Question: Which border area is under dispute between India & Nepal? Why is the area important? What can be done to resolve the issue?
Answer: Sir, India and Nepal share an 1,800-km open border. The border issue is not new and has come up now and again in the bilateral relationship since the 1960s. Nepal has objections to the Kalapani area being under Indian governance. Kalapani is a strategically important tri-junction between India, China, and Nepal in the Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand.
Since the 1962 war with China, India has deployed the ITBP at Kalapani, which is advantageously located at a height of over 20,000 ft and serves as an observation post for that area.
Nepal has also been unhappy about the China-India trading post at Lipu Lekh, the earliest to be established between the two countries. Shipkila in Himachal followed two years later, and Nathu La only in 2006. India and China agreed to increase border trade through Lipu Lekh during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Beijing in 2016. Nepal thus loses out the revenue it could have earned from transit-exit cess.
India constructed an 80-km road in Uttarakhand that ends at Lipulekh Pass on the border with China. The construction of roads and development of adequate infrastructure along the borders is a vital necessity for effective border management, security, and development of infrastructure in inaccessible areas adjoining the China Border. The road will also serve the pilgrims going to Kailash-Mansarovar (revered as abode of Bhagvaan Shiva) in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The pilgrims do not need the alternative routes now available for the pilgrimage, one through the Nathu La border in Sikkim and the other via Nepal, which entailed “20 per cent land journeys on Indian roads and 80 per cent land journeys in China … the ratio has been reversed. Now pilgrims to Mansarovar will traverse 84 per cent land journeys on Indian roads and only 16 per cent in China. In addition, the new road is also expected to provide better connectivity to Indian traders for the India-China border trade at the Lipu Lekh pass between June and September every summer. Thus, the road, built by the Border Roads Organisation, is important for “strategic, religious and trade” reasons.
Sir, the solution lies in settling all boundary disputes, including the Kalapani dispute, through bilateral talks as was agreed in 1998 between the two Prime minister’s of that time. Hence, responding to Nepal’s protests, India has agreed to discuss the matter at foreign secretary level talks between the two countries (postponed due to Covid-19).
Note:
- India perceives Nepal to be tilting towards China under the leadership of Prime Minister K P Oli and his Nepal Communist Party. China is making serious inroads in Nepal, through investment in both infrastructure and technology.
- Nepal claims all territories east of the Kali river, including Limpiyadhura, Kalapani and Lipulekh, under the Treaty of Sugauli that it signed with the erstwhile British administration in 1816. under which Nepal renounced all territory to the west of the river Kali, also known as the Mahakali or the Sarada river. The river effectively became the boundary. Nepal’s case is that the river originates from a stream at Limpiyadhura, north-west of Lipu Lekh. Thus Kalapani, and Limpiyadhura, and Lipu Lekh, fall to the east of the river and are part of Nepal’s Far West province in the district of Dharchula.
- New Delhi’s position is that the Kali originates in springs well below the pass, and that while the Treaty does not demarcate the area north of these springs, administrative and revenue records going back to the nineteenth century show that Kalapani was on the Indian side, and counted as part of Pithoragarh district, now in Uttarakhand. Both sides have their own British-era maps as proof of their positions.
- In the 1980s, India & Nepal set up the Joint Technical Level Boundary Working Group to delineate the boundary, which demarcated everything except Kalapani and the other problem area in Susta. Thus in 1998 they resorted to sort out the boundary disputes through bilateral talks.