India’s border disputes with all her neighbors

http://rupeenews.com/2009/01/04/indias-border-disputes-with-all-her-neighbors/

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Moin Ansari
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India has been unable to resolve any problems or border disputes with any of her neighbors. She has the unique distinction of having wars with all her neighbors. Khaled Ahmed reviews the book by Gupta and Sharma.

Book review: India’s maritime troubles -by Khaled Ahmed

Contested Coastlines: Fisherfolk, Nations and Borders in South Asia;

By Charu Gupta & Mukul Sharma Routledge 2008 Pp251; Price Indian Rs 650. Available in bookstores in Pakistan

South Asia has unresolved border disputes with consequences for human beings living alongside these disputed lines. It also has unresolved maritime problems with consequences for fishermen who go to the sea to catch fish and are caught because they have crossed lines they can’t see.

The tragedy is that the people who catch them also can’t see where the national boundary is. Fishermen therefore have become a symbol of the immaturity of the nation states in South Asia. It is a shame that imprisoned fishermen are dramatically “exchanged” every now and then as a reluctant confidence-building measure with which to dupe the world.


Gupta and Sharma have written a very important book and its importance lies in its humanist involvement in the plight of fishermen. The book also contains the best account in one place of the three big maritime muddles that bring a bad name to the subcontinent.

Sadly, nationalisms have become attached to the Sir Creek dispute between Pakistan and India; and if you ask a Pakistani or an Indian what the quarrel is all about, he doesn’t know. Yet he supports governments who don’t want to resolve the dispute but in fact use Sir Creek as one of the grounds on which to condemn the ‘enemy’ country.

India has a coastline 7,417 km long, out of which the Gujarat state has 1,663 km, which is one-third of the entire coastline, which makes Gujarat the principal maritime state of India. Because of a rich delta, Gujarat has the best fishing, and the Gulf of Kutch has the best fish known in India. Next to Gujarat is Pakistan, and there are no agreed maritime frontiers between the two. The Maritime Zones Act of India 1976 and 1981 under which the fishermen are caught and punished doesn’t conform to the United Nations Convention on Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), which India has signed. Pakistan is guilty of the same non-conformity.

The rival geographies of India and Pakistan are symbolised by the rival cartographies relating to Sir Creek, which is a 100 km long estuary in the marshes of the Rann of Kutch between Gujarat and Sindh. Sir Creek is not a flowing creek but a tidal channel which has no officially demarcated boundary separating Pakistan and India. Till 1954 there was free movement across the Creek. Then came the issue of finding out where the border lay. And this border was also to decide where in the Arabian Sea the line will be drawn separating Indian waters from Pakistani waters.

Till these two issues are resolved, the two countries cannot set up their continental shelves up to 350 nautical miles and describe their economic zones up to 200 nautical miles. The deadline for doing so falls in 2009. This is the area where the two could find oil and gas deposits. They can’t exploit these deposits without first sorting out the maritime boundary dispute. And the line that is drawn to describe the national frontier along Sir Creek will decide who gets how much of the sea off the Gulf of Kutch. That explains why there is no ‘give and take’ in the bilateral negotiations.

The western side of Sir Creek is under Pakistani control, and there are naval installations on the Indian side. Pakistan owns 16 creeks of Sindh and lays claim to the 17th called Sir Creek by saying that the dividing line must run along the eastern bank of the Creek - on the basis of an old map that India no longer recognises despite past record of an agreement of 1914 signed by the governments of Bombay, Sindh and the Raja of Kutch.

The Pakistani claim thus includes the left bank of the Creek, which means that the maritime border too will have to run further east than where the Indians think it is right now. The Creek no longer flows and has shifted westwards, to Pakistan’s disadvantage. Pakistan wants the boundary established according to the historical maps; India wants that too but according to thalweg.

As both the countries are deadlocked after 9 rounds of discussions till 2006, the fisherfolk suffer at the hands of the police and intelligence agencies. These poor original owners of the coast are doomed because both countries have killed the world’s biggest mangroves and fish reserve through pollution and are now simply focused on oil and gas that might or might not be there on the continental shelf. Let’s hope that there is no secret discovery of oil or gas in the uncharted waters or the two will likely have another casus belli.

India and Sri Lanka share a maritime border which is more than 400 km long cutting across three different seas: the Bay of Bengal in the north, the Palk Bay in the centre and the Gulf of Mannar in the south. In 1974 and 1976, the two countries signed agreements on how to sort out their boundaries in the sea and their territorial waters extending 12 nautical miles from the coast. The second agreement barred fishing in each other’s side of the line demarcated in the Bay of Bengal and the Gulf of Mannar. But there are islands given to one or the other country which cause confusion among the fishermen. The result is jailed fishermen in India and Sri Lanka.

With countries located close to one another and in some ways opposite rather than alongside each other, there is bound to be trouble when demarcating long 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zones. And if the sands are shifting either in the case of Sir Creek or in the case of an island in the case of Bay of Bengal, the states are going to be selfish in the absence of statesmen among their politicians. The India-Bangladesh land border is 4,000 km long and there are 20 million illegal Bangladeshis in India, which makes India rather nervous about people it catches crossing over.

The Bay of Bengal is the crux of the problem. Bangladesh has a concave coast reducing its continental shelf if the line is drawn from the coast; India has a convex coast and gets a larger share of the Gulf as continental shelf. India and Burma both reject Bangladesh’s stance that its shelf be measured from where its coastline is navigable and not choked with riverine effluvium. To make things worse, India and Bangladesh claim a 2 miles square island, two miles from India and five from Bangladesh, which has appeared in the Bay of Bengal composed of drifting volcanic silt. The quarrel is based on the flow of the river Haribanga inside the Bay.

When the coastal states are looking at the sea with greed and refuse to demarcate their areas of control, the fishermen come in the middle of the crossfire. The book describes the suffering of these poor people whose lives are already faced with destruction because of the environmental damage caused by these states to their fish beds. In old days, they had no problems with going far into the sea. Today navies patrol the waters jealously and spend their bravado on these victims of ‘contested coastlines’.