [Narayana] Rao rightly points out that China turned down the mediation proposals made by six neutral Afro-Asian states as well as Indian offers to refer the dispute to the International Court or to arbitration.

-- Kautilya3 (talk) 18:16, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

References

Bibliography

• Hoffmann, Steven A. (1990), India and the China Crisis, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-06537-6
• Mehra, Parshotam (1992), An "agreed" frontier: Ladakh and India's northernmost borders, 1846-1947, Oxford University Press
• Raghavan, Srinath (2010), War and Peace in Modern India, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1-137-00737-7

1837

Map of British India, 1837

I found this interesting map today, from 1837. It was also reroduced in the Imperial Gazetteer in 1908.

1837 was just three years after Zorawar Singh's first campaign to Ladakh, when they were still part of the Sikh Empire. The British were no where in Kashmir by then. As far as I know this is the first time Kashmir had appeared in British maps. Two things worth noting:

• Aksai Chin is included (and possibly Shahidulla)
• Demchok is excluded.

So the British implicitly knew that the northern border was along the Kuen Lun range, and also knew that Aksai Chin was part of Ladakh. This puts paid to Alastair Lamb's contentions that the Johnson added thousands of square miles to the Maharaja's territory.

The Demchok issue is more troubling. Moorcroft travelled in Ladakh in 1820s when it was still independent, and he believed that Demchok "belongs to Gartok". So, this got reflected in the 1837 map, and despite the Boundary Commission including it in Ladakh, they removed it later. Far from being a precise and accurate reflection of the ground situation, the Kashmir Survey seems to have been just filled with confirmation biases of preconceived notions. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:43, 10 November 2019 (UTC)

Great. I have added the map to the article. The Discoverer (talk) 06:24, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

I am afraid I was wrong about this. This was map drawn in 1908 about the purported situation in 1837. So it incorporates the knowledge and decisions made until 1908, in particular the exclusion of Demchok. Aksai Chin would have been "terra incognita" in 1837. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:10, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Shahidulla

1888 Survey of India map of India - Second edition

The importance of Shahidulla (and one or two adjacent factors) need to be discussed in depth. To situate the context in which Akshai Chin was marked.

A few in mainstream press have opined of Johnson and Maharaja to have engaged in some kind of nexus (Johnson was a colorful character, about which little is mentioned in our article - probably because they need to be sourced to primary reports) but that seems quite unlikely to me. TrangaBellam (talk) 12:46, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Shahidulla and Aksai Chin were quite different issues. I am working on a rewrite of this page at the moment. More later. Kautilya3 (talk) 12:55, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Alastair Lamb was the first to rant about Johnson and later it turned into an industry to rant about him. But there is nothing in reliable sources that shows anything. As far as I can see, he was just a regular old surveyor who did what he was told to do. His mandate was to survey up to the "Chinese frontiers", which is what he did and drew a line.

The problem for Lamb and company is not that he drew a line, but rather that the (British) Government of India accepted that line as the border. Since they can't rant about the Government, they rant about him. As far as I am concerned, even naming this line as a "Johnson Line" is POV. It was really the "Government of India line", which did not change between 1888 and 1947. It changed later in the north (in a negative direction), but not in the east. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:15, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

To the south of Changchenmo, it seems that he was told where he had to survey up to. In other words, somebody higher up decided the border and gave instructions. His map and the SoI map show exactly the same border for these regions. In most cases, they moved in the negative direction. In other words, the Government of India was actively giving away territory to Tibet/China, completely contrary to the current day Chinese propaganda. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:25, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

References

Gardner

I am reverting this wording:

By late 1950s, the Government of India fixed its official boundary in the west, which included the Aksai Chin, borrowing from the Johnson Line (and Macartney–MacDonald Line).

References

Gardner says (in a "Conclusion" section):

That same year the government of India revised its official maps that showed “undemarcated” or “undefined” borders in Ladakh to draw a definite border, a composite of the Johnson Line of 1865 and the 1899 Macartney–MacDonald Line, based on no additional surveying or demarcation.[51:Lamb, The Sino-Indian Border in Ladakh, 70]

If you look at Lamb, you can see that it is a misrepresentation of what Lamb is saying.

In either case, neither author is an autority on Government of India's decision-making. I don't see why you are changing Srinath Raghavan's commentary to these pointless ramblings. Nehru said quite clearly that he wasn't following any "line". He was trying to represent the true borders of India as best he could do it. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 21:18, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

• Nehru said quite clearly that he wasn't following any "line". - And, Nehru's assertion in Parliament stands above analyses by scholars? At minimum, this needs to be attributed. Also, there is no commentary from Raghavan, to change.
• More on inheritance of of J-A line later. TrangaBellam (talk) 13:00, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

• They can critique it if they want. But they can’t distort it. Kautilya3 (talk) 13:27, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Post-1899

Hmm. A. G. Noorani notes Alastair Lamb is not right in asserting that ‘at the end’ of the First World War British India emerged with the Ardagh boundary, as defined in the 1912 telegram quoted above, "as more or less its official border. As such it is marked on some reputable maps such as those contained in The Times Atlas and the Oxford Atlas". He does not cite any official map in support of his opinion nor London’s endorsement of the Viceroy’s proposal. Hardinge had made a suggestion which the C-in-C readily accepted. There was no deliberation over the record. Indeed Lamb himself later asserted that Lord Hardinge’s plan was "never accepted by the Home Government, nor was it rejected out of hand". It remained a ‘plan’, like many others before it.

• G. Narayana Rao (p. 59) mounts an even terse critique of Lamb's statement. Hoffman misinterprets him. TrangaBellam (talk) 14:49, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

1930s ROC border

• No, Hoffmann is not misinterpreting him. He says he "no longer believes" that the Ardagh-Johnson line was followed by British India. The citation he gives is an interview in 1989. So this is not based on Lamb's public writings.
• In terms of the British Indian government thinking, the key is the fate of the MacDonald line. This line was alive till 1912 (it was being modified till then). The 1914 Simla Convention map suggests that the British still had it in play (even though the Qing dynasty was gone).
• Parshotam Mehra's big point is that the MacDonald Line was a quid-pro-quo arrangement. The British were ceding the eastern part of Aksai Chin in return for China relinquishing suzerainty over Hunza. If that is so, then in the 1930s the British forced Hunza to snap all ties to China (ROC now). So we can expect that the ROC now assumed the MacDonald Line to be the border. Indeed, that is what the ROC maps show from 1930 onwards. Moreover, ROC also made plans to lay the Aksai Chin road through there (even though they didn't have the resources to do it).
• The first edition of the Survery of India map (which you find on the cover of Gardner's book) was made in 1938. Since this map didn't show any border, we have to say that the British hadn't committed to the MacDonald Line. But nevertheless, the MacDonald Line was now the de facto border. Mehra implies this, though he doesn't say so explicitly.
• PRC also acted as if the MacDonald Line was the border. Their 1956 claim line is effectively the MacDonald Line (though it advanced to Kongka La in the Chang Chenmo Valley).
• So I would say Narayan Rao is wrong. The Ardagh proposal was never accepted. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:39, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

• Where does Narayana Rao state that Ardagh was accepted by China/ROI or even the BI Govt.? He made out his case that it was not Ardagh which came to be accepted by Independent India but a version derived from MacDonald. The BI Govt. had tried to go back to Ardagh in the 1910s with some zeal but they remained unexecuted plans.

• This is what I found to be misinterpreted by Hoffmann in his 1987 paper. ["Him" refers to Narayana Rao.] More later.

• I agree that PRC also acted as if the MacDonald Line was the border. This is not explicitly stated by anyone other than Karackattu (2017). There exists enough evidence that cartographic presentations in publications, which were vetted by the government, were similar to the Macdonald line. Till Zhou Enlai's proposal.

• Liu (1994) [disclaimer that this monograph is ahistorical propaganda in favor of China but gets some parts right] notes In 1938. the British and Chinese representatives discussed the border incidents in Kashgar. Chinese representative General Jiang was said to mention the 1899 boundary proposal, and he did not recognize the proposed line as a valid border definition. However, he indicated that the Chinese did not agree to negotiate the 1899 border proposal, mainly because they did not want to accept the British annexation of Hunza, not because they disagreed with the proposed boundary alignment. [Cited to this book.]

• In context of BI's commitment to MacDonald line (or anything else), Liu (1994) notes, Before the British left India, the British-Indian government had shown no boundary at all in that area on its official maps. In Volume XIl of Aitchison's Treaties published in 1931, it was stated that The northern as well as the eastern boundary of the Kashmir state is still undefined. The Survey of India maps published in the 1920s and 1930s did not indicate any boundary alignment or show any color difference in this area, and wide spaces between Kashmir and Xinjiang and between Kashmir and Tibet were shown blank. In 1945, under the guidance of Olaf Caroe, Foreign Secretary of India, on new Survey of India maps the Aksai Chin area began to be shown by a color-wash with the words "Boundary Undefind" marked on it. I don't think that this is much disputable. Karunakar Gupta (p. 54, xii) as well as A. G. Noorani takes the same stance. TrangaBellam (talk) 04:40, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Narayan Rao writes: At the end of the First World War, therefore, India emerged not with the Ardagh line as Lamb (p. 110) has supposed but with the Mustagh-Aghil-Qara Tagh-Kuen Lun Line up to which alone de facto occupation now extended and to the south of which the Chinese had been unable to encroach ever since the adoption of their forward policy in 1890. This line is what is represented in independent India's border. Note the trailing "Kuen Lun", which means Aksai Chin was included in India. This line was developed in response to Ardagh's proposal (which I still can't figure out in precise detail). So I think Hoffman is justified in summarising this as "crystallizing" on the Ardagh-Johnson Line. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 07:06, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Was he right about this? Nobody knows. As Hoffman remarks, those records are not available to the independent scholars yet. So, Liu, Karunakar Gupta and Noorani all go into the "speculative" camp. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 07:15, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, the 1930s records should have become available under the 50-year rule, which has now been replaced by a Thirty-year rule. So I don't know why Lamb has been referred to as "an independent scholar who lacks such access", unless the records being referred to are the British India's records which don't have any support in London's records. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 07:33, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

1947 Political Map of India

1954 Political Map of India

• Karunakar Gupta (1982; p.59-60) remarks Since 1945, however, though the North and Eastern boundary of Kashmir were shown as 'Undefined', an attempt was made by means of a colour-wash to convey a vague idea of the North and Eastern boundaries of Kashmir, more or less in conformity with the Ardagh line in the region east of the Karakoram Pass. (This change was apparently made at the initiative of Olaf Caroe...)
  In the new map of India issued in July 1954, the words 'Boundary Undefined' were erased, and by this simple process, the Survey of India maps laid claim to a boundary alignment of Kashmir east of the Karakoram Pass akin to the John Ardagh Line, including the whole of Akshai Chin and reaching the Kuenlun Mountain in the north-east. Though in his circular of July 1954 to the Ministries of External Affairs, Home and Defence, Nehru ruled that the northern border should be considered a firm and definite one which was not open to discussion with anybody, no action was taken to push the check-posts to the forward areas in the Kashmir sector, as was done in the middle and eastern section of the Northern boundary.
  It appears that the Government of India's unilateral decision in July to issue new maps of India with a well defined Northern boundary incorporating a version of the John Ardagh Line in the Kashmir sector east of the Karakoram Pass was primarily meant to provide a bargaining counter in boundary negotiations with China, which were inevitable at some future date. TrangaBellam (talk) 07:54, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• I think Karunakar Gupta is a POV-ridden scholar in line with Lamb. I don't think we need to pay attention to any of his views.
• There was no evidence that Nehru was trying to use any "bargaining counters", but there is clear evidence that Nehru was not confident about the 1954 border and he expected that it may need revision. Srinath Raghavan discusses this at length. "Not open to discussion with anybody" means precisely that he didn't regard it as bargaining position, but he was willing to revise it if the facts proved it wrong. In 1960, S. Gopal convince him that it was right. And that was the end of that. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 08:36, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• I think WP:YESPOV is applicable. In a highly controversial domain, where there are multiple conflicting schools of thought, we cannot ignore random scholars (Gupta, Maxwell and others) simply because they are contradicted by a later scholar. Or else, there are multiple (in my opinion, ill-founded) critiques of Raghavan's historiography and some editor can use them to reject Raghavan's views.
• Further, you are robbing Raghavan of much nuance. Raghavan (2006; p. 3889) notes Available evidence suggests that up to this point [S. Gopal convincing Nehru of the validity of claims to Akshai Chin] Nehru was thinking of Aksai Chin as a bargaining counter. TrangaBellam (talk) 09:40, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• In international disputes of this kind, all kinds of views would be floating around. We need to stick to facts first, and use views sparingly when they are useful for summarising information.
• I will check Raghavan again, but he may have overstated his case. Note the other discussion we were having at Talk:Macartney-MacDonald Line, where Nehru was clear about his position. Trading eastern Aksai Chin for Tawang was eminently reasonable, and I don't think that would have escaped his mind. But Karunakar Gupta is stretching the point by suggesting that it was included just to facilitate such a trade. Aksai Chin got included in the colour wash in 1947, as soon as Kashmir acceded to India. There was no China in sight at that time. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 10:16, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• I don't really find him to be stretching the point. Amit R. Das Gupta (Foreign Secretary Subimal Dutt and the prehistory of the Sino-Indian border war, 1950–62: The Sino-Indian War of 1962: New perspectives, Routledge, 2017, p. 58) notes, Zhou insisted that the whole border had never been formally delimited, but indicated that China might accept its run in the east. In return, Nehru claimed that the McMahon Line followed the Himalayan watershed, referred to treaties from the 19th century, and demanded a withdrawal of forces from Aksai Chin as a precondition for talks. Confidentially, MEA officials told Western diplomats that this was more "a bargaining position" than real demand and that Delhi was ready to make some territorial concessions. TrangaBellam (talk) 17:19, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• I don't see how this can be relevant. 1947 is not even included in its time frame.
• If it was a bargaining position then why didn't Nehru accept the bargain offered by Zhou? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 17:56, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• How is this irrelevant? 1947?
• If you are considering the 7 November 1959 truce offer, Nehru rejected it since it included ceding from Akshai Chin as well as McMahon. The latter was a no-go territory. If you are considering the 1960 summit, Nehru was already convinced by S. Gopal and PRC had lost all trust of Delhi. Raghavan (2010; p.260) notes Nehru’s proposals indicated a gradual hardening of India’s stance on Aksai Chin. Hitherto, he had openly voiced his doubts about the strength of India’s claims. After the clash at Kongka Pass, Nehru was disinclined to concede anything to China under duress. This attitude was bolstered by the growing pressure of parliamentary and public opinion. At this juncture the director of the MEA’s historical division,Sarvepalli Gopal, returned from London where he had been studying the basis of India’s claims in British archives ... The available evidence suggests that until this point Nehru was thinking of Aksai Chin as a bargaining counter.
• P. Mehra (Essays in Frontier History: India, China, and the Disputed Border, p. 172) To cap it all, the April 1960 visit of the Chinese Prime Minister to New Delhi proved a major political disaster. No compromise solution was in sight and Zhou's alleged offer to swap Aksai Chin for the North East Frontier Agency, if ever made, was not accepted. Both S. Gopal, Nehru's biographer, and Jagat Mehta, his principal aide on the border dispute, stoutly deny that any such proposal was ever placed on the negotiating table.TrangaBellam (talk) 18:32, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• Ok, so you are accepting that whether it was a bargaining counter depends on the time frame that we are talking about. The colour wash was extended over Aksai Chin in 1947. How could it have been a bargaining counter then?
• If he is talking about 1954 instead, why isn't it an acceptable explanation to regard the 1954 map as a cleaned-up version of 1947? It wasn't anything extraordinary. Practically all the maps of India we have available on the Commons or elsewhere on the web include Aksai Chin. Why does any one need to look for weird explanations for it?
• After the Chinese built the road through Aksai Chin in 1957 or so, it definitely became a bargaining counter, because the strategic value of the area to China was now enormously more than anything India could possibly do with it. But we can't put the cart before the horse. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 19:57, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
• Since Karunakar Gupta so eagerly talks about Government of India's "unilateral decisions", I would like to see where he talks about Government of China's unilateral decisions as well. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 20:02, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• Raghav Sharan Sharma (The Unfought War of 1962: An Appraisal, Routledge, 2018, p. 215) notes, The study of Survey of India maps published in the early 1930s reveals that: (1) All political maps of India before 1954 showed the Northern Boundary extending from Kashmir to Nepal as undefined, (2) North-Eastern Frontier was shown as undemarcated, (3) Since 1954, the Survey of India maps were changed, and (4) This alteration of maps was done surreptitiously and arbitrarily.
  Sourin Roy describes it a great cartographic forgery. He is a former deputy director of National Archives of India. He pointed out, it was initiated by Olaf Caroe and was completed under Nehru in 1954. TrangaBellam (talk) 08:31, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• Oh, please! Is this any kind of WP:HISTRS? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 08:43, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• I am not sure about the professional qualifications of the author but HISTRS notes, [h]istorical scholarship may include publications, reviewed to scholarly standards by historians, that were authored by non-historians. Routledge is an academic publisher and quite reputed at that. It is not hard to speculate that they employed suitable peer-reviewers, on deciding to co-publish Sharma's work with Manohar. Which is another publication-house of national repute. TrangaBellam (talk) 09:26, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• From the author bio in the book: Raghav Sharan Sharma who has actively taken part in militant kisan movements, has written and edited several books such as Indo-China Rivalry; Naxal Movement; Collected Works of Swami Sahajanand; India's War of Independence through Kisan Documents, among others. He is at present President of the All India Forward Kisan Sabha, and Director of Swami Sahajanand Research Institute, Varanasi. Do I need to say more?
• Even academic publishers publish opinion books of various kinds. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 09:46, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• I am not going to use this in article, ever. But if your bone of contention is that he is actively involved in leftist politics, we have to ignore a lot many folks including Irfan Habib and others. TrangaBellam (talk) 09:50, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Between the 1947 and 1954 maps displayed here, there was another issued in 1950, which was similar to the 1947 map, but had "boundary undefined" written for the western and middle sectors, and arrow marks indicating undemarcated (possibly) for some of the places in the eastern sector. This is what Karunakar Gupta is referring to. But it wasn't simply a matter of removing "border undefined". There was refinement. For example, the colour wash seems to go all the way to Shahidulla in the north but the 1954 border was along the Aghill-Mustagh-Karakash-Kuenline line that Narayan Rao mentions. Similarly the Demchok sector, Chumar sector (where the border was retracted from Chepzi), Kaurik area in HP, Neelang etc. in Uttarkhand etc. also got defined in the 1954 map. If India had extended its administration to any places that were not in India's jurisdiction earlier, there should have been complaints. But we don't see any. (Demchok, i.e., the Tibetan Demchok, is particulary interesting. There were Tibetan officials there in 1946 and Demchok seems to have figured in the 1954 negotiations with China. So why were there no objections when India included it in its map?) -- Kautilya3 (talk) 15:17, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

• How is that relevant? "Cartographic aggression" is a commonly (ab)used term and it does not necessarily include setting up posts on claimed areas. On a related issue, there has been scholarship on why China chose to be silent for years despite India traversing into disputed territories south of the McMahon (and establishing infrastructure) across 1951-54. TrangaBellam (talk) 17:52, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Ardagh proposal

I don't understand the new "Ardagh proposal" section. What was Aradagh's proposal, actually? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:24, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

The Ardagh's proposal was made in 1897, and concerned the northern frontier "which stretched from the Pamirs to Tibet and was contiguous to the Chinese provinces of Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan" (the part that was marked as undefined in the 1888 Survey of India map). Ardagh argued in essence that China could not be relied upon to act as a buffer between Russia and India, that the Chinese control of Kashgaria was tenuous, and if Russia took control, it would push the boundary as far south as possible. So, he wanted British India to claim as much territory in the north as possible. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 07:45, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

References