Review of Akhilesh Upadhyay’s In the Margins of Empires

The ‘Chicken’s Neck’, in non-avian parlance, is a 60-km-long strip of land that keeps India’s territorial contiguity with its eight north-eastern States. About 22km wide at its narrowest, it is cheek by jowl with four international borders — the Tibetan Administrative Region’s Chumbi Valley and Bhutan to the north, Nepal to its west, and Bangladesh to the south and east. A geographical oddity that traces its genesis to the Partition, the strategic corridor’s significance — and vulnerability — is apparent even to the naked eye, let alone the nation-states encircling it. It hit home with the 2017 China-India stand-off over the construction of a road by the People’s Liberation Army in Doklam, a tri-junction under 100 km from the strip.

As one superpower hunkers down from the vantage point of the Chumbi Valley and an emerging one fast-tracks fortifications to keep it at bay, little lives are subordinated to big states, finds journalist-turned-policy analyst Akhilesh Upadhyay. Fluid borders turn hard, comings and goings grind to a halt, and kindred ties fray as borderlands splinter along border lines. “Decisions from faraway capitals often harm the local residents who have little connection to the distant state,” he writes. To illustrate the point, In the Margins of Empires — A History of the Chicken’s Neck casts a wider gaze. The author treks up the eastern Himalaya in Nepal, drives through Siliguri, Kalimpong and Gangtok in India, and touches down at Lhasa in search of a lost interconnectedness.

Closing of borders

Upadhyay traces much of the trans-Himalayan rupture to the Chinese takeover of Tibet in the 1950s, which put not only New Delhi on guard but also forced King Mahendra of Nepal to consolidate frontier regions that had a skeletal state presence up until then. The cross-border trade in Olangchung Gola, on the upper reaches of eastern Nepal, ceased after the Tibet takeover led to the closing of what had been an open border.

Similarly, the closing of the Tibet-Bhutan border in 1960 shut down the centuries-old trade route through Chumbi Valley; Kalimpong, midway between Siliguri and Gangtok, which flourished as a Calcutta-Lhasa connector bypassing Nepal, was another immediate casualty.

The post-annexation geopolitics brought other global powers into the mix. The author, at the risk of repetition, describes at great length the Eisenhower-era ‘Mission ST CIRCUS’ plan where the CIA trained Khampa fighters in high-altitude Colorado to build the resistance movement in Tibet, with Mustang in Nepal becoming the de facto base camp for guerrilla operations. With the U.S. cooling off on Communism after its ‘ping-pong’ success, the need to keep Beijing in good humour finally forced Kathmandu to clamp down on the insurgents in 1974; parallels can be found in the flushing out of ULFA secessionists from Bhutan and Bangladesh decades later amid a reset in ties.

As Nepal and Bangladesh undergo intense political churn while India and China are on the cusp of a ‘Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai’ redux, Upadhyay’s lament is that the fortunes of the highlanders and the Terai people hinge on the waxing and waning of diplomatic relations. When not blockaded by New Delhi, the Nepali will still take an autorickshaw to Siliguri for her shopping run. And the Bangladeshi will complain ad nauseam about layering up but make it to Nathula and Darjeeling — until hawkish comments emanating from political quarters about choking the Chicken’s Neck stops him in his tracks.

In the Margins of Empires — A History of the Chicken’s Neck

Akhilesh Upadhyay

Vintage

₹499

abdus.salam@thehindu.co.in