In the once-packed streets of Surat, Gujarat, the dissonance of polishing machines and voices has lulled to a halt. A sign of life in the streets of the diamond capital of India has been replaced with an unsettling hum of hundreds of thousands’ uncertain futures. The cause? A hike in U.S. tariffs amounting to 50 percent under the Trump administration. Thousands of diamond cutters are now facing unemployment, a reminder of the inherently fragile scaffolding upon which India’s economy has historically relied. 

However, amidst the silence, there lies a story of the importance of legacy, perseverance and adaptation. India’s path from colonial constraints to being the fastest-growing major economy is riddled with periods of transformation, where adversity has often instigated innovative economic policies. Indeed, the challenges posed by these tariffs act as another catalyst for policymaking, shaping Modi’s ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ policy of self-reliance. Yet, with the diamond industry’s collapse, calls to reassess and dismantle the vulnerable foundations of such neglected industries become louder and louder. 

Surat’s diamond industry, which employs around 800,000 workers and sustains nearly 5 million livelihoods, has been a fundamental pillar of India’s exports. Polishing around 90% of the globe’s diamonds, this Indian city is where almost every diamond sold is cut and cleaned. It generates significant trade, with the U.S. serving as its single largest buyer, purchasing around $5 billion worth of stones in the last fiscal year. However, an apocalyptic wake has surfaced as the recent imposition of a 50% tariff on Indian gems has been placed: orders have been cancelled, factories are closing, workers are facing layoffs, and the beginning of a serious unemployment crisis shakes Gujarat, the home state of the current Prime Minister, Narendera Modi.

As opposition to Modi’s government grows from within the political nation, India struggles to form a united front during its shift towards an economic policy somewhat mirroring that of protectionism, when this is perhaps most needed. Since Trump’s “brokering” of a ceasefire between Pakistan and India in the long-disputed region of Kashmir in May earlier this year, the slogan “Narendra Surrender” has circulated. This slogan was spread by Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in India’s parliament and grandson of the previous Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Framed by the opposition, Modi is an incompetent victim of Trump’s bullying, whilst across the Pacific, Modi is the leader of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, with a White House Official referring to the situation in Ukraine as “Modi’s war.” 

It is precisely this rhetoric in the White House which has brought about these problematic tariffs. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, India has become Moscow’s largest oil buyer with about 2 million of the 5 million barrels of crude oil it imports per day arriving from Russia, amounting to $140 billion fed into Russian oil markets. The issue of India’s oil trade is that it indirectly finances Russia’s war against Ukraine, freezing the Indian government in a perplexing moment of decision-making. Do they stop or reduce Russian oil imports and diversify their oil trade with the hopes of America’s tariffs disappearing, or do they, like Indira Gandhi did, treat the U.S. “as a friend, not a boss” and stand stoic and firm in their trade decisions?

Either way the Modi government chose to act, it was not acting with full independent agency. Rather, this agency was overshadowed by the colonial legacy of India’s economy and its inherent issue of overreliance on exports and, particularly, certain heavy industries.

Divesting oil from Russia and elsewhere would create “a significant tightness into market,” potentially increasing the price of crude from current levels of around $67 a barrel to over $80, says Premasish Das, head of analysis of oil markets in Asia at S&P Global Commodity Insights. Continuing to trade with Russia at its current rates would result in the feared 50% tariffs, which would make exporting to the U.S. incredibly hard, diminishing trade with India’s largest export partner.

With the 50% tariffs imposed upon India on August 27, 2025, the world witnessed the Indian economy’s dependence on the stability of geopolitics. Thus, the diamond and textile sectors in particular exemplify the broader tension between historical legacies and modern realities. The recent escalation of U.S. tariffs exposes far more than a short-term economic setback; it reveals the structural fragilities that have long underpinned India’s global trade. It is the neglected industries, like the diamond trade, heavily dependent on American consumers, that illustrate these issues and the risks of overreliance on a few markets in a volatile geopolitical environment. The contradictions of Modi’s self-reliance agenda become clearer: while framed as a path to economic independence, it is in practice constrained by historically entrenched dependencies and the absence of market diversification.

Under British rule, India’s trade was cultivated to serve primarily the British economy, allowing for the gradual dissolution of India’s export trade altogether. As H.H. Wilson notes, the British manufacturer “employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms.” This forced millions of artisans into deprivation, as policies redirected demands towards British imports, and polluted India’s previously flourishing textile work as part of the ‘Silk Road.’ By the nineteenth century, the colonial government had turned India into a supplier of raw materials and a chronic consumer of imported British goods.

 The East India Company, an English joint-stock company, was granted a royal order exempting the materials they purchased in India for export to Europe from inland duties, further limiting the success of local businessmen in their respective trades. In turn, this pushed such local artisans out of business and towards factory labour as a means to sustain their, and their families’, livelihoods. In 1813, Calcutta exported 2 million pounds of cotton goods to London, whereas by 1830, this trade dynamic was entirely reversed, with 2 million pounds of British cotton manufactures being imported into Calcutta. Romesh Dutt, in his ‘The Economic History of India, Under Early British Rule,’ identifies the methods used by the British Empire to establish a systematically dependent economy: “but England was unwilling…to become subservient to India in manufacturing industry. She strove for commercial supremacy.” 

India’s independence in 1947 is yet another reminder of the way in which economic pasts and futures are inherently harboured by geopolitics. Following this liberalisation, Indian policy was largely shaped to dismantle any methods of colonial rule over the economy, instead embracing import substitution and protectionism under the Industries Development and Regulation Act of 1951. As state intervention became the way of navigating an unstable economy that remained detached from global trade (India’s trade deficit widening from $0.1 billion in 1948 to $6.3 billion in 1980), it became clear that the colonial legacy of India impacted more than just its culture, people, language and politics—it affected the capacity of the country to operate as a stable economy in the global market and the capacity of the local worker in a city like Surat to be prepared for the coming day. 

As the 1991 liberalisation reforms marked a re-entry into the international economy with trading of IT services, petroleum, pharmaceuticals and oil and steel, India demonstrated the dangers of an economic policy such as Modi’s current hope for ‘self-reliance.’ It seems that in a global order defined by volatility, the notion of economic self-reliance becomes a gamble, for no nation can shield itself from the adversities of international politics. Without trade ties, it risks isolation; with them, it remains vulnerable.

So what does this mean for Modi’s government and the current economy of India? 

Well, what has been made clear throughout studies of this nation’s economy is its irrevocable tendency to depend, whether that is on itself or on other nations. It is India’s colonial past that has permeated history and continues to define the path that economic policies undergo today. The creation of an economy dependent on Britain and robbed of artisanal businesses that did not provide success to the British Empire has moulded the Indian economy into that of a victim of colonialisation, chains it attempts to rid itself of to this day.

Surat’s current crisis is the product of a culmination of neglect and underinvestment in industries that were originally ignored more than a hundred years ago. What we see is the legacy of several structural vulnerabilities: over-reliance on single markets, lack of diversification, and labour market constraints. 

Yet, what Surat perhaps most significantly exposes is the sheer impact that decisions single international leaders place have on the most common and ordinary lives across the globe, regardless of sociogeographic or economic borders. In the apocalypse of Surat rests a glimmer of hope.

India’s government has, in some ways, acted upon this opportunity for retrospection and reform. It has extended cotton import duty exemptions to support the weakening textile industry and continues to explore new and more reliable trade partners, such as the UK and China, in hopes of divesting their economy’s dependence on the U.S. 

For India’s diamond industry, diversifying export markets and investing in technology and workforce development are necessary steps towards overcoming historical foundation issues. Surat’s craftsmen would benefit from specialised technical programmes designed to develop and spread their technical skills and adaptability in an increasingly competitive global market. 

The challenges posed by U.S. tariffs on India that affect the diamond and textile sectors are significant and have triggered the unemployment of thousands. The President of the Gujarat Diamond Workers Union predicts it to”completely destroy” their industry. However, these are overcomable. Through reflecting on its past economy, its colonial legacies and patterns that permeate it, India could consider implementing reforms tailored to supporting the local artisans to support the industry’s sustainability and protect them from turbulent geopolitics. 

In a moment of crisis, India is presented with an opportunity to transform its export economy whilst restructuring its colonial legacies from the foundations, policymaking starting with neglected industries at a grassroots level. Skills and training programmes, financial support in the form of low-interest loans, as well as health, accident and pension insurance for artisans and providing smaller cooperatives with the tools to negotiate more fairly within international trading systems, are all policies that would help the sustainability of such industries. They could incentivise small business owners to continue their trade as opposed to moving into what are viewed as more reliable industries that are currently untariffed, and prevent future impoverishment of local artisans as a result of such politics. Building a more secure diamond trade domestically, as part of the policy of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat,’ would further insulate cities like Surat.

The recent tariffs have exposed structural weaknesses in India’s economy that trace back to its colonial past, leaving artisans and small business owners at the mercy of geopolitical shifts far beyond their control. For the diamond cutter in Surat or the textile weaver in Varanasi, the consequences of decisions made in Washington or Paris are immediate and often devastating. To move beyond this inherited instability, India must redefine these historically neglected industries as foundations for a more resilient and secure economy. Until India breaks free from the legacies of its colonial economy, global politics will continue to write the fate of its most vulnerable.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Diamonds, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

Introduction

The region of Arunachal, a sparsely populated Himalayan borderland, had long eluded the firm control of any pre-modern state. Only in 1912-13 did British India negotiate treaties with the ethnic groups (the Abors, Daflas, Mishmis, etc.) to create the Balipara, Sadiya, Abor, Mishmi and Tirap Frontier Tracts, together the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), thereby laying the basis of modern Arunachal. Even then the region “had largely remained unadministered during British rule,” governed indirectly through frontier deals rather than direct administration. Likewise, the Chinese Qing dynasty exercised at most symbolic control over the region, and despite expansive Qing-era maps, which showed Arunachal (Lhoyü) as a part of the Qing Dynasty, “no areas of present Arunachal Pradesh, which were mostly forested then, were ever administratively controlled by the Qing.” Throughout most of history, British and Indian cartographers omitted Arunachal from maps of India, while still depicting Myanmar, right up until the 1920s.

This raises the question: if neither empire truly ruled the land, why do both modern China and India now claim it so strongly?¹ Constructivist IR theory offers a clue. Identity-driven narratives can transform historical ambiguity into absolute certainty. States seek ontological security, a stable sense of self over time, which compels them to craft coherent stories about their territory and history. Arunachal’s murky past provides a blank canvas for such storytelling. Rather than factual administration, each government’s claim is anchored in a national narrative that makes the disputed territory “forever” part of the self. 

The McMahon Line and Competing Histories 

The first contested claim emerged with the 1913-14 Simla Conference, where Britain, Tibet and China discussed the frontier. British and Tibetan plenipotentiaries agreed on a Himalayan crestline, later called the McMahon Line, which London described as the “geographic, ethnic, and administrative boundary” between India (Assam) and Tibet. In practice the British saw it as a natural frontier; after the conference, India’s Survey of India routinely drew that line on maps. China, however, withdrew its signature almost immediately and later denounced the Simla agreement as illegitimate. In a 1959 letter to Nehru, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai explicitly called the Simla Convention part of “imperialist aggression” and the McMahon Line a product of British “aggression… never recognised… and therefore decidedly illegal.”

After Indian independence in 1947, the McMahon Line became New Delhi’s accepted border. Maps showed the disputed hill tracts as de facto administered by British India, with the agreement cited as the legal basis for the boundary. In contrast, Beijing’s official history rejects any inherited British treaty. Chinese leaders argue Tibet had no independent authority to cede territory, and that any colonial-era border was an imposition. As the Encyclopedia Britannica records, in the late 1950s China claimed nearly the entire upland of Assam (NEFA), insisting the British had drawn McMahon by force. Notably, the postage stamps issued by Azad Hind, the Indian National Army fighting for India’s independence, also did not depict Arunachal as part of India.

Independence, Integration, and Identity 

What is interesting is that neither country’s nationalist movement originally centered on Arunachal. At independence the region was merely a remote northern part of Assam; Indian leaders had little connection to it during the freedom struggle. After 1947, however, the emerging Indian state moved to consolidate NEFA within its borders. In 1950, India took responsibility for frontier administration, and by 1972, NEFA was formally declared a Union Territory (renamed Arunachal Pradesh). In 1987, it became a full state. India emphasizes this continuity and integration: the Survey of India has consistently marked the frontier as part of Assam in its maps, published annually since the late 19th century.

Indian politicians and media portray Arunachal as willingly part of India’s nation-building project—its citizens were granted Indian citizenship, local leaders sit in state assemblies, and the slogan “अरुणाचल हमारा Arunachal Hamara” (“Arunachal is ours”) is widely invoked by India. Even in the most recent spat, India’s Ministry of External Affairs insisted flatly that “Arunachal Pradesh was, is, and will always remain an integral and inalienable part of India.” This in turn also led to India undermining the indigenous culture of the region, enforcing Hindi as the sole language and temporarily banning all religions—except for those that conformed with Hinduism. India also did this, by sending in Hindu priests to make the indigenous customs more Hindu, as could be seen with the religious movement of Donyi Polo that was started in the state. Although this did endanger the indigenous culture of the people, this helped India solidify its grasp on the people. As more and more Indian shows were streamed on television, the indigenous community came to see themselves more and more closer with India. 

China’s post-1949 narrative, however, took the opposite tack. After Mao’s rise, Beijing nullified pre-1949 treaties and reaffirmed earlier Qing claims. Chinese officials renamed the province on paper as Zangnan (藏南, “southern Tibet”) and began issuing maps treating Arunachal as part of Tibet Autonomous Region. In 1959 Zhou Enlai dispatched Indian maps showing Arunachal as Chinese territory. Today’s PRC rhetoric frames Arunachal as “South Tibet” that must eventually be returned to China. Official statements make this clear: at a May 2025 press briefing, China’s foreign ministry stated bluntly “Zangnan is part of China’s territory” and that standardizing Chinese names there “is fully within China’s sovereign rights.” Beijing also emphasizes Tibet’s long historical ties to China (presented as uninterrupted) and downplays local ethnic identities. In this case, it is indeed true that most of the ethnic groups of Arunachal do share their origins in the Sichuan river basin, and China in many ways uses this part of history to solidify their claim. However, most of Arunachal was unexplored until the Britishers arrived, and the Qing Dynasty had never ever held any true control over administration in this region. Chinese discourse, however, continues to treat Arunachal not as a frontier, but as an ancient province of the Chinese nation: only “occupied” by colonial-era India. 

Contemporary Narrative Strategies 

These contrasting historical framings are actively reproduced through today’s politics. China has made “cartographic normalization” a pillar of its strategy. Since 2017, Beijing has repeatedly published lists of Chinese names for Arunachal localities, framing this as routine to “standardize” geographic names in Zangnan. For example, in May 2025, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs issued official Chinese names for 27 places in Arunachal ranging from mountain peaks to villages, explicitly identifying them as in “Zangnan of China.” Chinese media describe this as a technical exercise under China’s sovereignty. Experts note it is part of a broader “renaming” campaign: media outlets report each batch (6 names in 2017, 15 in 2021, 11 in 2023, 30 in 2024, etc.) as a way to “boost claims and normalize its occupation” of the region. State commentary ties this to China’s narrative about Tibet where China is pushing terms like “Xizang” instead of “Tibet” and changing place names so “consistent usage” of Chinese nomenclature erases the notion of a separate Tibetan identity. 

India’s discourse counters forcefully but differently. Official spokesmen denounce Chinese renaming as a provocation.² The MEA called China’s latest naming attempt “vain and preposterous,” declaring that no change of labels can alter the fact that Arunachal “will always remain… an integral and inalienable part of India.” Indian media have invoked terms like “cartographic aggression” to describe China’s actions. Domestic speeches and news stories emphasize Arunachal’s Indian statehood, economic development, and cultural integration. For instance, in 2022 Prime Minister Modi invoked Arunachal’s 50th anniversary of Statehood Day to highlight its progress under Indian rule and reassert its Indian identity. Front-page news articles repeat that India “rejected” China’s naming moves and reaffirm that Arunachal is “in every sense” Indian territory. In short, Indian strategic narratives present the region as a democratic success story and an unshakeable part of the national framework: in direct contrast to China’s historical/civilizational arguments. 

China’s official narrative emphasizes that Arunachal (called Zangnan in Chinese accounts) is inherently Tibetan and “part of China’s territory.”³ However this argument falls through since the majority ethnic group in Arunachal is Tani, which is inherently non Tibetan. The Tani community is also called Lhoba, which China recognises as distinct from the Tibetan identity. These claims are thus solely made to be reinforced with imagery of the remote Himalayan landscape and symbolically tie the region to Tibet’s topography, instead of it being factually accurate. Indian narratives, by contrast, stress national unity and legal continuity. New Delhi insists that no unilateral act, not even assigning new names to mountains and rivers, can change Arunachal’s status. However, what is lost in these claims and counterclaims is the indigenous names of the region, which are often replaced with “Indian or Chinese” names.⁴ Both sides thus frame the same terrain in absolutist terms: one as sacred Chinese-Tibetan heritage, the other as sacred Indian soil. 

Through this analysis, we can see the constructivist mechanisms at work. Each country has woven Arunachal into its identity-claim narrative, transforming historical uncertainty into ontological necessity. China’s “Southern Tibet” story and India’s “eternal integral state” slogan serve to reassure national audiences that their country has neither ceded pride nor contract status. As Lu Yang notes of the India-China case, mutual defense of narrative identity has become “routinized”—each side reinforcing a victim/perpetrator storyline that makes disengagement psychologically difficult.⁵ In short, both governments need Arunachal to symbolize their national cohesion. 

Conclusion

These identity-driven narratives create stiff constraints on diplomacy. When the land is cast as part of “the self” of the nation, ceding even a sliver is seen as a betrayal. As Mitzen (2006) argues in the ontological security literature, actors (including states) guard a stable self-identity; uncertainty or concession can be profoundly unsettling.⁶ For India, agreeing to Chinese claims would undermine its self-image of a democratic republic protecting its frontier tribes. For China, recognizing India’s hold would undermine the core narrative of a unified Chinese motherland. In practical terms, hardening of language, whether calling McMahon a colonial affront or Arunachal “forever Indian” makes compromise politically costly.⁷ 

Moving beyond this impasse requires engaging the narratives, not ignoring them. Scholars suggest a narrative-based approach to peacebuilding: to ease ontological anxiety, each side must see the other’s history as plausible. One proposal is a “multi-layered historical reconciliation,” a process by which India and China collectively acknowledge past traumas and map their memories onto one another. For example, both governments could support joint scholarly forums or cultural exchanges in Arunachal/Tibet that highlight the perspectives of indigenous ethnicities, demonstrating that the borderland has overlapping heritages. Confidence might also grow if bilateral dialogue explicitly addresses public narratives, refusing cartographic aggression as a tactic while separately discussing resource or security concerns in less charged language. If nationalists on both sides come to see the conflict as a constructed storyline rather than a zero-sum inheritance, new policy space may open. 

Ultimately, sovereignty claims live in stories as much as statutes. China and India have transformed a once-ambiguous zone into “Chinese” and “Indian” realms through strategic framing and rhetoric. These entrenched narratives now bind each state’s hands: the identity payoff of victory is too great to yield, and the identity cost of compromise too high. Only by consciously reframing the meaning of Arunachal, from a contested prize to a shared threshold of cooperation, could policy makers break free of the current stalemate. As Lu Yang suggests, identifying and addressing the narrative dimensions of the dispute may be the key to an eventual thaw in this Himalayas standoff. 

1.  Sarmah, M. (2021). Is China’s territorial claim on Arunachal Pradesh justifiable? World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues, 25(4), 78–89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48654881. ↩︎
2.  Kumar, A. (2023, May 5). दो-दो मोर्चों पर चीन क दविुविधा: भारत–चीन बॉर्डरर्ड के हालात पर एक नज़रि या. Observer Research Foundation (ORF) हि दं. https://www.orfonline.org/hindi/research/chinas-two. ↩︎
3.  廖小韵, 郝晓光, 胡小刚, & 刘根友. (2012). 从一幅早期地图看藏南问题研究的重要性 测绘科学 (Science of Surveying and Mapping), 37(Suppl), 1–4. http://www.hxgmap.com/lunwen/h47.pdf. ↩︎
4. 段彬. (2020). 印度对中国藏南地区的同化政策探析(1951—1959) [Analysis of India’s Assimilation Policy toward China’s Zangnan Region (1951–1959)]. Journal of Boundary and Ocean Studies, 5(2). http://www.cibos.whu.edu.cn/res/soft/2020/f167f11263760e65.pdf. ↩︎
5. Lu, Y. (2016). Ontological Security and India-China Relations: From Border War to “News War” (ISAS Working Paper No. 227). Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
   Hansen, E. G. (1967). The impact of the border war on Indian perceptions of China. Pacific Affairs, 40(3/4), 235–249. ↩︎
6.  Mitzen, J. (2006). Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 341–370. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066106067346. ↩︎
7. Singh, J. J. (2019). The McMahon Line: A century of discord. New Delhi: Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA). ↩︎

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Bomdila, Arunachal Pradesh, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

“Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit sa hayop at malansang isda.” 

—José P. Rizal 

One who does not love one’s own language is worse than an animal and a rotten fish. Dr. José P. Rizal, a polymath, polydoctor, and author, sought to instill in Filipinos a sense of national identity on the eve of the Philippine Revolution through two of his famous books, Noli Me Tangere and its sequel, El Filibusterismo. These piercing words from Rizal encapsulate two integral factors in the modern nation-building process: language and national identity. 

Notable international relations scholar Francis Fukuyama explains in Political Order and Political Decay that the creation of a unifying language and identity is critical in nation building, especially for former colonial nations. Governments are more stable when they invest early in nation-building, and as a result, can achieve better social and economic results. In promoting a national identity, the state is able to bolster its legitimacy by winning the loyalty of citizens and fostering patriotic sentiment. However, many postcolonial nations, largely due to being colonial constructs themselves, are culturally and linguistically diverse, making it difficult to impose a unifying national language and identity without the use of violence and cultural erasure. Examining this strong connection between language and identity and its relationship with multilingual realities is crucial to understanding why certain modern states have succeeded in nation-building, while others have failed. Moreover, understanding this link could provide lessons for struggling postcolonial governments moving forward as they formulate legal and educational policies. 

While both India and the Philippines inherited English linguistic imperialism through colonial rule, their divergent constitutional approaches to language policy have led to starkly different outcomes in nation-building and linguistic diversity. India’s constitution embeds explicit, enforceable protections for multilingualism, allowing regional languages to coexist with English and Hindi within governance and education. In contrast, the Philippine constitution’s lack of concrete safeguards have perpetuated English dominance and marginalized native languages, limiting the development of a cohesive national identity. Constitutional clarity and institutional commitment are critical to mitigating colonial legacies and promoting linguistic equity in postcolonial multilingual states. 

Legacies of English Linguistic Imperialism 

India and the Philippines’ experiences with language and national identity cannot be discussed without first understanding their histories of English linguistic imperialism (ELI). In his book Linguistic Imperialism, prominent linguist Robert Phillipson defines this concept as “the dominance of English… asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages.” Literature surrounding this topic suggest that while both the Philippines and India experienced ELI through Western imperial projects, there were key differences. Preexisting sociopolitical structures, motivations and the policies of their respective colonizers, and native responses and debates. 

The Caste System, Economic Incentives, and the East India Company

The Indian subcontinent’s sociopolitical landscape at the time of the East India Company’s (EIC) arrival in Bengal was complex, with various kingdoms vying for control and an intricate caste system that determined access to education and power. Persian, Arabic, and most importantly, Sanskrit, were the languages of the Brahmin elite, who were at the top of this existing hierarchy. Given the long history of literature, poetry, religious texts, and scholarship written in these languages, there was a prestige associated with them. Although it was neither widespread nor attainable by the masses, the presence of a formal educational tradition helped to legitimize these languages to the colonizers. With the tendency of Western discourses to Orientalize non-European cultures, the British admired the existing native knowledge and languages. While there were initial debates in the British Parliament for imparting “useful knowledge” to the native people, these lost out to those who thought that the Hindus “had a good system of faith and morals as most people.” This rationale was informed by Britain’s experiences with the United States, where the establishment of universities led to revolution led by an educated elite. Therefore, Britain avoided establishing schools in India to curtail the chances of educated rebellion. Nonetheless, attitudes began to change as the British tightened their control. 

In the 1830s, British politicians such as William Babington Macaulay began to assert the superiority of the English language and civilization. He infamously said that English education should be promoted in India so as to form “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Lord Betninck, the Governor General of India at the time, agreed, saying: 

“The great object of the British Government in India was henceforth to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone.”

Despite this civilizational rhetoric, Lord Betninck’s motives were mostly economic. In 1833, when the Charter Act was passed, the EIC was facing a financial crisis. In order to reduce expenditures, which were largely made up of the expensive salaries of English officers, the Governor General wished to add more Indians to administrative positions at lesser pay. Thus, English language education was implemented for mostly administrative efficiency reasons, rather than a genuine desire or belief that Indians must become ‘civilized.’ 

According to scholars like Chowdhury, the preexisting caste system served as a powerful vehicle for English to take root as a prestigious language. The wealthy Brahmins, who wielded the most political power through their competence in Sanskrit, welcomed English language education as a means of taking new economic opportunities. As a result, English became associated with administrative power, education, and upward mobility, reinforcing existing social hierarchies rather than dismantling them. Thus, a new linguistic hierarchy emerged; English became the new “Brahminical thread,” marking a person’s access to modern education, economic opportunities, and social prestige. This was not a mere linguistic shift but a continuation of caste and class stratification under a new guise. 

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, English education in India expanded, but unevenly. While cities like Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras became hubs for English-educated elites, rural India remained untouched by this new system of learning. The establishment of institutions like Hindu College in Calcutta, with support from Indian elites eager to access Western knowledge and power, further entrenched the association of English proficiency with social and economic advancement. 

By the time of India’s independence in 1947, English had become firmly embedded in the structures of higher education, governance, and business. Though some national leaders, like Gandhi, critiqued English education for alienating Indians from their cultural roots and promoting elitism, others, including Nehru and many of the English-educated middle class, saw it as a vital tool for national unity and global engagement. Post-independence language policy reflected this tension: while Hindi was promoted as the federal language, English retained its privileged position in higher education and administration, justified as a “link language” that could bridge India’s vast linguistic diversity. 

Chowdhury argues that the continued dominance of English in India after independence has perpetuated structural inequalities. English functions as both a gatekeeper and a status symbol, often determining access to quality higher education, employment, and social mobility. This has created what Chowdhury terms a “Brahminical power of English,” where fluency in the language effectively marks one’s entry into India’s elite, much like caste status did in earlier times. The state’s failure to significantly empower Indian languages in higher education has reinforced this dynamic, limiting the intellectual and developmental potential of vast sections of the population. 

In contrast to Gandhi’s vision of education in vernacular languages fostering inclusive and holistic development, postcolonial India has largely followed Macaulay’s blueprint, producing a small Anglophone elite that dominates the country’s political, economic, and intellectual life. Chowdhury contends that without a radical rethinking of language policy in education, particularly higher education, India risks remaining caught in this cycle of exclusion and inequality. 

Elitist Education, Benevolent Assimilation, and a Consciousness of Forgetting

The Philippines, meanwhile, differed in its sociopolitical landscape given its fragmented history and Spanish colonization. Prior to Magellan’s arrival in Mactan, the Philippines was divided into numerous rajahnates, sultanates, and kingdoms, none of which achieved dominance over the whole archipelago. This is unlike India, where kingdoms had established control over most of the subcontinent several times throughout history. Although the Philippines had preexisting writing systems such as baybayin, a long history of trade and currency exchange with neighbors like China, and education through oral tradition and vocational apprenticeship, there was no formal education system established throughout the archipelago prior to the Spanish arrival. 

With Spanish colonization, education in the Philippines was largely controlled by Spanish religious orders, which primarily focused on religious indoctrination rather than broad intellectual development. The Spanish colonial government established a dual system of education: catechism schools for indigenous Filipinos, which prioritized Christian doctrine and basic literacy, and higher academic institutions that primarily served Spanish elites and mestizos. This led to only a very small elite receiving broader secular education. Even though religious schools taught basic literacy, it was far from being comprehensive, being restricted to memorizing prayers and understanding religious doctrine. Consequently, only a mere 2-5% of the population became fluent in Spanish, indicating how few Filipinos had access to higher secular education. 

Despite this, this is not to diminish the role of limited Spanish colonial education on the awakening of Filipino nationalist sentiments—in fact, Spanish education directly fueled it. According to Karl Schwartz, Filipino educational behavior during this period evolved in response to these colonial structures. While Spanish policies aimed to maintain social hierarchies by limiting access to advanced education, Filipinos increasingly sought alternative educational avenues, such as private Latin schools, to challenge colonial intellectual dominance and assert their own agency. This divergence from the Spanish-imposed system laid the groundwork for later nationalist movements, as education became a tool for resisting colonial control and fostering a distinct Filipino identity. 

Despite the structures left behind by Spanish education, the United States perceived Filipinos as uncivilized and sought to reshape the archipelago in its own image, equipped with the white man’s burden and benevolent assimilation policies as ideological justifications for their influence. 

Throughout the colonial period, English linguistic imperialism was implemented primarily through a public education system with English as the sole medium of instruction, which the Americans tried to disguise under a façade of ‘benevolent friendship’ with the Filipinos. However, this ‘friendship’ was a façade; American officials wanted to use English to indoctrinate and ‘civilize’ the Filipinos, forcing them to abandon their native languages. In 1915, American Director of Education Frank L. Crone proclaimed his dream for the colony: “[make] the Philippines a great storehouse of Western learning and civilization, upon which the Orient may freely draw.” Many like Crone believed English inherently carried Western values and traditions, and could serve as a vessel for American ways of life to be imparted upon Filipinos. There were practical considerations: teaching in English was cheaper since American educators could use existing U.S. textbooks and pedagogy, English acted as an impartial language among ethnolinguistic groups, and Americans expected English to become the international lingua franca, believing it would benefit Filipinos to learn it. This emphasis on English was a large part of the education system’s goals: to brainwash future generations into submitting to American colonial rule and, especially after the brutal Philippine-American War, into forgetting why they desired independence in the first place. The system succeeded in making Filipinos think they were inferior and believe that American education would bring ‘civilization’ to ‘uncivilized people’ like them. An essay by a Filipino student during the colonial period writes: 

“The natives were fighting for independence at this time, so we fought against the Americans very hardly, but we could not succeed. The reasons why we could not succeed is this: we are not well united and we do not know how to rule; we are not a powerful nation and we speak different languages; we have no weapons and we have no rail-road. But the Americans were wise, united, powerful, speak one language, and they had the advantage in every way.” 

The exclusive use of American and European literature in the education system that taught Western values ingrained in the Filipino consciousness the idea of American cultural superiority. Being the language of this ‘superior culture,’ English became heavily associated with refinement, education, and civilization in Filipino society. Furthermore, those proficient in English advanced to high positions in society and government. The civil service, legislation, administration, and leadership all required English, associating the language with progressivism, democracy, and ‘enlightenment.’ As a result, Filipinos believed that without English, they would never access endless economic and social opportunities. 

Two important sociolinguistic consequences emerged. First, by creating a façade of opportunity through English, American colonizers erased the violence of colonization and instilled in Philippine society a sense of indebtedness. This was exacerbated by American liberation during World War II, creating a “problem of consciousness” where Filipinos idealized colonial history and ignored the colonial implications of English. Second, English became an indicator of and gatekeeper to an educated, privileged class. Former oligarchic families, or ‘caciques,’ sided with the Americans during the Philippine-American War, using English to gain favor with colonizers and distance themselves from the ‘uncivilized’ and ‘uneducated’ Filipinos. English thus became a marker of education, wealth, and prestige. 

Comparing Effects of English Linguistic Imperialism on the Constitutions’ Language Policies 

After analyzing the historical colonial context behind ELI, it is crucial to understand how it has manifested itself in the two nations’ constitutions and laws post-independence. Furthermore, it is important to observe how these constitutions have approached the ethnolinguistic diversity of their respective territories. In this section, I will be conducting an comparative analysis of India’s 1950 Constitution with the Philippines’ 1935, 1973, and 1987 Constitutions. There is a lack of literature comparing the two constitutions, let alone the language sections of both constitutions. Therefore, I will be doing an original analysis of both. 

Part XVII of The 1950 Constitution of India 

Part XVII of the Indian constitution has a meticulously detailed section about how language would look like in the newly independent state, giving little room for misinterpretation. This granular detail arguably serves to protect the languages of India, despite the legacy of ELI. 

Chapter I outlines the language of the Union. Section 343, Clause 1 clearly states that the official language of the Union “shall be Hindi in Devanagari script.” As the first clause of the chapter, this undoubtedly declares Hindi as a chosen language—among the many languages of India—that shall have prominence in this new Union. Notwithstanding, given the entrenched history of English in the country per British colonization, it acknowledges its relevance and potential permanence in Clause 2, stating, “for a period of fifteen years… the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union…” This potential permanence is furthered by Clause 3, in which it states, “Parliament may by law provide for the use, after said period of fifteen years of… the English language.” Thus, this section allows for flexibility and ultimately leaves it up to parliament whether English shall be an official language or not. Nonetheless, the Constitution is clear in that Hindi shall be the official language. 

Section 344 details the formation of a Commission and Committee of Parliament on official language, whose duty it is to make recommendations to the President as to, “(a) the progressive use of the Hindi language for the official purposes of the Union; (b) restrictions on the use of the English language for all or any of the official purposes of the union;… [and] (e)… the language for communication between the Union and a State or between one State and another and their use.” The establishment of a committee dedicated to the issue of language shows intentionality on the part of the state; language must be planned and observed. 

Chapter II, meanwhile, defines the role of regional languages in the Union. It gives these languages and the people who speak them constitutional recognition and institutionalization, which serves as a strong protection against language degradation or oppression. The States that make up India were drawn along ethnolinguistic lines, and the Indian Constitution explicitly names 22 officially recognized native languages in the Eighth Schedule, offering further constitutional protection. These languages include Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Given this, Section 345 gives States the power to choose their own language(s), stating, “the Legislature of a State may by law adopt any or more of the languages in use in the State or Hindi as the language or languages to be used for all or any of the official purposes of that State.” However, once again, ELI is still present, with the section providing that “the English language shall continue to be used for those official purposes… for which it was being used immediately before the commencement of this Constitution.” Nevertheless, Section 345 has an important consequence, namely, that it nominally recognizes the right of the States to language sovereignty. Thus, the Indian Union implicitly acknowledges the ethnolinguistic diversity of its territory and the possible difficulties that may arise with managing it, making an active effort to give these States a say in language policy. 

This implicit acknowledgement of diversity and State-level language sovereignty continues throughout the rest of Chapter II, which painstakingly addresses every possible scenario with regard to the use of language in the country. Section 346 deals with what the official language shall be between one State and another or between a State and the Union. It is ultimately predicated on State consent, stating, “if two or more States agree that the Hindi language should be the official language for communication for such States, that language may be used…” Section 347 even includes a special provision for languages that are spoken by a section of the State’s population. If the President believes that a substantial number of people within a State wish to have their desired language be recognized by the State, the President can direct that that language shall also be officially recognized. 

Perhaps the most overt manifestation of ELI in the Indian Constitution is Chapter III, which declares that English as the language to be used in the Supreme Court and in the High Courts and for acts, bills, etc. Although Clauses 2 and 3 provide for some leeway for the use of other languages such as Hindi or other regional languages, these are exceptions rather than guarantees. Although Chapter III is the only section that explicitly places English above any other language, it can be contended that this component of official language is the most critical, as it relates to the law that all citizens of the Union must abide by. Most likely a British colonial parliamentarian legacy, to have the laws be proclaimed in a foreign language elucidates a persistent hold of ELI on the country. 

Finally, the last chapter of Part XVII, Chapter IV, lists special directives, which, like Chapter II, places State language sovereignty at its center. Section 350 gives the right for any person to submit a representation for the redress of any grievance in any of the languages used in the Union. Significantly, 350A provides for the establishment of facilities for instruction in mother-tongue languages at the primary stage. This is critical, as it explicitly creates a place for regional languages in the education system, which will play a vital role in education policy later on. 350B, meanwhile provides for a special officer for linguistic minorities, whose duty is to “investigate all matters relating to safeguards provided for linguistic minorities under this Constitution and report to the President upon those matters… and the President shall cause all such reports to be laid before each House of Parliament, and sent to the Governments of the States concerned.” This is an indispensable part of the Constitution with regard to linguistic minority protection, since it delineates a means for constitutional and legal review over the status of linguistic minorities. Through this special officer, linguistic minorities can voice their concerns to the Union government. Lastly, 351 declares that it is the duty of the Union “to promote the spread of the Hindi language and develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India…” The part about language thus ends on a strong note, declaring the hope and desire that Hindi shall eventually become the main medium of expression for the ethnolinguistically diverse Union. Whether it was meant to dethrone English completely remains an unanswered question to this day. 

In sum, Part XVII of the Indian Constitution is an excellent example of language policy planning on the constitutional level, with its attention to detail and anticipating linguistic issues, particularly as a result of India’s diversity. Furthermore, the explicit nature of this constitution effectively prevents any misinterpretation of or means of undermining its linguistic diversity protection goals. With Hindi as the official language and English as an auxiliary language, it lays out the specific conditions and provisions for the use of regional languages and explicitly mentions the right of states to determine what languages they wish to use. Ultimately, despite ELI’s influence through the predominance of English with regard to the courts and laws, Part XVII serves as a constitutional protection that guarantees the linguistic diversity and sovereignty of the States and aspires for Hindi to become the unifying language of India. 

The 1935, 1973, and 1987 Constitutions of the Philippines 

Compared to the Indian Constitution’s exceptionally high level of detail, the three constitutions of the Philippines pale in comparison. With their sections on language being only a few sentences to a paragraph, there is a lack of protections for regional language sovereignty and relative indifference to the idea of a national language, and thus, the Philippine Constitutions fail to successfully plan out an effective native language policy. It could be argued that this lack of constitutional and institutional protection is the reason for the continued predominance of ELI and the deterioration of not only Wikang Filipino, but of all Filipino languages. 

The 1935 Constitution was created prior to Philippine independence from the United States, meant as a guiding hand towards full independence and effective governance. However, this constitution merely provides two sentences on the subject of language, stating, “The National Assembly shall take steps toward the development and adoption of a common national language based on one of the existing native languages. Until otherwise provided by law, English and Spanish shall continue as official languages.” Acknowledging the constitution does express the intent of finding a common national language, the fact that the language is neither explicitly named or when the development of said common language would be due, this constitution does not provide any protection for neither a common national language or regional languages. English and Spanish could effectively continue being the official languages indefinitely. Although this ambiguity is understandable due to the Philippines’ status as an American commonwealth at the time, this relative apathy sets the stage for the weak language planning that is exhibited in the latter two constitutions. 

The 1973 Constitution offers only a marginal improvement, expanding the language section to four sentences. It officially establishes English and “Pilipino” as the country’s official languages and provides for the ”development and formal adoption of a common national language to be known as Filipino.” However, it does not specify the mechanisms for this development or provide meaningful protections for regional languages, aside from the promise of translation of the Constitution into each ‘dialect’ spoken by over fifty thousand people.  The usage of the word ‘dialect’ rather than ‘language’ assumes an inferior position, belittling other Filipino languages. Lastly, similar to India, the English text of the constitution shall prevail over the other translations. This demonstrates a bias towards and preference for the English language, even post-independence and despite the existence of a national official language. The Constitution thus acknowledges the national language in principle but fails to implement concrete measures to ensure its institutionalization or promotion. 

The 1987 Constitution, while being the most explicit among the constitutions and provides more leeway for regional languages, still suffers from the same ambiguity of the previous two. Nonetheless, it finally proclaims Filipino as the national language, and provides a more enthusiastic push for the propagation of the national language, with a drive to “initiate and sustain the use of Filipino as a medium of official communication and as language of instruction in the educational system.” It also states that a national language commission shall be established which shall “undertake, coordinate, and promote researches for the development, propagation, and preservation of Filipino and other languages.” This displays a marked increase in the enthusiasm for native language policy planning and a wish to be inclusive of all Philippine languages. This constitution also has a more ambivalence towards the use of English, stating, ”the official languages of the Philippines are Filipino and, until otherwise provided by law, English.” The phrasing “until otherwise provided by law” gives a temporality to the official status of English since it could be changed. Whereas, Filipino is implied to eternally be the nation’s official language. Lastly, this constitution grants regional languages auxiliary official status: “The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary media of instruction therein.” That being said, they neither explicitly give the right to establish an official language to the regions nor do they go into more detail of how that would be implemented. While this provision formally recognizes regional languages, it does not grant them substantive constitutional protections or outline a framework for their preservation and development. Thus, Filipino, while designated as the national language, remains underdeveloped and struggles against the continued dominance of English in education, government, and business. 

In conclusion, this comparative analysis of the language provisions in the Indian and Philippine constitutions reveals stark differences in their approach to ethnolinguistic diversity and language policy. India’s 1950 Constitution offers a detailed and robust framework for managing its linguistic diversity, providing constitutional protections for regional languages and granting states a significant role in language policy decisions. Despite the legacy of English, the Indian Constitution aspires to unify the nation under Hindi while safeguarding linguistic rights at the state level. In contrast, the Philippine constitutions, though progressively more explicit, lack the same level of institutional detail and protections for regional languages. The Philippine approach has been characterized by a reliance on vague language provisions, particularly in the 1935 and 1973 Constitutions, which have contributed to the continued dominance of English and the neglect of regional languages. While the 1987 Constitution shows a more concerted effort to promote Filipino and recognize regional languages, its lack of concrete measures leaves much to be desired in terms of actual language preservation and development. Ultimately, India’s comprehensive language planning stands in sharp contrast to the Philippines’ more inconsistent and underdeveloped approach, reflecting differing legacies of colonialism and their respective constitutional commitments to linguistic diversity. 

Constitutional Effects on Language Policy 

This section analyzes how these constitutions have influenced the evolution of language policies over time. I argue that India’s constitution has embedded language policy into the fabric of its political framework, giving the language debate sociopolitical significance and enforcing checks and balances between Hindi, English, and regional languages. This has laid the groundwork for effective language policies such as the Three Language Formula (TLF), which attempt to balance national integration with linguistic diversity. Meanwhile, the Philippine constitution’s vagueness has led to a weaker institutional framework for language policy, essentially relegating it to education policy, where English is dominant as a language of socioeconomic competitiveness and prestige. Although strides have been made in education, such as the Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) and the Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), there is constant resistance in defense of the advantages of English proficiency. 

An important thing to note is the asymmetry in how language policies are framed in India and the Philippines. India’s language policy is largely shaped by constitutional provisions and national language planning, whereas due to the vagueness of its constitutions, the Philippines’ language policy has been implemented primarily through the education system rather than a comprehensive national framework. This difference may create an imbalance in comparison, as India’s approach encompasses both governance and education, while the Philippines’ policies have focused more on language instruction and medium of education. This may bring up flaws in this comparative analysis, but this comparison nevertheless is valuable, as it displays the paramount significance of language planning at the onset of post-colonial nation-building.

India 

Under the administration of the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1950-1964), non-Hindi speaking states were personally assured by Nehru that Hindi would never be imposed on them without their consent. As mandated by the constitution, English was still to be used in official proceedings, since it was within the period of fifteen years at this point. In order to give Nehru’s assurance legal status, the Official Language Act of 1963 was passed, which stipulated that English may continue to be used alongside Hindi even after 1965, but it was vague in regard to whether English would be permanent. 

With Nehru’s death, there was a significant anti-English and pro-Hindi push from northern states. Advocates argued that since January 26, 1965 was the expiry date for the constitutional protection of English, being 15 years after the promulgation of the constitution, Hindi should become the sole official language of India. Many in south India, especially in Tamil Nadu, saw this as the beginning of Hindi imposition over non-Hindi speaking states. Many feared that Hindi would become the sole medium of instruction and governance, erasing the educational and economic opportunities that were afforded to those who spoke English. This resulted in massive protests, largely led by students, who chanted “Hindi never, English ever!” and burned Hindi books. This caused a call for a constitutional amendment to make English the sole official language of the Union. 

Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri backtracked on his pro-Hindi stance through the Official Language Amendment Act of 1967, which stipulated that Hindi will not be imposed on non-Hindi states and that English use in official proceedings would not end as long as at least one non-Hindi state desired to keep it. This effectively secured English for its use in parliament and provided veto power to non-Hindi states. Furthermore, a growing demand to add languages to the Eighth schedule emerged, since the Indian government has the responsibility to develop any languages that were added to it. Lastly, from this point, the Three Language Formula (TLF) was to be strictly enforced and competitive examinations must be held in all regional languages. The TLF was proposed by the Central Advisory Board of Education in 1956 and simplified and accepted by the Conference of Chief Ministers in 1961. The Education Commission recommended a modified TLF which stipulates the learning of: 

(1) the mother-tongue or the regional language; 

(2) the official language of the Union (Hindi) or the associate official language (English) so long as it exists; 

(3) a modern Indian or foreign language not covered under (1) and (2) and other than that used as medium of instruction 

The TLF was then approved by the Indian Parliament, incorporating it into the National Policy on Education (NEP) in 1968. Even so, issues persist with a renewed pro-Hindi movement emerging from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), reigniting tensions between north and south as well as criticisms of the setbacks in the implementation of the TLF. The current pro-Hindi movement emerged due to the BJP’s espousal of Hindu nationalism. Furthermore, the number of Hindi speakers had increased dramatically over time, growing at a rate of 25% and adding 100 million new speakers back in 2011. Due to the fact that Hindi-speaking constituents overwhelmingly support the BJP, the ruling government has promoted Hindi-centered policies in order to consolidate its share of votes. In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi indicated that the promotion of Hindi was a government priority, ordering that Hindi be made compulsory in all Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) affiliated schools until the secondary level in order to expand the geographical scope of Hindi to traditionally non-Hindi speaking areas. As a result, anti-Hindi agitation has reignited in southern India, with political parties warning that any move by the CBSE to impose Hindi will revive pushback and discontent from non-Hindi speaking states. Student organizations have started demanding the withdrawal of the move to impose Hindi, arguing that southern states have their own languages and have the right to choose their language per the Right to Education Act of 2009. 

Furthermore, criticisms regarding the TLF have emerged over the years, putting into question the effectiveness of its implementation. The latest iteration of the TLF as dictated by the NEP in 2020 provides even more freedom of language choice, permitting students themselves to choose the three languages that they wish to learn in their education. The medium of instruction would be the mother tongue until the fifth grade, though preferably until the eighth grade. Yet, as highlighted by Ray et al., significant challenges persist, especially in multilingual and tribal-dominated regions such as Odisha. The lack of trained teachers proficient in tribal languages, inadequate learning materials, and the complexity of distinguishing between mother tongue and regional languages have hindered effective implementation. Although NEP 2020 emphasizes flexibility and autonomy, allowing states and students to choose languages, this has introduced fresh challenges, such as logistical issues in offering diverse languages, teacher shortages, and unequal resource distribution. Parents and teachers continue to prioritize English due to its perceived socioeconomic value, with a majority favoring it as a compulsory subject, potentially undermining efforts to promote regional and indigenous languages. These issues suggest that while the TLF aspires to promote multilingualism and national integration, its execution remains fraught with practical difficulties, particularly in balancing linguistic diversity with equitable access to quality education. 

Thus, India’s political dynamics have forced its policymakers to adopt a multilingual approach toward language policy; any effort to disrupt this multilingual order is likely to meet with strong resistance. Yet, even in the midst of a robust language policy, it seems that the effects of ELI in India continue to cause difficulties in promoting both Hindi and regional languages. As observed above, the complications of English continuing to be a language of prestige, opportunity, and globalism have driven a wedge between the Hindi-speaking and non-Hindi-speaking populations. Just as the British had used divide-and-conquer tactics to weaken Indian resistance, the English language continues to be seen as a ‘neutral’ option that favors neither Hindi nor any other Indian language, barring any native language from claiming dominance in the country. Nonetheless, because of the strong constitutional protections and educational policies, the diversity of Indian languages are still maintained at an institutional level.  Although, it is important to acknowledge the languages that are not mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution continue to lack protection and institutional support in development and preservation. Ultimately, however, the role and status of Indian languages in society continues to be a politically charged dialogue at the forefront of public discourse, and India, due to its extensive efforts in early language policy planning, possesses the legal frameworks to improve upon this policy to ensure that its linguistic diversity continues to be protected and celebrated. 

The Philippines 

Meanwhile, the Philippines presents a much different story post-independence. Unlike India, the Philippines’ weak constitutional commitment to language planning has relegated its language policy primarily to education, leaving it vulnerable to the enduring dominance of English and Tagalog at the expense of regional languages. 

Although Tagalog was not established as the national language constitutionally in 1935, it was declared as such after the Second World War through the Commonwealth Act No. 570 in 1946. This coincided with a decline in English use and the rise of nationalists who sought to create a new identity through the national language. Still, it is important to acknowledge that, similar to the tension between  Hindi and non-Hindi speakers in India, Tagalog is seen as an imposition upon non-Tagalog groups. Tagalog was chosen as the national language due to it being the language of political elites, who were the majority in the government in the 1930s. Non-Tagalogs, especially Cebuano-speaking politicians strongly objected to this move. Unlike in India, where Nehru promised no Hindi imposition, Tagalog, largely without the consent of most of the public, was unilaterally imposed onto all Filipinos, becoming another layer of linguistic imperialism after English. 

However, it was only in 1974 that Tagalog—rebranded with the de-ethnicized name “Filipino” to assuage the non-Tagalogs—was officially institutionalized through a new education policy known as the Bilingual Education Policy (BEP). This policy is defined as the separate use of Filipino and English as the medium of instruction (MOI). In all grades except 1 and 2, Filipino and English were used in all subjects, and regional languages were relegated to auxiliary status. English was the MOI for science, mathematics, and English, while Filipino was used for all other subjects. To achieve bilingual fluency, Filipino and English were not only MOIs but also language subjects of their own at all grade levels. The ultimate goal of the BEP was to encourage bilingual education, with Filipino as a language of literacy and academic discourse and English as an official language. This policy was ultimately a political compromise, especially at a time when anti-colonial sentiments to nationalize education were being pushed. This presented an opportunity to promote Filipino as a unifying language and national symbol, without losing the competitiveness and prestige of English fluency in a globalizing world. 

Although the BEP represented a significant move away from the Philippines’ colonial past, loopholes have caused its implementation to be less effective. Academic performance disparities between Tagalog and non-Tagalog speakers have led to criticisms that non-Tagalog speakers were being institutionally marginalized. Based on a report by the Congressional Commission on Education in 1993, the BEP was perceived as a factor in dropouts, and students who experienced significant linguistic barriers were likely to withdraw from school. Lastly, the exclusive use of the official languages implies the perceived inferiority and irrelevance of minority languages to academic discourse. The name “Filipino” was seen as a mere derivative of Tagalog, and thus the BEP was seen as elevating the language of ‘Imperial Manila,’ pejoratively referring to the capital-centered nature of national decisions. As for English, it maintained its superiority as an official and prestigious language, especially as a medium of instruction. Thus, the lack of connection with, if not outright resentment towards, these two languages may cause students to find little value in classes they cannot fully understand. Thus, in several ways, the BEP worsened linguistic inequality in the classroom. 

After years of research studies on the benefits of multilingual instruction, including higher achievement scores in reading comprehension across three languages (mother tongue, Tagalog, & English), the Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) program was implemented in 2012. Broadly speaking, it is a framework that maintains the mother tongue as the primary MOI and recognizes the importance of the use of mother tongue education, not too dissimilar from India’s TLF. The Department of Education designated 19 major Philippine languages to be used as mother tongues from kindergarten to Grade 3. Filipino and English, meanwhile, are taught as subjects from the second and third quarters of Grade 1 to Grade 6. From then, both languages are used as MOI, with English generally for STEM subjects and Filipino for humanities subjects. English begins to be used for music, arts, physical education, and health after Grade 6. 

The MTB-MLE represents a significant step in not just education, but in the dialogue surrounding the diversity of language and legacies of linguistic imperialism in the Philippines. Tupas notes that the MTB-MLE: 

(1) Recognizes the idea that education in the mother tongue is a linguistic right; (2) Validates the viability of minority languages as potential academic languages;  (3) Is an ideological response to nation-building. 

By putting mother tongues at the forefront of education, the MTB-MLE addresses the double-layered structure of linguistic imperialism in the Philippines and declares these languages as integral parts of Philippine identity and culture. In 2018, UNESCO reported academic successes that have resulted from this program, including increased confidence, lower dropout rates, and learning other languages. Naturally, the program is imperfect and has faced challenges in implementation due to funding issues, stakeholders’ favorable perceptions of English, and their negative perceptions of native languages. Cruz and Mahboob note that due to the lack of ‘vertical discursiveness’ in Tagalog and other Filipino languages, they are not preferred as languages of education, despite their availability. Nevertheless, despite these setbacks, the MTB-MLE is a breakthrough in the Philippines’ attempts in dismantling linguistic imperialism, especially given the lack of constitutional support. 

Currently, there has been a revival in the debate about which education policy is more effective: the MTB-MLE or the BEP, especially in the midst of reports of academic decline in Filipino students. Reports from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) show an apparent decline in mathematics and reading comprehension among students. The blame for these low results in international tests have been pinned on the MTB-MLE and decline in English language use. English continues to be perceived as an economic competitive advantage for Filipinos in a globalizing world, and the Marcos Jr. administration has highlighted the importance of English in the Philippine economy: 

“Foreign employers have always favored Filipino employees because of our command of the English language. This is an advantage that we must continue to enjoy. The internet has now  become the global marketplace. Not only for goods services but also for ideas, even extending to our own personal interactions. The language of the internet—for better or for worse—is English. Therefore, the question of our medium of instruction must be continuously re-examined to maintain that advantage that we have established as an English-speaking people.” 

With the backing of the Marcos Jr. administration for the BEP, lawmakers have introduced bills to suspend the MTB-MLE, namely House Bills 2188 and 3925. BEP supporters have argued that because Filipino students have been introduced to the mother tongue at an early age, it would be redundant to use it as an MOI. Furthermore, the BEP is seen as a means of educational material-related cost efficiency, fast tracking students’ learning progress and rebound from declining academic performance. While coming from a place of concern, these arguments have belittled the significant amount of research put into the development of the MTB-MLE, purely based on the false notion that early exposure to English and only English means language fluency. According to Kirkpatrick, the imposition of English and Filipino in education can transform multilinguals into bilinguals, causing them to lose their linguistic assets and resources. 

Ultimately, the promotion of English based on the assumption that economic growth will follow is a band-aid solution for the economic woes of the Philippines. Institutions have not addressed the systemic issues that deter the promotion of equitable and reasonably paying domestic employment, forcing individuals to move abroad for better opportunities. Rather than fixing the root of these issues, namely poor economic planning and corruption, the promotion of English education simply pushes Filipinos to leave the Philippines, sending back remittances to their families to encourage the cycle of an exodus from the homeland. 

In evaluating the language policies of the Philippines, it is easy to attribute all of the blame to Filipinos themselves. However, what this analysis highlights is the enduring legacy of English linguistic imperialism and 400 years of colonial rule on the societal consciousness of the Philippines. As a result, without the strong support of constitutional provisions for language policy, language diversity protection policies such as the MTB-MLE are highly susceptible to being overturned by any presidential administration that wishes to uphold English dominance. Whereas any Indian government, bound by the constitution, has no choice but to maintain its multilingual approach, the Philippines can easily deinstitutionalize its regional languages depending on the attitudes of the government towards English. 

Even in the face of compelling and comprehensive scientific and sociolinguistic research displaying the tangible benefits of multilingual education, the attitudes of a majority of the Filipino population stubbornly hold up the prestige of the English language. Furthermore, unlike India, where any indication of disrupting the multilingual status quo would be met with strong political uproar, the Filipino public’s attitude towards integrating Filipino languages through the MTB-MLE has been muted at best, reflecting their satisfaction with the dominance of English in the education system at the cost of the maintenance of their native languages. Unfortunately, some Filipino parents are no longer teaching their children their native tongues, in hopes that through English-only exposure, their children would achieve for themselves and their families a brighter future. 

Thus, the perceived prestige, globalism, and opportunity associated with English incentivize the neglect of Filipino native languages. Without a major overhaul of the current language policy through constitutional amendments—which seems unlikely due to deeply entrenched attitudes—all Filipino languages will continue to deteriorate. 

Conclusion: Lessons in Language Policy 

The comparative analysis of India and the Philippines demonstrates the profound and lasting impact of constitutional language policy on postcolonial nation-building. Both nations inherited the legacies of English linguistic imperialism, yet their divergent approaches in addressing this inheritance have led to markedly different outcomes. India’s detailed and proactive constitutional provisions have institutionalized a multilingual framework that, while not without its challenges, continues to safeguard linguistic diversity and accommodate regional identities within the broader national narrative. Its early and comprehensive language policy planning—embodied in the Constitution and implemented through measures such as the Three Language Formula—has ensured that debates over language remain central to India’s political discourse, providing mechanisms for adaptation and resistance to linguistic homogenization. 

In contrast, the Philippines’ constitutions have historically lacked the clarity, depth, and enforceable protections necessary to cultivate and preserve a truly multilingual society. The vagueness of its constitutional provisions has allowed English to retain its colonial prominence, while the imposition of Tagalog—later rebranded as Filipino—has marginalized other Philippine languages. Despite the introduction of promising initiatives such as the Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy, the lack of constitutional guarantees renders these efforts vulnerable to shifting political agendas and societal biases that continue to favor English as the language of economic opportunity and prestige. 

This comparison underscores the critical role of constitutional clarity and political will in creating language policies that promote equity, preserve cultural heritage, and foster national unity. India’s experience illustrates how embedding multilingualism into the legal and institutional framework can mediate colonial legacies and support a more inclusive national identity. Conversely, the Philippine case serves as a cautionary tale of how constitutional ambiguity can perpetuate linguistic inequalities and hinder genuine nation-building. 

To move forward, both India and the Philippines can benefit from strategic policy recalibrations rooted in constitutional commitment and inclusive language planning. For the Philippines, amending the constitution to explicitly affirm the rights of regional languages and to institutionalize multilingual education would provide stronger legal grounding for policies like MTB-MLE. Strengthening and increasing funding for the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language) could ensure sustained evaluation, development, and protection of all Philippine languages. Meanwhile, India should consider expanding its Eighth Schedule to include all unlisted languages and provide equitable state funding for their development, particularly in tribal and rural regions. Both nations must prioritize teacher training, curriculum development in native languages, and public campaigns that challenge the stigma around non-English languages. Ultimately, constitutional clarity must be matched by cultural revalorization, where multilingualism is reframed not as a burden but as a vital asset to the nation. 

Ultimately, the lessons from these two postcolonial states highlight that sustainable language policy requires not only legal recognition but also active commitment to linguistic justice. For nations grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the pressures of globalization, constitutional safeguards and inclusive policy frameworks are indispensable in ensuring that linguistic diversity is not only protected but celebrated as a cornerstone of national identity. Languages are integral to the cultural identities of both India and the Philippines, and these lessons must remind us of the importance of cherishing our native tongues, whatever they may be. 

Sapagka’t kung hindi ta’yo ang magmamahal sa sariling wika, sino? 

For if we don’t love our own native language, who will?

Bibliography: 

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Krishna Pushkarani – Hampi Ruins, Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

Aggarwal, Kailash S. 1988. “English and India’s Three‐Language Formula: An Empirical Perspective.” World Englishes 7, no. 3: 289–298. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-971X.1988.tb00238.x.

Baldoz, Rick. 2008. “The Racial Vectors of Empire: Classification and Competing Master Narratives in the Colonial Philippines.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 5, no. 1 (2008): 69–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X08080089. 

Bernardo, Allan B. I. 2008. “English in Philippine Education: Solution or Problem?” In Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives, edited by M. A. Lourdes S. Bautista and Kingsley Bolton, 29–48. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Online edition, Hong Kong Scholarship Online, September 14, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789622099470.003.0003. 

Bravo-Sotelo, Karizza P., James McLellan, and Noor Azam Haji-Othman. 2024. “The Ideological Tug-of-War of Language Policies in the Philippines: Perspectives and Proposal.” Asian Englishes 26, no. 2: 564–578. https://doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2023.2257946.

Chowdhury, Sunandan Roy. 2017. Politics, Policy and Higher Education in India. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM). Making Education Work. Quezon City: Congressional Oversight Committee, 1993. 

Cruz, P., and A. Mahboob. “Critiquing Mother Tongue-Based Language-in-Education Policies: A Focus on the Philippines.” In Reconceptualizing English Education in a Multilingual Society, edited by I. P. Martin, 47–65. English Language Education 13. Singapore: Springer, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7528-5_4. 

De Vera, J. P. E. (2018). CHED on the Supreme Court decision on the removal of Filipino from the New General Education Curriculum – CHED. Commission on Higher Education. 

https://ched.gov.ph/ched-on-the-supreme-court-decision-on-the-removal-of-filipi no-from-the-new-general-education-curriculum/

Department of Education (DepEd). Policy Guidelines on the K to 12 Basic Education Program. Department Order No. 21, s. 2019. 

Galvez, Daphne. “DepEd Exec: Use English, Filipino as Kindergarten Media of Instruction.” Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 20, 2020. 

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1631047/deped-execuse-english-filipino-as-kinderga rten-media-of-instruction. 

Gonzalez, Andrew, and Bonifacio Sibayan, eds. Evaluating Bilingual Education in the Philippines (1974–1985). Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines, 1988. Hardgrave, Robert L. “The Riots in Tamilnad: Problems and Prospects of India’s Language Crisis.” Asian Survey 5, no. 8 (1965): 399–407. 

Hau, Caroline S., and Victoria L. Tinio. 2003. “Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in the Philippines.” Fighting Words. 319–49. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2988.003.0015.

Hsu, Funie. “The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico.” L2 Journal 7, no. 3 (2015). https://doi.org/10.5070/l27323549, 131-133. 

Jayaram, B. D., Rajyashree Subbayya, and Central Institute of Indian Languages. 1998. Goals and Strategies of Development of Indian Languages. Mysore, India: Central Institute of Indian Languages. 

Kirkpatrick, Andy. “Language Education Policy among the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).” European Journal of Language Policy 9, no. 1 (2017): 7–25. https://doi.org/10.3828/ejlp.2017.2. 

Lorente, Beatriz P. “10. the Grip of English and Philippine Language Policy.” Studies in World Language Problems, March 28, 2013, 187–204. 

https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.4.13lor, 189. 

Madrunio, M. R., Martin, I. P., & Plata, S. M. 2016. “English language education in the Philippines: Policies, problems, and prospects.” English Language Education Policy in Asia, 11, 245-264. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22464-0_11 

McMahon, Jennifer Marie, “The American Colonization of the Philippines and the Self-examination, Self-presentation and Re-presentation of American Identity.”

(2000). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4273, 80-81. 

Misra, Satish. 2019. “Controversy over Hindi Language; an Attempt to Divert Attention from Important Issues?” Observer Research Foundation, September 30. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/controversy-over-hindi-language-divert-a ttention-important-issues-55990/. 

Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press.  Porter, Christopher James. Dissertation. Language, Tagalog Regionalism, and Filipino Nationalism: How a Language-Centered Tagalog Regionalism Helped to Develop a Philippine Nationalism, 2017. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69j3t8mk#author, 40. 

Rappler. “Full Text: President Marcos’ State of the Nation Address 2022.” July 25, 2022. https://www.rappler.com/nation/full-text-transcript-president-marcos-jr-state-nat ionaddress-2022/. 

Sengupta, Papia. 2018. Language as Identity in Colonial India : Policies and Politics. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Simpson, Andrew. 2007. Language and National Identity in Asia. Oxford University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199267484.001.0001. 

Srijan Kumar. 2020. “The Evolution of India’s Language Policy: Special Reference to the Development of Hindi Vis-à-Vis Other Indian Languages.” Asia Research 23 (2): 379–400. 

The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines. Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines. Accessed January 20, 2025. 

https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/constitutions/the-1987-constitution-of-the-rep ublic-of-the-philippines/. 

The Amended 1973 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines. Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines. Accessed January 28, 2025. 

https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/constitutions/the-amended-1973-constitution 2/

The 1935 Constitution. Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines. Accessed January 28, 2025. 

https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/constitutions/the-1935-constitution/ The Constitution of India. Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice, 1950. Accessed January 20, 2025. https://legislative.gov.in/constitution-of-india. The Official Languages Act. Government of India, Department of Official Language, 1963. Accessed January 20, 2025. https://rajbhasha.gov.in/en/official-languages-act-1963.

Tupas, T. R. F. “History, Language Planners, and Strategies of Forgetting: The Problem of Consciousness in the Philippines.” Language Problems and Language Planning 27, no. 1 (2003): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.27.1.02tup. 

“Inequalities of Multilingualism: Challenges to Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education.” Language and Education 29, no. 2 (2014): 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2014.977295. 

UNESCO. MTB MLE Resource Kit: Including the Excluded: Promoting Multilingual Education. France: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2018.

“Many of the concepts and theories regarding South Asian relations analyzing the problems of South Asia broke down when examined regarding their adequacy to realities.”

– Dr. Gunar Myrdal’s Asian Drama- An Enquiry into the Poverty of Nations, observing the collapse of established theories of South Asian relations, under real world scrutiny, succumbing to contemporary diplomatic realities. 

The ‘Neighborhood First’ policy was introduced in 2008 with the objective of fostering strong and cooperative ties with India’s neighbours. Its main is to mutually benefit the citizens living on either side of the border, including but not limited to regional connectivity, infrastructure development and trade, with a boost up to $35 billion in regional trade over the next 14 years. Fostering global goodwill, through humanitarian aid and assistance, has been vital in helping India develop a people-oriented approach to its foreign policy while promoting the establishment of scholarship and training programs and growing digital and telemedicine initiatives with its neighbors has also contributed to these goals. When asked about India’s foreign policy in the Indian Parliament External Affairs Minister Subramaniam Jaishankar responded that “India engages with these countries on a consultative, non-reciprocal and outcome-oriented basis, driven by the  principles of Samman (respect), Samvad (dialogue), Shanti (peace), and Samriddhi (prosperity).” 

The country’s approach realizes its goals by providing asymmetric support through dialogue-driven projects from energy grids to infrastructure, creating shared stakes for harmony and progress. India is the fourth-largest economy in the world and is set to be the third-largest by 2030. As a flourishing economy in South Asia, it is imperative for India to invest in developing relations with its neighbors. India is constantly investing in infrastructure projects ranging from megastructures, such as the India-Bangladesh Maitree Super Thermal Power Project in Bangladesh—a 1,320 MW coal-based plant developed by NTPC (India) and BPDB (Bangladesh), to community-specific programs. Such investments extend not only monetary support but also humanitarian assistance. For example, the $4 billion in assistance that India sent to Sri Lanka at the apogee of the island country’s economic crisis in 2022 helped provide food, fuel, and medical aid. 

The Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal Motor Vehicles Agreement (BBIN MVA) is another good example of regional cooperation. This motor-vehicle agreement empowers connectivity. Implementing the Motor Vehicles Agreement (MVA) through the finalization of the Passenger and Cargo Protocol will enhance trade and strengthen people-to-people connectivity among BBIN nations. Of late, China has also taken an interest in Bhutanese standing. It does not have diplomatic relations with the latter, and the 470 kilometer boundary is un-demarcated between China and Bhutan. India has a strategic interest in any border settlement that could affect its national defense, which has lead the country to counter Chinese influence in the vulnerable Siliguri corridor and establish trusted partnerships in sensitive zones. Bhutanese sensitivity towards India’s concerns, rising from their dependence on India acting as a support to the nation, provides for significant achievement with regard to India’s objective of the policy.

As in Nepal, India’s role in the development of Bhutan is crucial, with trade having increased from $484 million in 2014-15 to $1.422 billion in 2021-22 and constituting about 80% of Bhutan’s overall trade. India is Bhutan’s leading source of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), accounting for more than 50% of the country’s total FDI. Bhutan also tops India’s foreign aid list, with a significant allocation of ₹2,150 crore for 2025-26, up from ₹2,068 crore last year. These allocated funds focus on infrastructural development and realizing hydropower projects. 

India also shows the flexibility of its regional approach in the case of Bangladesh. India has played a key role during the COVID-19 pandemic by supplying aid and vaccines under the Vaccine Maitri Scheme. The country also provides development assistance through concessional Lines of Credit (LOCs) under the Indian Development and Economic Assistance Scheme (IDEAS). This is facilitated by the Exim Bank of India. In the past 8 years, India has spent approximately $8 billion on Lines of Credit (LOC) for Bangladesh’s development, fostering a regional relationship. At the advent of relations during the formation of its eastern neighbor, political tension with India abounded after a shift in territorial boundaries and the creation of a new state, thereby shaking India’s backing and eroding political trust. Nonetheless, the transformation in relations with Bangladesh over the last decade has been significant in developing the two countries and marks a pivot in regional connectivity.

Further south, India has raised its financial assistance to the Maldives from ₹470 to ₹600 crore as per its 2025 financial budget. This increase comes as the Maldives works to improve ties with India after tensions arose due to President Mohamed Muizzu’s pro-China approach. While Muizzu had intended to enhance the Maldives Free Trade Agreement following his election, the recent visit of Maldivian Defense Minister Ghassan Maumoon to India in 2025 reflects ongoing efforts to strengthen bilateral cooperation with India instead. This includes but not limited to the Greater Malé connectivity project to connecting Malé with the islands of Villingili, Gulhifalhu, and Thilafushi using Indian assistance, the Ekatha Harbor development project, and the repair facility at Sifavaru in Uthuru Thila Falhu (UTF) atoll aiming at bolstering the operational capabilities of the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) with the latter two using Indian support as well. 

It is true that China has dominated South Asia for a considerable period of time not least due to its hard power capabilities, trade establishment, massive land area, population, military, and robust domestic economy. The country, which boasts of the second largest military power globally and has the largest standing army with over 2 million personnel, is naturally a dominant military power in Asia. India has historically feared that China may initiate a political upheaval in South Asia against India, and it has focused on fostering relations with its weaker economic neighbors by way of its policies and understandings as a result. Its steady involvement in the progressive affairs of several nations in the region can help facilitate united growth and development. In the future, India could pose as a unifying power against China.

Indian policymakers, throughout the history of independence, have been strategic when molding their policy relations with all countries with special emphasis on their neighbors. Following the ‘Indira Method’ of beneficial bilateralism (a foreign policy approach adopted during the 1970s and early 1980s, establishing India’s primacy in  South Asia) and the Rajiv Gandhian way of domination in the late 1980s, a more modern, interventionist, and technocratic style of asserting India’s influence in the region has taken root. This new approach is characterized by a blend of hard diplomacy and peacekeeping. That being said, India has always kept its goal simple: be in mutual gain with its neighbors.

Undoubtedly, the challenges India faces in its neighborhood have grown more intricate over the past two decades. The country has been vocal about its unsolved ‘neighborly’ problems such as that of Kashmir, illegal infiltration from its south-eastern borders. Indian diplomats, through dialogue and multilateral talks, have been successful in mitigating the extent of conflict and mistrust that follows. The Neighborhood First Policy must prioritize sustained engagement at all levels, including political dialogue and people-to-people interactions. Strengthening regional connectivity such as in the case of India-Nepal-Bangladesh multimodal transport corridor, enhancing this corridor including rail, land and inland waterways should be the primary focus. On the other hand, security concerns must be tackled through cost-effective, efficient, and globally-proven technological solutions, including nuclear-nonproliferation technology and satellite-based monitoring. In its entirety, India’s ‘Neighborhood First’ policy has helped it to enhance economic integration through trade and infrastructure. Such policies show the nation’s ethics and mores while demonstrating inclusivity and a flexible, proactive, and pragmatic approach towards diplomacy. 

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Buddha Head in Tree Roots, Wat Mahathat, Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made     

In November 2024, Delhi once again earned the unenviable title of the world’s most polluted city. As is routine by now, the winter months in the Indian capital bring delayed flights due to smog, schools shuttered due to dangerous Air Quality Index (AQI) levels, and millions struggle to breath due to the city’s air that is suffocating them. With over half of the ten most polluted cities in the world being in India, the country is no stranger to the ramifications of AQI levels topping 450—classified as “severe” by the World Health Organization—and the implications of this public health emergency on its most vulnerable populations. Behind these dramatic headlines is a structural crisis, one fueled by rapid industrialization, fossil fuel use, and weak enforcement of environmental regulations. Yet, despite this grim backdrop, change is on the horizon as India embarks on a quiet policy revolution: a national carbon credit trading scheme that has the potential to redefine environmental governance in the Global South. 

India’s air pollution is the result of a variety of sources: construction dust, vehicular emissions, stubble burning in agricultural areas, industrial activities, the list goes on. With several stakeholders involved in the process of regulating and limiting these toxic emissions, the issue becomes increasingly bureaucratic. According to the World Bank, air pollution costs India $36.8 billion annually, mainly due to premature deaths, additional healthcare spending, and reduced labor force productivity. Examining the public health effects further, it’s clear that the implications are devastating. Studies have estimated that air pollution kills about 1.5 millions people in India annually and that 40% of the population is estimated to die 7.6 years earlier. These costs are disproportionately faced by those in underserved and vulnerable communities—laborers in industrial hubs or near large traffic corridors suffer the most. 

Historically, India’s attempts at addressing air pollution have taken the form of regional, reactive policies such as odd-even vehicle rules, smog towers, not fueling cars older than 15 years, or firecracker bans. While correctly-intentioned, these policies are inadequate at limiting emissions due to their unequal and limited enforcement, suffering at the hands of limited state capacity or communication between national and regional administrative bodies. India’s pivot to market-based solutions signal a promising shift to addressing the vast and structural problems that stand in the way of clean air. 

Emissions trading systems (ETS), also referred to as cap-and-trade systems, aim to reduce emissions by limiting the total allowable emissions or emission concentration for firms and then allowing them to buy or sell these emission credits or allowances. This creates a financial incentive for firms with low abatement costs to reduce their emissions as much as possible and then sell their emission credits to firms with higher abatement costs. ETS systems have been successfully implemented in the EU and, as of 2021, in China as well. Regional ETS systems have also been implemented in California, Quebec, and British Columbia. Critical to the success of these systems are transparent reporting, consistent monitoring, and equal enforcement. 

India’s first foray into ETS began all the way back in 2012 with the Perform-Achieve-Trade (PAT) program that was implemented by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE). This targeted heavy manufacturing industries such as steel, cement, and aluminum, reported to have saved 87 million tons of CO₂ by 2020. Critics mention that lax enforcement and a focus on paper savings as opposed to real world ones limit the success of PAT.

More recently, a pilot program instituted and studied in Surat, Gujrat for a particulate matter emissions trading system found great success. Led by researchers Rohini Pande and Nicholas Ryan from Yale University, their randomized trial found that 99% firms complied with the cap-and-trade regulations and that particulate emissions decreased by 20-30%.¹ This was a first-of-its-kind particulate matter ETS—the first in the Global South—and the near-perfect compliance and results are a promising reminder of the potential these systems have in countries like India. 

While these examples are more regional, in 2023 India introduced its first national carbon market, the Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS). Its first regulatory phase is expected to launch this year and will mainly focus on firms with large emissions in industries such as steel, power, aluminum, and cement. These industries are also crucial to the country’s export strategy and will help it meet its goal of reducing emissions intensity of GDP by 45% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, as outlined in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. 

Beyond just reducing emissions, this domestic carbon credit market has several potential benefits for India. It could attract climate finance, via the global voluntary carbon market, to India, where firms in other countries would buy Indian carbon credits to offset their emissions and meet net-zero goals. This market is projected to grow to $50 billion by 2030, representing an attractive financial opportunity for India. Beyond this, the CCTS will also help India prepare for international carbon taxes such as the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is slated to be implemented in 2026 and will impose tariffs on carbon-intensive imports from countries that lack a carbon pricing mechanism like an ETS. 

Despite the hypothesized benefits, India faces several challenges in properly implementing the CCTS. Perhaps the most pressing shortcoming is the lack of institutional capacity at the moment: without a centralized emissions database or Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system, the scheme is opened up to potential misreporting or fraud. In the early days of the EU ETS, fraud led to the loss of 5 billion euros in taxpayer money. 

Greenwashing and serving corporate interests over genuine reform are other risks. Industrial lobbies or corrupt administrative bodies might lead to unequal enforcement of emissions caps that ultimately might allow companies to fall into the narrative of meeting environmental targets without making genuine progress towards them. And, if certain firms are unable to meet these regulations or public transparency and communication are compromised, a national Indian ETS is bound to fail. Above all, this is a project that requires trust, communication, and accountability from all stakeholders. 

India’s carbon market is also significant from a global perspective. As one of the world’s fastest growing economies and largest greenhouse gas emitters, India’s foray in markets-based approaches to environmental regulation can offer a model of success for other countries in the Global South. With other developing countries such as Indonesia and Brazil exploring ETS for their key industries, India’s role in global cooperation on these metrics and regulations cannot be understated. 

It’s clear that India’s willingness to explore carbon credit markets marks an inflection point in their battle against pollution. While far from a guaranteed success, it will be critical to watch how institutional capacity and enforcement expand to implement a first-of-its-kind scheme at this scale in this part of the world. And if executed with transparency and accountability, India will not only chart a new course for its own citizens but for discussions on environmental regulation and sustainability for decades to come.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Local authorities announced plans to spray water with dust suppressants on roads and use mechanized sweepers to reduce dust” | Image sourced from EPA Images  | CC License, no changes made

1.  Greenstone, Michael, et al. “Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 27 Jan. 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf009. ↩︎

Introduction

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought a four-day war over a patch of salty, barren territory
populated by greater numbers of wild asses than men. In the historiography of modern South
Asia, that war has been left largely untouched. India and Pakistan have fought longer, blooding
wars over relatively more hospitable bits of territory (as well as a glacier). Those wars—in
Kashmir, in Bengal, in Punjab—have received the bulk of historians’ attention (Gupta 1969;
Grover and Arora 1998; Raghavan 2013).

Despite this historiographic neglect, the 1965 war in the Rann of Kutch was no mere
skirmish. It was the penultimate event in a centuries-long dispute that demonstrates how the
interaction of sovereignty with the natural world has been transformed as the world’s dominant
regimes have moved from kingdoms and empires to the modern nation-state (Scott 1998;
Cederlöf 2013; Gardner 2021). That the long-running dispute over the Rann concerned a strip of
land regarded by many visitors and administrators as an interminable waste, neither land nor sea,
makes its example deeply relevant to a world in which the boundaries between those two realms
are increasingly blurry (Young 1839; Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler
1968).

This thesis traces the history and evolution of the Rann of Kutch dispute over more than
200 years. The dispute traces its genealogy to early modern battles between Sindh and Kutch, the
two political territories adjoining the Rann (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Their animus
was transformed by the bureaucratic apparatus of the British Raj into a decades-long exchange of
maps and memoranda between Sindh and Kutch over where the jurisdictional divide between them lay. The dispute was finally concluded when India and Pakistan, after both diplomacy and war had failed them, accepted an international tribunal’s verdict on the position of the border in
1968 (Khan 1998; Singh 1998).

This paper was prompted by a conundrum: why would India and Pakistan go to war over
a tract of desolate wasteland? Working through archival sources, legal arguments, and a diverse
array of cartographic evidence, I offer an argument in two parts that forms the core of this paper.
First, I contend that the Rann of Kutch dispute endured because the modern nation-state
demands the transformation of fuzzy pre-modern boundaries into hard borders satisfying the
nation-state’s requirement of a well-defined territory (Elden 2013). The final period of the
dispute, which involved contestation between India and Pakistan, was driven by the need of both
to completely constitute themselves as sovereign states.

Second, I argue that border-making was frustrated in the Rann by its amphibious, barren
condition. Border-making, which relied on evidence of state presence, could not be carried out in
the Rann. The tract, with its sparse and transient population, lacked clear and uncontested
evidence of state-imposed taxation, violence, or administrative jurisdictions (Frere 1870;
Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Ibrahim 2004). India, Pakistan, and their predecessors
attempted to escape this problem by imposing a cartographic and bureaucratically-defined reality
on this complex ecological system, reifying it into categories that could be operated on by
border-making practices. The attributes of the Rann that challenged attempts to extend
sovereignty over its alien landscape presage the problems states will be forced to confront as
they strive to preserve the tokens of sovereignty in an increasingly environmentally volatile
world.

My arguments take as their starting point a landmark piece of international arbitration from the 1960s, the award of the Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal. I intersect the arguments and claims made in that case with a diverse array of cartographic and qualitative evidence that makes the conceptual visualization of the Rann possible. In combining these disparate kinds of sources, I find that the dispute over the Rann, which was motivated by the most fundamental needs of the nation-state, proceeded inevitably from the environmental confusion that the Rann produces.

I arrive at this conclusion by bringing together legal claim-making, a strong proxy for the
state’s understanding of its own rules and authority, with cartographic depictions. The process of
doing so required the analysis of an archive previously only considered for the tribunal I
reference above, which traces the shifting representations of the Rann over two centuries through
its cartographic and bureaucratic records. In the next section of this introduction, I lay out the
specificities of this singular place to help shape an understanding of what, perhaps, the Rann of
Kutch is, and why it has posed such a challenge to the modern state.

Setting

The Rann of Kutch encompasses two connected but differentiable ecological systems.
The Little Rann of Kutch, a salt flat covering 2,000 square miles, is located entirely within the
Indian state of Gujarat. The Great Rann of Kutch, a salt flat covering 7,500 square miles,
transgresses the India-Pakistan border. The lion’s share, 90%, is in Gujarat. The remaining 10%
lies in the Pakistani state of Sindh (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Raikar 2023). The
Great Rann shares the Kachchh Rift Basin, a seismically active former seafloor, with the Kutch
Peninsula, which bounds it on the south, and with the Little Rann, which bounds it on the
southeast (Sorkhabi 2014; Thakkar and Kar 2017; Chauhan et al. 2021).

This paper is concerned exclusively with territorial disputes in the Great Rann. While disputes over the Little Rann were cited during the arbitration of the Rann of Kutch dispute, Pakistan and India never contested control of the Little Rann (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Whenever I refer to “the Rann” in this account, I am referring to the Great Rann.

The Rann is a flooded grassland biome covered mostly by sabkhas, alluvial salt, and mud
flats(Glennie and Evans 1976; Olson et al. 2001). On account of its extreme salinity and seasonal
inundation it is often described as a salt marsh. The salt flats are most expansive in the central
and western Rann, often called the “white desert” in contemporary travel stories (Springer 2018;
Patel 2021). The flat terrain is intermittently interrupted by bets or dhools, upraised “islands”
where pasture and occasionally freshwater may be found (Burnes 1829; 1834; Lagergren,
Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Four large bets cross the southern Rann from west to east: Pachham,
Khadir, Beyla, and Chorar. A chain of small bets runs north from Pachham to the part of Sindh
called Pirol Valo Kun.

Every year, during the monsoon, the Rann is inundated by rainfall, inflow from rivers,
and, in places, seawater (Glennie and Evans 1976; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968)3. The
waters, which may be a foot or more deep, are shallower at the center of the Rann and deeper at
the edges (Frere 1870). The largest river flowing into the Rann is the brackish Luni, which
evaporates in the northeastern Rann after picking up salt and silt in the Thar Desert, which is also
the Rann’s northern border.

One genre of descriptions of the Rann focuses on its aridity and salinity, calling it a “barren waste, sandy desert, vast salt flats, salt desert, salt waste, salt impregnated alluvial tract.” But the Rann, inundated for a large chunk of the year, is not a typical salt pan. A second genre calls the Rann a seabed, inland sea, lake, or gulf, emphasizing its aquatic qualities. Unlike any of these features, though, the Rann is arid for most of the year. A final genre characterizes the Rann as amphibious: “swamp, marsh, morass, salt marsh, salt water waste, mud and sand, marsh of alluvium.” This category is closest to capturing the extreme duality of the Rann, but even then, the Rann lacks the clusters of low-lying vegetation typical of salt marshes (Tremenheere 1867; Frere 1870; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). It is, as the British adventurer Alexander Burnes said, “a tract without a counterpart in the globe.”

Theory: Borders and Barriers

My argument for the close and intricate relationship between the state and its borders is
founded on an expansive literature dealing with the emergence of the modern nation-state and its
territory. In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott writes that:

“State power, in this conception [of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive
unit of sovereignty], is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle, be
fully projected to the very edge of its territory, where it meets, again in principle, another
sovereign power projecting its command to its own adjacent frontier. Gone, in principle,
are the large areas of no sovereignty or mutually canceling weak sovereignties” (Scott
2009).

The period I study, from the 18th century into the late 20th, nearly traces the global transition
from empires and kingdoms to nation-states. During this period, the overlapping legal and
territorial landscapes associated with empire—characterized by a plurality of asymmetric
relations between the sovereign and the governed—were replaced by relationships between the
governed and the state that were defined in terms of an impersonal, not personal, sovereign state.
That state was necessarily defined by its group (national) identity and its borders, which marked
the limits of its territorial control. Elden describes the conception of territory that was born out of
this transition into modernity as “a bounded space under the control of a group of people, usually
a state” (Elden 2013).

The conception of sovereignty, specifically territorial sovereignty, articulated by Scott
and Elden has manifested itself repeatedly in South Asia. During the colonial period, the East
India Company and the British Raj both created the conditions for the rise of the modern
nation-state, in their attempts to define the boundaries of their rule, and permitted the persistence
of older forms of overlapping territorial and popular sovereignty (Cederlöf 2013; Chatterjee
2020). A close analogue to my work is Gardner’s research on Ladakh, which traces the uneven
march of a border across the Ladakh-Tibet frontier from the late 19th century through the 20th.
Gardner argues in The Frontier Complex that:

“The colonial state’s use of geography became intimately tied to the particular demands of
security and to the general process of making legible political territory. This increasingly
close relationship between geography and the state reveals a major spatial reorientation of
the modern period: a geopolitical vision that conceived of the world as a set of
coterminous territories tied to, and dependent upon, geographical features. While the
British Empire would ultimately fail to define its territorial borders in the northwestern
Himalaya, it bequeathed to its successor nation-states a conception of political space that
made borders objects of existential significance” (Gardner 2021).

Gardner’s exhaustive analysis of border-making in Ladakh, and the tension between the
ambiguities permitted under empire and the imperatives of postcolonial nation-states, maps
closely to the process I describe in Kutch in this essay.

As in Ladakh, India and Pakistan found themselves the unhappy possessors of a
territorially ambiguous situation in one of the least hospitable places in the world. From the
British Raj into the post-independence period, all parties attempted to use the tools of geographic
sciences to transfer the uncertain volatility of the Rann into forms of representation and data that could be understood and interpreted by the state. But even as British imperium and imperial science sought to make the Rann legible, the Rann frustrated their efforts through the simple fact of its environmental volatility. As was true in other shifting landscapes, like the delta of Bengal, it could not be easily categorized by the systems of territorial control to which the Raj or its successor states would be accustomed, and any attempt to reify the ecological system and place through maps, reports, or surveys was at odds with its shifting complexity (Bhattacharyya 2018; Dewan 2021).

This is not to say that the colonial project in the Rann was fully intentional. As Cederlöf
notes, “There is a tendency at times to ascribe far more coherence of interest and institutions to a
state in its daily practice than can be justified” (Cederlöf 2013). Rather, the everyday attempts by
agents of the Raj and of the precolonial kingdoms they succeeded to govern the Rann would be
ultimately interpreted by India and Pakistan as attempts at imposing governance on an
ungovernable place, largely by creating a vision of its reality that fit neatly on a map but did not
necessarily fit neatly onto the ground. As Cederlöf outlines in 18th century Bengal, well into the
19th century, out of a combination of the permissiveness of empire and technological limitations
to the assertion of control, a boundary in the Rann could be “a set of points… marking out
territorial claims meant fortifying strategic strongholds such as heights or rivers bifurcations, or
exercising authority by taxing market places” (Cederlöf 2013). My research demonstrates how,
as they grew increasingly uneasy with their frictional frontier, the component parts of the Raj as
well as the Raj’s postcolonial successor states clung to such points and markers of authority in
order to achieve broader control over an uncontrollable place.

While the purposes for which borders were sought in the Rann were complex and multi-layered, they came over time, even during the Raj, to be regarded as essential to the functioning of the imperial components adjacent to the tract. Neither Sindh nor Kutch, nor Pakistan and India after them, could permanently tolerate a wide, liminal boundary between them. In pursuit of a border, “geographical science was employed to determine territory by attempting to rationalize and standardize boundary-making principles and practices… the resulting frontiers and borders were simultaneously physical spaces and spatial ideals that reflected a host of aspirations and anxieties of the state” (Gardner 2021).

The following thesis brings together a host of archival sources and materials to show that the process of border-making and the anxieties that accompanied it were an essential part of the historical transition into modernity. But these processes relied on ecological and geographical fantasies sustained only by the relative stability of the last three centuries. As we transition into a new age of widespread climatic volatility, the underpinnings of the modern nation-state, especially its requirement for a clearly defined territory, will be called into question.

The Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal, 1965–1968

In 1948, newly-independent Pakistan sent a diplomatic correspondence to newly-independent India complaining of hardship to Pakistani pastoralists as a consequence of uncertainty over the boundary between India and Pakistan in the Rann of Kutch. In 1949, India responded with the assertion that there was no dispute and that the Rann fell firmly under Indian control. In 1954, shortly after it signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement with the United States, Pakistan responded. Saying that “the boundary between Sind and Cutch from Sir Creek onwards has always been in dispute,” Pakistan proposed that the boundary be demarcated, either by a conference, an arbitration, or India’s acceptance of Pakistan’s claim to the Rann north of the 24th parallel. India, in its 1955 reply, said that it would not accept a border anywhere besides the northern edge of the Rann (Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Munshi 1998).

After half a decade of further disagreement, the two disputants agreed to the Sheikh-Swaran
Singh Agreement in January 1960. The Agreement provided a nebulous framework for the
peaceful settlement of the border problem, saying that “detailed ground rules for the guidance of
the Border Security forces along the Indo-West Pakistan frontier… will be put into force by both
sides immediately” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Gupta 1969). Despite the Agreement,
clashes intensified in the Rann after 1960, culminating in Pakistan’s Operation Desert Hawk, a
series of strikes on Indian military installations in the Rann, on 24 April, 1965. A ceasefire was
declared on 28 April, but the conflict was not officially concluded until 30 June, 1965, when
both parties agreed to submit the dispute for arbitration after the intervention of Harold Wilson,
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Ahmad 1973).

The dispute was arbitrated by the Indo-Pakistan Western Boundary Case Tribunal, which
operated from 1966–1968. The Tribunal was constituted by three judges: one nominated by
India, one by Pakistan, and a chairman, after India and Pakistan could not agree on a candidate,
nominated by the Secretary General of the United Nations. Prior to the start of hearings,
delegations from India and Pakistan were permitted two months to visit each others’ archives to
collect evidence. Hearings before the Tribunal ran from 15 September, 1966 until 14 July, 1967.
A draft award was proposed by the Tribunal in October 1967. The award was finalized on 19
February, 1968 (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

The Tribunal found itself fully in favor of neither India nor Pakistan. It awarded ninety
percent of the Rann to India—all areas where the Raj had, affirmatively or by omission, accepted
Kutch’s claim. Ten percent, the areas where Pakistan had demonstrated sustained state activity originating from Sindh, was allotted to Pakistan. The verdict written by Gunnar Lagergren, Chairman, said:

“A recognised and well-established boundary did not exist in the disputed region east of
the Western Trijunction on the eve of Independence… Since the Rann until recently has
been deemed incapable of permanent occupation, the requirement of possession cannot
play the same important role in determining sovereign rights therein as it would have
done otherwise. Therefore, special significance must be accorded to display of other State
activities and to attitudes expressed or implied by one or several of the sovereign entities
abutting upon the Rann in regard to the actual extension of their respective dominions”
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

In Lagergren’s verdict, we see the problem at the root of the dispute exposed: without evidence
of state presence, jurisdiction could not be determined in any conventional way. As I argue above
and throughout the rest of this paper, the reason for this absence lies in the Rann’s ecological
complexity. To simplify it, India and Pakistan both conceived of and presented competing
cartographic, bureaucratic, and ecological visions of the Rann from 1947–1968.

Pakistan’s Conception of the Rann

In publicity documents, published works, and its arguments to the Tribunal, Pakistan articulated a vision of the Rann that emphasized the ways in which it met the conditions of being a marine space. This conception was premised on the geomorphological reality that the Rann was a former seabed disconnected from the Arabian Sea by tectonic uplift and seismic activity (Thakkar and Kar 2017). It was supported by an outdated claim that the major source of the Rann’s seasonal inundation was monsoon winds blowing seawater across the length of the Rann. In Pakistani documents, the Rann was described as an “inland sea,” in some cases with the caveat “now dead” (Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Ahmad 1973).

In addition to drawing on scientific knowledge about the Rann, Pakistan drew on the
ways in which movement across the Rann resembled navigating marine spaces. These arguments
drew on statements like that of the Acting Commissioner in Sindh, who said in 1856 that:

“This district [Thar Parkar] is in fact… as much separated from Kutch by the Runn as if
the sea there still covered its former bed. In fact it is even more completely separated
from Kutch than if the Runn were still covered by the ocean, for in that case the
communication by boat would assuredly… be more than it now is across the salt swamp
of the Runn” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Descriptions like these emphasized the idea of the Rann as a barrier, a concept that implied
comparisons to seas and other water bodies are seen as barriers that must be traversed, rather
than inhabited. The claim that the Rann was in many respects a sea—uninhabited, difficult to
cross, often watery—and therefore a barrier supported the Pakistani contention that the Rann was
a bounding area, a peripheral and perhaps liminal space, rather than a place in and of itself. This
sense of the Rann as “belt of boundary” could be neatly aligned with legal conceptions of
transboundary bodies of water, but had far fewer modern legal precedents for terrestrial areas
(Gardner 2021).

Categorizing the Rann as a marine space rendered an alien landscape familiar, making it conform to the existent principles of the nearness of shores and the median line. Doing so achieved two objectives. It reduced the need for special categorization of the Rann, which could be understood as a marine feature and subsequently divided and demarcated using pre-existing frameworks. Without the need for greater and more specialized site-specific knowledge, further knowledge production was unnecessary (Bhattacharyya 2018). The complexity of the Rann as a temporarily inundated landscape could be replaced with the fiction of the Rann as a permanent body of water, cartographically and bureaucratically imposed on the landscape. Second, once the Rann was defined as a marine feature, it was subject to different standards for sovereignty. It could be demarcated using a simple and single line, and disputes over islands were washed away.

In its effort to place the Rann firmly in the legal category of the marine, Pakistan sought to effect a reclassification of space that suited its political objectives (Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1965). Classifying the Rann as a sea opened up the category of marine features to the possibility of including a space like the Rann, and it applied existing rules to a confusing place in a way that made its administration simpler and advantageous to Pakistan. Choosing one aspect of the often-confused British categorizing project, Pakistan solidified its terms and then redoubled its application to the Rann in order to construct a space over which it had an undeniable and persuasive claim.

India’s Conception of the Rann

In its claims to the Rann between 1947–68, India emphasizes that the Rann should be
understood as a complicated salt marsh within its territory. Defining the Rann as a wetland
allowed India to push for a context-driven understanding of the space as one that was terrestrial
but prone to frequent and violent change. India supported its argument with statements like a 2
November, 1906 Foreign Department letter saying, “It does not appear to be correct to show the
Rann of Kutch as though it were all water. The symbol for a swamp might be used”
(Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Understanding that India saw the Rann as a marsh is essential to understanding India’s
perspective on border-making in and around the tract. If the Rann were categorized as aquatic or marine, it would be subjected to the rigid and pre-existing rules governing aquatic features.
While a wetland is both soaked and fluid, unlike non-fluvial and non-soaked land, it is still
ultimately more governable by the context-driven rules of terrestrial law than the standards of
maritime law (Bhattacharyya 2018). India’s contentions rendered the Rann as an anomalous but
not totally alien place, a space integral to the whole of Kutch and therefore subject to the same
exercise of sovereignty. The Rann could experience change or shifting within its cartographically
outlined borders, but that change was constrained by lines on a map. Having been defined as a
wetland, the Rann was tethered to a very specific piece of land in the Indian imagination, as an
auxiliary but integral part of Kutch.

Before and after 1968, India was deeply concerned about what the liminality of this
auxiliary, integral space meant for its functional coherence with the body of Kutch. Despite its
physical and bureaucratic taming, the fear went, the Rann might still serve as a place of
disorientating crossing, as an ungovernable periphery. Imagining the Rann as a landform and the
border as being at the edges of the Rann, rather than anywhere within it, gave India room to
remake the Rann as a militarized frontier, on the edges of society but central to its security, rather
than letting it remain a place of marginality and liminality (Ibrahim 2004; 2017; 2018). To
borrow from Benjamin D. Hopkins, the Rann was constructed in the Indian imagination as one
of a number of “forgotten peripheries—the edges of empire” built, often intentionally, by
colonial states and their successors (Hopkins 2020).

Constructing a Peripheral Space

This section chronicles the construction of the Rann as a peripheral space in the period before 1857, when The British Raj assumed paramountcy in South Asia. The Rann’s peripherality was premised, in part, on a geopolitical reality. It was not part of any state in a way that would be contemporarily recognizable. And it could not be an effective component of any state because no state could maintain an effective presence within it (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). But the Rann’s peripherality was also the reflection of an effort to make it definable, a process that began with informal documents and accounts that reified conceptions of the Rann as a periphery to state entities. This process began with documents and observers that emphasized the ways in which the Rann was alien to familiar life and neglected by or outside of
the state.

Dams and Earthquakes

Before the weakening of Mughal power in the 1700s, Sindh was a part of the Thatta
Subah, an administrative division of the Mughal Empire (Ansari 1992). Kutch was the core
territory of Cutch State, a Mughal client. From the 1730s until at least 1741, Kutch maintained
thanas (outposts) in Sindh at Rahim ki Bazar, Virawah, and possibly the nearby towns of Baliari
and Badin. Sindh achieved de facto independence from Mughal rule in the 1730s. By the
mid-1700s, the Kutch thanas appear to have been abandoned (Burnes 1829; 1834).

The armies of the Kalhora mians (princes) of Sindh crossed the Rann along different
routes to raid Kutch in 1762, 1764, 1775, and 1776 (Burnes 1834). In 1762, the most devastating
invasion, Sindh and Kutch met in the Battle of Jara, an inconclusive Sindh victory. Afterward,
Sindh stationed a garrison at Lakhpat and built a bund across the Puran at Mora, a few miles
north of the Rann. The building of the dam marked the beginning of the desertification of Sayra,
which began to lose the waters that sustained its rice paddies. The Sindh garrison at Lakhpat was
withdrawn in the 1770s, but Sindh again built a dam across the Puran in 1802. The dam this time
was at Ali Bunder, near Mora (Burnes 1829; 1834).

In the early part of the 19th century, Kutch was riven by internal strife that weakened its
ability to project power in and across the Rann. In 1809 and again in 1815, the East India
Company concluded treaties with representatives of the Kutch darbar, or court (Lagergren,
Entezam, and Bebler 1968). In 1819, a final treaty, the Treaty of Alliance, was signed by
representatives of the Jadeja bhayad, Kutch’s regnal council of noblemen. Article 5 of the Treaty
of Alliance stated, “The Honourable Company engages to guarantee the power of his Highness
the Rao Dessul, his heirs and successors, and the integrity of his dominions, from foreign or
domestic enemies” (Aitchison 1909).

Though not apparent at the time, it would emerge over the course of the 19th century that
the boundaries of the dominion of Kutch were functionally unknown. They were further
complicated a few months before the signing of the Treaty of Alliance when the Rann of Kutch
earthquake occurred. The earthquake flooded Sayra, leaving behind only a lone tower peeking
out of the lake covering Sindri’s former location (Burnes 1834; Lewis 1873). A 16-mile-long
natural dam on the Puran, Allah Bund, formed five miles north of Sindri, erasing evidence of the
customs post at Kaeera Nullah from the landscape (Raikes 1855; Frere 1870; Athavale 2013).
When Kutch attempted to establish a customs post on Allah Bund, it was forced to withdraw its
officers in the face of opposition from Sindh.

Both the destruction of Sindri and the earthquake of 1819 would be cited in the ensuing decades as evidence of Kutch’s lack of effective presence in the Rann. Alexander Burnes, who was stationed in Kutch in the 1820s, implied that in some respects state failure was a cause of the expansion of the Rann, and that the Rann and the state could not therefore coexist. Burnes wrote that Kutch had tolerated repeated dam construction on the Puran for so many decades that the flooding of Sayra “passed unheeded, for it had become a matter of indifference to Cutch whether the tract which had been a desert since the battle of Jharra [sic] continued so, or became an inland lake, as in either state it had ceased to yield those advantages to the people which they had once enjoyed” (Burnes 1834).

Burnes’ writing suggests that Sayra and Sindri were seen as peripheral to Kutch even
before they were functionally a part of the Rann. Having become part of the Rann after many
years of desertification and the 1819 inundation, they were truly peripheral to the core territory
of the state, and so did not merit attention or a state presence. While Burnes’ narratives include
mentions of Kutch attempting to assert its presence in the tract, it is essential to note that this
presence was temporary and rebuffed; Kutch could not sustain a customs post, the fertility of the
landscape, or its interests writ large. That was because the landscape, due to its inherent volatility
as well as human action, was now part of the Rann. And the Rann could not be controlled
because it was inherently hostile to the people and the presence of the state.

Writers and Mapmakers

Several accounts similar to Burnes’ were written during and shortly after the Company
Raj. These include the memoirs of Marianne Postans (Young), who lived in Kutch in the 1830s
as the wife of the Political Agent; Henry Bartle Frere, Chief Commissioner in Sindh in the 1850s
and later Governor of Bombay; William Pottinger, who traveled to Sindh in the 1830s; and C.W.
Tremenheere, an officer in the Royal Engineers. These accounts describe a remarkable place.
Postans says, “nothing could, perhaps, be found more worthy the observation of the traveller”
(Young 1839) But it is remarkable in part because of its desolation and alienness. Frere says,
“There is a total absence of any sign of animal or vegetable life which could break the uniformity
of the surface. There are no trees, no tufts of grass; and the bones of a dead camel are visible for miles, whether seen in their actual form or size, or drawn up into the likeness of towers, rocks, and houses by mirage” (Frere 1870).

Mirages appear repeatedly in travel writing about the Rann (Burnes 1834; Young 1839;
Frere 1870). Mentioning them served to emphasize the ways in which the Rann was distinct from
the typical human existence. The fact that the only indicators of human presence to be found in
the Rann were illusory emphasized its desolation and hostility to human life. And the presence of
these illusions reinforced the unreality of the Rann; rather than being tangible, firm, and real, like
the world of the state, it was cloudy and intangible—at the margins of the known world. Through
these descriptions, the Rann was constituted as a place that could be seen but not inhabited, a
space rather than a place in its own right. At best, in these narratives, it can only be an alien
periphery, undergoing such frequent tumult and subject to such hostile conditions that it is not
worth the effort or the time of the state to establish a presence in the first place.

There are occasional exceptions to this picture, but where they disrupt the idea that the
Rann is totally hostile to human life, they entrench the idea that it is not inhabitable. Burnes
writes that “the traffic across is considerable” on the direct military and trade route from Bhuj to
Rahim ki Bazar, despite “an inhospitable tract of forty-eight miles without a drop of fresh water,
on leaving Luna” (Burnes 1834). But this piece of evidence, as well as descriptions of river
traffic in the decade after the 1819 earthquake, are always contrasted with the Rann’s
inhospitality otherwise (Burnes 1834; Holland 1855). Trade can only take place through it, not in
it; there are not, as there are in the settled places of the world, points of state presence in the
Rann. It is a tenuous bridge between two areas of state control, liminal and peripheral.
The extent to which the Rann was seen as a periphery is reaffirmed in the pre-survey
maps, the earliest of which dates to 1788 (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Dossal 2019).

These maps were prepared by a range of creators with an equally varied range of familiarity with
the Rann. Perhaps as a consequence, it is difficult to extract a sense of what the Rann is from the
maps. It is a marsh in some, a desert in others, a sea in a third fraction. There is no standard
depiction of the space (Pottinger 1814; Arrowsmith 1822; Walker and Walker 1833; Zimmerman
1851; Wynne 1872a; Risley et al. 1909; Indian Information Service 1965). In Fig. 1, I show a
section of Burnes’ 1829 map of Kutch, which ambiguously depicts the Rann.

In Burnes’ map, which influenced depictions of Kutch and its environs for decades, and which was used to represent landholdings in the Rann, the Rann is personally knowable through Burnes’ recollections of his travel (Burnes 1829; Lumsden 1855). But this information is of limited use to the state, which cannot use a map like Burnes’ to govern. This is in spite of its detail and fairly careful measurement; without a standard of systematization, it does not serve the key function of cartography to the state, which is to simplify an unsimple space into a visual language that is codified and can be used to exert power and control.

The irregularity of the Rann was later communicated through the range of ribands, demarcating ribbons of color, used to separate the Rann from Sindh and Kutch on maps. The Tribunal’s award notes that “In these maps Sind and Kutch are either represented in different colour washes or they are bounded off by coloured ribands. In between is the Rann, coloured either blue, white, or light brown, with the addition, sometimes, of swamp or marsh symbols” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Indian Information Service 1965; High Commission of India 1965). I show an example of one kind of boundary marker in Fig. 2.

The confusion over how to depict the Rann, and the ways in which it was occasionally
merged with the Thar and at other points rendered as a sea, contributed to the sense of its
peripherality (Wynne 1872a; 1872b; Risley et al. 1909). The lack of clarity reinforced the sense
that the Rann was beyond the ken of the state. No standard border could be drawn around or
through it because it was not a knowable place. On the basis of hearsay, assumption, or first-hand
knowledge, it might be assigned to one mainland, the other, or left uncategorized. The
ambiguousness of its depiction contributed to the peripheralization of the Rann: it was not
knowable through maps, could not be known, and therefore existed firmly at the margins of the
state until it could, by means of state presence, state-generated knowledge, and growing state
capacity, be brought in from the hazy margins of early cartographic efforts.

Searching for a Legible Rann

As Scott uses it, legibility describes a state’s efforts to order society in such a way that it
is knowable, controllable, and extractable by the state (Scott 1998; Lee and Zhang 2017).
Compared to the complexity and specificity of local and particular knowledge, legibility is an
abstraction that simplifies knowledge in order to make it manipulable. A range of projects
undertaken by states can contribute to making a place and its people legible; surveys, censuses,
and standardized units are archetypal examples (Hopkins 2020).

The British Raj replaced the East India Company as the paramount power in the Rann
after 1857. Over the course of its rule, it engaged in a series of occasional efforts to make the
Rann more controllable by the organs of the state. As I outline in this section, that program
involved first making the Rann knowable. Through decades of surveys, maps, and administration
reports, the Raj, Sindh, and Kutch worked to simplify the complexity of the Rann until it could
be both a target of state presence and a component of states.

The urge to do this was driven by a fact of modernity: the rise of the modern nation-state
erased the possibility of a geopolitical no man’s land or space of ambiguous borders. A space
was required to be a place, and a place was required to belong to a party. Every border needed to
be coterminous, rather than a borderland. The Rann, which had occupied a peripheral position
during the era of pre-modern states, therefore needed to be made fully a part of one or both of the
adjoining mainlands. This need grew more pronounced with the end of the Raj. An empire could
accommodate the fuzziness of a borderland, but the postcolonial state could not.

In response to these pressures, both Kutch and Sindh sought to create and co-opt standardized knowledge about the Rann into their claims to and about the space. Pakistan and India, in turn, sought to draw stronger claims out of these legible-making processes. In this analysis, I consider two mechanisms of legibility: surveying efforts and documentary evidence, and illustrate how legibility was used to support assertions of the Rann’s integrality to state spaces and of their presence within it.

Surveying

Four surveys took place in and around the Rann between 1857–1947. The first, lasting
from 1855–1870, was a Survey of India survey of Sindh. From 1866–1870, the survey, under the
leadership of Donald MacDonald, concerned itself with Thar Parkar, Mohamed Khan’s Tanda,
and Shahbunder Districts. The survey maps from Mohamed Khan’s Tanda included a “Runn
Sub-Circuit” outside of any village dehs, or revenue collection areas (Gastrell 1867; 1868; 1870;
High Commission of India 1965). The reasons for this decision are unclear. In 1968, India
claimed that the survey, a revenue survey, was meant to survey the political and topographical
landscape of a region, meaning that the omission of most of the Rann was evidence that it was
really a part of Kutch. The parts of the Rann so included were included because of instructions to the surveying party to survey adjacent areas to the areas they were tasked with surveying. Pakistan, on the other hand, argued that revenue surveys were meant to capture only the revenue-producing parts of a place, and so the Rann, a barren waste, would not have been included (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

There is no record of a dispute at the time between Sindh and Kutch over the surveying
boundaries. But it seems clear that the survey was not viewed as the final word in the boundary
question because in 1875, the mukhtiarkar, or revenue-collector, of Diplo Taluka responded to a
query from the Political Superintendent of Thar Parkar about the location of the border between
Thar Parkar and Kutch with a message that:

“In the midst of Kutch Bhuj and Taluka Diplo, District Tharparkar, from the Rann, from
Rahimki [Bazar] coming in the north of Allah Bund, Mian ji Sari, the distance of which
from Rahimki will be 24 miles, is the settled boundary, and from Vingar and Balyari,
Gaind ji Chhan, where Dharamsala is built, the distance of which, from Balyari will be 24
miles, from where towards the north, at a distance of half a mile, the boundary of Diplo,
and towards the south, boundary of Kutch Bhuj territory. On these boundaries, there is no
boundary mark” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

On the basis of the mukhtiarkar’s report, the Political Superintendent informed the
Commissioner in Sindh that there was no demarcated boundary between Sindh and Kutch, but
that customary points indicated the border. He recommended that the boundary be demarcated
with the assistance of the Political Agent in Kutch, who asked the Dewan of Kutch whether the
border had ever been demarcated and what Kutch’s border claim was.

The Rao of Kutch died that year, and the Government of Bombay passed an 1876 Resolution postponing border demarcation. The question of where the border fell spurred the Dewan to ask three vahivatdars, or leaseholders, to “collect evidence relating to the boundaries of Kutch in the direction of Sind[h] and Thar Parkar” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

This new interest in the Rann would be encouraged by the 1879–1886 Survey of Kutch,
led by Major A. Pullan. This survey mapped the whole of the Rann. When questioned as to why
after Sindh raised objections, Pullan wrote “I surveyed the Runn because it is intimately
connected with the country of Cutch and it was an absolute geographical necessity that it should
be surveyed. I have carefully abstained from laying down or even suggesting any boundary
between Cutch and Sind” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Before asking Pullan to answer to it, the Government of Bombay had already resolved
that the dispute over the location of the border be suppressed. It sent a Resolution titled
“Boundary Disputes: Claim of Cutch Darbar to the Sind side of the Runn,” and took no further
action. But the border remained undefined (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Pullan’s attitude that it was “an absolute geographical necessity” to have the Rann
surveyed and mapped speaks to the unacceptability of the informational lacuna embodied by the
Rann. Though it was a hinterland, it was essential that the Rann be understood in order to fix its
position relative to its settled state neighbors. Without a knowledge of the geographic and
ecological characteristics of the Rann, there was no way to begin the process of reifying the
Rann into a simplified form that suited Kutch’s claims to the Rann.

In this respect, Pullan’s notes from the survey are contradictory. He claimed to the Government of Bombay that he did not recognize Kutch’s claim to the whole Rann. But in a letter to the Surveyor-General dated 9 August, 1880, he wrote that “the survey when completed will be of the greatest use to the Durbar who are very desirous to obtain a reliable map of the Country.” In his 1880–1881 Survey Report, Pullan adds that “The part of Cutch surveyed during the past field Season comprised firstly a portion of the Great ‘Rann’ and the widespreading grass land known as ‘Bani” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Pullan’s writing makes explicit the way in which Kutch saw accurate information about
its erstwhile hinterland as a necessary ingredient in the process of transforming the Rann from a
periphery into an essential component of the state. It also suggests that Kutch saw patronizing
information creation by an organ of the paramount power as a way of creating usable knowledge
about a place that would be seen as Kutch knowledge about a place that was a part of Kutch.
Using standardized information, Kutch began to seek to freeze the Rann as a static entity in maps
and to use evidence from surveys to substantiate its claims to the Rann.

Compared to Kutch, Sindh did less during the colonial period to make the Rann legible to
it; it was largely content to assume that it had a legitimate claim to the northern half of the Rann.
Where there were efforts to render the Rann legible, these were at its edges, in places where
human activity was semi-permanent, and therefore more within the traditional realm of the state
and knowable through information already possessed by Sindh. For Sindh, the Rann did not
demand the level of legibility that Kutch sought to create and enforce.

The third major surveying effort in the Rann was that of Erskine in 1904–1905, which sought to resolve territorial disputes between Kutch, Wav, Suigam, and Sindh. This led to a complaint in 1907–1908 from the Commissioner in Sindh of encroachments by Kutch on Sindh territory. The Government of Bombay, writing to the Kutch darbar, said: “If the Darbar had reason to think this boundary was inaccurate — the Government was perfectly willing to consider any representation it might have to make and that, in that case, the Darbar should state precisely and with an accurate map the boundary which it claimed, specifying the grounds on which its claim was based” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). The conditions of this letter emphasize the importance of legibility—in this case represented by an accurate, survey-derived map—to control.

Both the darbar and the Collector of Karachi District submitted maps with boundary
claims on them to the Government of Bombay. The Kutch map showed a diagonal border
running from the top of Sir Creek, a tidal creek west of Kori Creek, to the junction of the Rann
with the Jati and Badin talukas, both in Karachi District. Sindh claimed a vertical boundary
running due north from the top of Kori Creek to the junction point. The compromise
promulgated by the Government of Bombay was for the boundary between the two jurisdictions
to run from the top of Sir Creek until it met Sindh’s proposed border, then north to the junction
point (High Commission of India 1965). In Fig. 3, I show the relevant map.

In a letter from 20 September, 1913, the Secretary to the Government, Bombay wrote to
the Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, that the compromise had been
suggested to and approved by both parties to the dispute. In the Resolution of 23 February, 1914,
the Bombay Government mandated that the letter of 20 September, 1913, be circulated to the
Commissioner in Sindh, Political Agent in Kutch, and the Rao of Kutch (Krishnamurthy Rao
1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

The last of the surveying efforts was that of Gordon Osmaston in 1937–38, which was
prompted by the creation of Sindh as a Governor’s Province in 1935. The creation of Sindh
created a demand for demarcated borders from the bureaucracy, and these could not be found
along its southern edge. This last effort was unsuccessful in settling the jurisdictional conflicts
between Sindh, Kutch, Wav, and Suigam that had necessitated Erskine’s earlier survey
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

The surveying efforts in the Rann began as efforts to render the region legible, and they
culminated in two efforts to make border-drawing within it feasible. While these are different
kinds of legibility, they both reflect the importance placed on having abstract knowledge about a
place in order to make it governable (Dossal 2019). The problem faced by these surveys was that
while they allowed Sindh and Kutch to make their respective attempts at reifying the landscape
and imposing their respective categorical ecological visions on it, they captured only a slice of
reality. Given the volatility of the Rann, they did not even fully succeed at rendering it permanently abstracted; the Rann could change from season to season, and surveys were unable to capture this dynamism. As a consequence, surveying efforts, while useful, were frustrated in their efforts to unite visions of the Rann with knowledge about it by the complexity of the ecological system in question.

Documentary Legibility

Kutch (later India) was the main party attempting to establish the legibility of the Rann
through non-survey means, which it did through three channels: pre-survey maps, local
knowledge, and administration reports. The 1844 map of Kutch witnessed by J.G. Lumsden,
Political Agent, enabled this process. The map depicted feudal land ownership among the royalty
and nobility of Kutch using 35 colors of washes and ribands (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler
1968). On this map, the area formerly called Sayra is occupied by a lake with the note, “this
colour lake of his Highness the Rao.” Describing this map in 1968, India added:

“The northern limit of the Rao’s possessions in the Sayra District is approximately the
northern edge of the Rann. Besides the mainland of Kutch, the Banni (spelt Bunnee) and
the three large bets of Pachham, Khurir and Beyla as well as a group of four more bets
are shown as belonging to the Kutch Bhayad. The group of four bets is situated to the
north of Pachham. The first is called Koosree, the second Gainda, the third Horonto. The
fourth has no name but has the notice: “attached to mainland before earthquake of 1819.”
This notice and the place on the map where the bet is situated permits the hypothesis that
it is Dhara Banni… The Rann was so well protected that feudal ownership over bets on
its extreme northern edge made some sense and was worthwhile recording and depicting”
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

This map indicates legibility by means of property rights and ownership; with specific demarcations of land titles and demesnes, it was possible to make the claim that Kutch both knew the Rann well and could lay meaningful claim to it. By pointing to the evidence of royal and noble titles, Kutch could argue that the Rann was an integral component of its territory about which it knew governance-supporting knowledge.

Later in the 19th century, Kutch sought to demonstrate its knowledge of the Rann and its
ability to make the space legible by drawing on the testimony of the Bhuj vahivatdar, who wrote
in 1885 that the Rann had historically been in the possession of Kutch. The vahivatdar wrote, “At
present the entire Rann is in our vahivat and there is ample evidence for this… from the village
Dhrobana in Pachham up to the limit of the Rann in the north… guide stones have been fixed…
at the Kutch Darbar’s expense” (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

While they are an untraditional means of indicating legibility, the ability to fix guide
stones in the Rann indicated that the darbar had the information and the capability to order an
unsettled landscape. Through guidestones, Kutch could make the Rann legible to travelers, and
therefore somewhat closer to being a productive part of the state. The capability described by the
vahivatdar meets the key legibility-related need for the state to be able to order the world in a
way that is conducive to its needs. Without the guidestones, the navigators of the Rann would
still have been capable of crossing. But the guide stones indicated the supremacy of the state
over the landscape and the people participating in it—a feat achieved through a knowledge of the
land itself in terms that could be reported and repeated in other media.

Finally, from 1855–1945, Kutch sent annual Administration Reports detailing the
condition of the State to the Government of Bombay. Fifty of these reports touched on the Rann.
Of these, 47 describe the area of Kutch as “6,500 square miles exclusive of the Rann,” “7,616
square miles exclusive of the Rann,” or some other variation (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler
1968). The Rann is described as spanning 9,000 square miles and belonging either directly to the
State or to the Rao. Rather than rendering the Rann governable to Kutch, these reports sought to make the idea of a Kutch in which both the Kutch Peninsula and the Rann were included legible to the Raj. The Administration Reports abstracted these two distinct geomorphological regions into a single entity that could be communicated to the empire’s bureaucracy. In doing so, they created the appearance of the Rann’s essentiality to Kutch, and asserted that Kutch found the Rann legible, even when and where it did not.

The way Kutch presented the Rann in its Administration Reports shows how Kutch sidestepped the challenges posed by Kutch’s ecological understanding of the Rann. Kutch recognized the ecological ambiguity of the Rann and the hazards of applying typical border-making principles to it. By placing the border it claimed at the edge of the Rann, and denoting the Rann as a core component of Kutch, Kutch placed literal solid land underneath its claims and bureaucratically began to integrate the Rann into its dominion.

The representations Kutch made to the Government of Bombay of its relationship with
the Rann were largely accepted. From 1871–1924, the Government of Bombay in turn prepared
its own Administration Reports on the agencies and territories within its ambit. Of the 31 of
these reports touching on the Rann, 30 describe the area of Kutch as “exclusive,” “besides,” or
“independent” of the Rann. These reports show the way in which legibility was communicated
successfully by Kutch, to the Government of Bombay, which ignored Sindh claims in favor of
Kutch, which seemed to have made the Rann legible and therefore controllable (Lagergren,
Entezam, and Bebler 1968; “Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency” 1915).

In the following chapter of this thesis, I expand on the ways in which legibility, or the perception of legibility, enabled attempts at control. I further discuss how those attempts at control were inconclusive as a result of the inherent reductiveness of simplifying attempts to make the Rann legible. As I note in my introduction, attempts to assert control over the Rann failed to overcome the fundamental mismatch between reality’s ambiguities and the state’s imagination (Scott 1998; Cederlöf 2013; Dossal 2019; Gardner 2021).

Controlling the Rann

A claim on territory is most often premised on a state’s successful occupation of that
territory. What is de facto true becomes the de jure reality over time. Once a territory is claimed
effectively, borders can be drawn around it. The challenge faced by India, Pakistan, and their
predecessors in the Rann was the difficulty of demonstrating occupation within the Rann. For
most of history, there was little reason to station military forces within the Rann, a hard-to-cross
wasteland. Because of its salinity, the Rann lacked a population through which evidence of
occupation could be demonstrated using consistent tax payments, among other things.

In response to the challenges created by the Rann’s environmental condition, Sindh,
Kutch, India, and Pakistan sought avenues through which they could substantiate their claims of
control over the Rann. In the colonial era, these avenues took the form of citing and investing in
indicators of state capacity: fiscal instruments such as indirect taxes and customs taxes. Where
evidence of the state did not previously exist, parties to the Rann of Kutch dispute worked to
produce it. And in the decades leading up to and immediately after independence, India and
Pakistan introduced law enforcement and armed occupation as a third indicator of state presence
(and, eventually, of state capacity).

In all cases, the object of state capacity-building exercises and substantiation was to support the boundary claims made by the states adjoining the Rann. Rather than being understood as evidence of true state capacity, they should be understood as attempts to underwrite territorial claims that both sides knew would not be decided on the basis of functional capacity or the fiscal and infrastructural integration of the Rann with a mainland, but on the basis of textual evidence that matched the location of boots on the ground.

Fiscal Capacity

The essential indicator of a state’s fiscal capacity and presence is its ability to raise taxes.
Kutch and Sindh provided their respective evidence of this capacity by indicating the range of
tax levies and customs duties they imposed within the Rann and at its edges. In the case of taxes,
the types of taxes relied upon were indirect taxes that demonstrated the state’s purported ability
to extract revenue but lacked the complexity of direct taxation or the systematic frameworks for
payment. These were the best evidence of state presence on offer in the Rann, which lacked the
population or wealth needed to drive the construction of complex tax systems.

In the 1876 report from the Bhuj vahivatdar to the Dewan of Kutch, the vahivatdar wrote,
“In the Rann, sale of cattle from Sind and other places takes place. On that sale the Darbari
Officer collects levy on sale of animals and also ‘Ukaru Dan’ on the same animal is payable”
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). He also says that on the bet of Sindhdi, fewer than 15
miles from Rahim ki Bazar, Kutch levied a duty called ukrau until the 1819 earthquake, after
which the customs post had to be moved to Luna, on Banni. On the islet, the jamadar, or officer,
who was from Luna, had the right to levy chowki and tansri duties on the goods that passed
through.

Kutch pointed to these statements from the vahivatdar as evidence of its historical and persistent presence in the Rann, but they also expose the challenges of asserting state presence in this dynamic space. Sindhdi is not mentioned in any other accounts of the Rann, and it is possible that it was erased or reformed by the 1819 earthquake that shook the Rann. The ability of any state to maintain a presence and build capacity in the Rann was highly contingent on the temporary environmental conditions of the space, suggesting that no power could truly claim to control it because they could not sustain a permanent presence within it in the face of natural changes. Without evidence of a permanent presence and the limits of state power—which customs posts helpfully evince—coterminous boundaries were extremely challenging to draw.

In order to assert state presence, Kutch in particular turned to levying taxes on
pastoralists. Pastoralists are often a challenge for the state, but in this case, Kutch worked to
demonstrate its ability to impose taxes on graziers in order to substantiate its claims of state
presence. In 1926, the thanedar, a kind of police officer, of Khavda, a town in Pachham, was
permitted to levy a panchari grazing tax on graziers from Thar Parkar who grazed their cattle in
Chhad Bet (Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). Chhad Bet, which
is included in the 1876 note of the Bhuj vahivatdar as part of a bet called Dhera (likely another
name for Dhara Banni), is close to Thar Parkar and the Sindh mainland. Sindh considered Chhad
Bet a part of its territory, although Kutch acknowledged no dispute (Lagergren, Entezam, and
Bebler 1968).

The graziers’ headmen petitioned the Commissioner in Sindh for a stoppage of the tax,
which they accused of exacerbating their poverty and violating their customary rights to the
Rann. When they investigated the matter, British officials in Sindh found that the border in the
Rann had never been demarcated, and that panchari had not been levied before 1926. The
graziers were told that they did not need to pay panchari, and the dispute lay dormant for about a
decade. Kutch began to assert itself more in 1938, around the time of Osmaston’s surveying
efforts in the northeastern Rann, and the question of whether Nagar Parkar graziers were
obligated to pay panchari became a recurring issue. Throughout the 1940s, officers including a
tajvijdar, or revenue officers, were sent to Chhad Bet. In 1945, 13 officers and peons from Khavda traveled to Chhad Bet to ensure compliance with panchari, but were confronted and confined for a day by more than 200 armed men from Nagar Parkar. This confrontation indicates that while Kutch worked to project authority and control in the northern Rann, it was not always successful; it did not have a monopoly on coercion in the area and indeed had limited power projection capabilities.

By 1947, Kutch had licensed the rights to graze cattle and collect panchari in Chhad Bet
and the nearby areas of Dhara Banni and Pirol Vala Kun to Node Sadi Rau, a Kutchi, and his
sons. When Rau’s license expired, the thanedar in Khavda re-leased the territory to Sama
Ibrahim Suleman and Sama Jusal Kesar, two other Kutchis from Pachham, for at least
1955–1957, after which the leases were discontinued due to increased military presence in the
Rann (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

It is more likely than not that Kutch only began to impose panchari in Chhad Bet in 1926
because it realized that Sindh was not effectively exercising its authority in the area and because
it recognized that in order for it to make a claim to the whole Rann, it needed to particularly
make its presence in the region where human activity took place. But the environmental
condition of the Rann was such that there was a significant cost for Kutch to project its presence
into the Rann, and it could not do so often. Border-making could not proceed on the basis of
these tenuous and disputed assertions of sovereignty, and Kutch would ultimately fail to
transform these measures on the ground into a compelling conceptual vision of how the Rann fell
entirely within its dominion.

Sindh took much less care to issue licenses or tax local pastoralists around the Rann,
though it did earn revenue off of fishing licenses issued for dhandhs and lakes west of the Puran.
There is evidence from both 1926 and 1954 that Sindh earned thousands of rupees through licensing fishing rights, a practice which Kutch could or would not contest. But the main evidence of fiscal capacity on Sindh’s part comes through customs. In 1968, Pakistan demonstrated that officers of the Central British Customs Organisation patrolled the Rann on 53 occasions between 1945–1946. Pakistan pointed to this practice as evidence of British presence and effective control of the Rann, which in turn meant that Sindh, as a direct component of the British Raj, was the party to whom control of the Rann ought to be assigned. But Sindh itself did not exercise a right to taxation on salt or grazing, and the extent to which it can be said to have projected a state presence in the Rann on the basis of fiscal capacity is also extremely dubious
(Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968).

Coercion and Occupation

A second and essential dimension of state capacity is the state’s coercive capacity. In the case of
the pre-independence Rann, this can be analyzed through the ability of each state to maintain law
and order in the Rann and the extent to which each state actually did so. Both Kutch and Sindh
acted as though they held police authority in the Rann, though Sindh often did so to a greater
extent. Sindh claimed patrolling, arresting, and inquiry rights for offenses in at least the northern
half of the Rann, and it additionally reserved the privilege to try cases in Sindh’s courts. In 1892
and 1923, Sindh police assisted Kutch police in combating dacoity even on the Kutch mainland.
The extent to which this was a function of Sindh’s jurisdiction rather than that of the Imperial
Police, which belonged originally to the Central Service, is uncertain (Lagergren, Entezam, and
Bebler 1968).

In several cases during the immediate decade preceding independence, “offences allegedly committed by persons assumed to be citizens or residents of Kutch, purportedly committed outside the boundary of Sind as conceived by India, were registered at Sind police stations and investigated by Sind police.” Some offenses of this nature were also tried in Sindh courts. These collected incidents took place in 1939, 1940, and four times in 1945 (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968). India rejected these citations of Pakistani jurisdictional authority in the Rann as evidence specifically of British authority over British subjects, rather than as evidence of any territorial authority in the region. It also pointed to Kutch investigations of
offenses committed in the Rann as evidence of Kutch’s police jurisdiction in the tract.

In the post-independence era, both India and Pakistan sought ways to translate their
claims about the Rann into tangible evidence of occupation. This was enabled by the advance of
modern technology, which transformed the nature of state presence in the Rann. The state was no
longer totally subject to the environmental condition of a complex, hostile ecological space.
Instead, it could sustain a presence in the Rann, albeit at cost and only, at first, on the bets, for a
much longer period. This was most clearly demonstrated in the 1950s, when military patrols
from both India and Pakistan traversed the Rann north of the 24th parallel, especially around
Karim Shahi Bet (Lagergren, Entezam, and Bebler 1968; Gupta 1969).

On 19 February, 1956, India realized that Pakistan had established its presence
sufficiently to occupy Chhad Bet when an Indian patrol near the bet was fired on by Pakistani
troops. In response, India sent back its forces on 25 February, 1956 to occupy Chhad Bet
themselves. They found the site deserted and established a border outpost there that was visited
biweekly by deployments of the Rajkot Rangers. Pakistan’s protests were dismissed by India
(Krishnamurthy Rao 1965; Gupta 1969; Ahmad 1973).

Neither state could keep its forces in the Rann forever. Even with cartographic reification
in play for decades, the volatile, seasonally-inundated salt flats could not be physically reified in
the 1950s and 1960s. But India’s decade-long occupation of Chhad Bet demonstrates how the nature of state presence in the Rann began to change in the modern era. No longer were the states
competing for control of the Rann mostly dependent on conceptual redefinition of the space.
With improved military technology and more sophisticated logistical networks, it was possible to
make the redefinition of space and control of space a physical, tangible project supported by
boots on the ground.

The military patrols and occupations of the 1950s and 1960s marked the penultimate
stage in the evolution of the Rann from peripheral boundary space into a state-claimed and
state-defined frontier. In the final stage of that evolution—the stage we are currently in—India
and Pakistan have used technology and the concept of the nation-state to physically alter the
Rann into a militarized frontier. In this new ecosystem, the state must always be vigilant against
forms of transgression—border-crossing, unmonitored movement, environmental volatility—that
could harken back to the Rann’s history as a place outside the state (Ibrahim 2017; Hopkins
2020; Gardner 2021). While volatility continues to threaten the stability of state control, there is
no longer any risk that the Rann could exist beyond the state. The arms of the state, and its
borders now stretch too far for such a possibility. Through the cooperation of technologies of
knowledge—mapping, documentation, and surveying—and tools of occupation, the Rann’s
ecological complexity and amphibious ambiguity have been subdued. In spite of this, the Rann
as a place of imagined transgression continues to survive. And, importantly, many more places
around the world are being driven by environmental change to become like the Rann—outside
the ordinary realm of the state’s governmentality, if not totally out of its reach (Bhattacharyya
2018; Hopkins 2020; Gardner 2021).

Conclusion

One of the few Indian films to prominently feature the Rann is the 2000 Bollywood
movie Refugee, which marked the debut of both Abhishek Bachchan and Kareena Kapoor.
Refugee dramatizes the saga of crossing the Rann in the decades after independence. The picture
it paints of a radically transgressive landscape that must be patrolled by state actors to prevent
offenses against the authority of the state, namely terrorism, accurately depicts the Rann in the
state’s imagination and begins to capture how its harshness enabled its frustration of
state-making objectives. The movie ends with a state victorious over terrorism, and by
implication, over the transgressive environment of the Rann that has stalled the state’s progress
towards asserting its authority (Dutta and Mahadev 2000).

As in the film, in the last three centuries, the Rann of Kutch has been radically
transformed, physically and conceptually, by an unprecedented level of attention from state
actors. Until the 19th century, the Rann existed only at the margins of the state; it was a space
apart from state control and beyond the incentives for state control. Over the course of the 19th
century, the Rann was constructed as a peripheral space through the production of written and
cartographic knowledge that described the Rann—and, in doing so, sought to make it both
knowable and categorizable. This effort was advanced by the efforts of surveyors and
bureaucrats, who worked to place the Rann into defined categories that would facilitate the
tract’s governance and control through a legibility-making process. Their efforts were made
necessary by the driving need of modern states to constitute themselves as discrete territorial
entities with sharply defined borders, rather than fuzzy boundaries (Scott 1998; Cederlöf 2013;
Gardner 2021).

From the late 19th century onwards, the states adjacent to the Rann began translating
their reconstructions of the Rann from an elusive but increasingly knowable periphery into an
integral component of the state by working along axes of state capacity: fiscal capacity, public
services, and coercive capacity. In some sense, this effort has succeeded. The Rann’s ecological
complexity has been trampled by the imperatives of the modern state, which has militarized
much of the tract and laid concrete over salt pans.

Today, the Rann is traversed by wire and sentry posts (Ibrahim 2021). But the long-term
viability of the modern state’s foundations—absolute control over a discrete and defined
territory—are in serious doubt. The states of the future will struggle to reconceptualize and
reshape ecological systems and landscapes to the extent that has been achieved in the
post-colonial Rann by India and Pakistan, who have succeeded in part because of relative
environmental stability in the rest of their territories. The frustrations faced by those states in
claiming the Rann will pale in comparison to the problems posed by new forms of
environmentally dynamic and ambiguous spaces that continuously challenge the
governmentalities of yesteryear (Bhattacharyya 2018; Dewan 2021).

In the last three decades, global weather patterns have grown increasingly erratic.
Extreme weather events have grown more common, with South Asia bearing a particularly heavy
burden of storms, floods, and droughts (Guhathakurta, Sreejith, and Menon 2011; Roxy et al.
2017). In the decades to come, persistent sea level rise will threaten coastlines around the world,
including the densely-populated shores of the subcontinent, which are already maladapted to the
environmental conditions in which they exist (Bhattacharyya 2018; Pasricha 2021; Dewan 2021).

A world of increasingly volatile environmental conditions will be one that increasingly
resembles the Rann. This is not necessarily a function of inhospitality, but of the weak link between the governmental approaches to territory that have characterized the modern nation-state and the kinds of territories—soaked, amphibious, or barren—that states will begin to grapple with governing (Bhattacharyya 2018; Gardner 2021). The Rann has been, in some ways, successfully “tamed.” It has been integrated into the state’s imagination and its territory, even if it continues to persist as a wasteland of imagined transgressions. But as work on the amphibious regions of Bengal and Northeast India has shown, such state successes are almost invariably temporary (Saikia 2019; Dewan 2021).

The greater the volatility that manifests, the greater the need for the state to create, or
recreate, new conceptions of territoriality and governmentality in order to justify its continued
existence. This will be doubly true in the populous coastlines of the world, where cities like
Karachi, Mumbai, and Dhaka will wrestle with questions of their continued existence. The Rann
contains lessons for states on the frustrations of complex ecological systems and the technologies
and imaginations needed to conquer them. But its most important lesson may be that its
conception, construction, and conquest will not be repeated.

References

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Road that leads to the Rann of Kutch, taken on Dec. 19, 2016, Photo by Nilanjan Sasmal | Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

Ahmad, S. 1973. The Indo-Pak Clash in the Rann of Kutch. Army Education Press.
https://books.google.com/books?id=kts5AQAAIAAJ.

Aitchison, C.U. 1909. A Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads Relating to India and
Neighbouring Countries. 2nd ed. Vol. 7. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing,
India. https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/14003.pdf.

Ansari, Sarah F. D. 1992. Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947. Cambridge
South Asian Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511563201.

Arrowsmith, Aaron. 1822. “To the Hon[Oura]Ble. the Court of Directors of the East India
Company, This Improved Map of India, Compiled, from All the Latest & Most Authentic
Materials Is Respectfully Dedicated by Their Most Obedient & Most Humble Servant.”
London.
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/india-aaron-arrowsmith/1gFMwtoR88o6Kw.

Athavale, Chandrashekhar. 2013. “Two Disasters That Defined India’s South-West Border with
Pakistan for Ever.” Sand Prints (blog). November 18, 2013.
https://chandrashekharasandprints.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/7313/.

Bhattacharyya, Debjani. 2018. Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of
Calcutta. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108348867.

Burnes, Alexander. 1829. “A New Map of Cutch With the Eastern Mouth of the Indus The
Puchum Island and Khureer.” British Library.

———. 1834. “Memoir on the Eastern Branch of the River Indus, Giving an Account of the Alterations Produced on It by an Earthquake, Also a Theory of the Formation of the
Runn, and Some Conjectures on the Route of Alexander the Great; Drawn up in the Years
1827-1828.” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3 (3):
550–88.

Cederlöf, Gunnel. 2013. Founding an Empire on India’s North-Eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840:
Climate, Commerce, Polity. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198090571.001.0001.

Chatterjee, Nandini. 2020. Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian
Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108623391.

Chauhan, Gaurav, S. K. Biswas, M. G. Thakkar, and Kevin N. Page. 2021. “The Unique
Geoheritage of the Kachchh (Kutch) Basin, Western India, and Its Conservation.”
Geoheritage 13 (1): 23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-021-00535-1.

Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta : Climate Change, Development, and
Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. 1 online resource (xxiii, 210 pages) : illustrations,
maps. vols. Culture, Place, and Nature. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/72236.

Dossal, Mariam. 2019. “‘Without a Counterpart on the Globe’: Geographical Knowledge and the
Mapping of ‘Kutch’ in the Nineteenth Century.” In Knowledge and the Indian Ocean:
Intangible Networks of Western India and Beyond, edited by Sara Keller, 137–60.
Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96839-1_8.

Dutta, J. P., and Dinesh Mahadev, dirs. 2000. Refugee. Drama, Musical, Romance.

Elden, Stuart. 2013. The Birth of Territory. University of Chicago Press.
https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226041285.001.0001.

Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. 1965. Dispute–Rann of Kutch : Background
Report. Washington, D.C.: Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Frere, H. Bartle E. 1870. “Notes on the Runn of Cutch and Neighbouring Region.” The Journal
of the Royal Geographical Society of London 40: 181–207.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1798642.

Gardner, Kyle J. 2021. The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China
Border, 1846–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108886444.

Gastrell, J.E. 1867. “1867 General Report of Revenue Survey Operations in Sind for Season
1866-67.” Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Governmnet Printing.
https://pahar.in/pahar/1867-general-report-of-revenue-survey-operations-in-sind-for-seaso
n-1866-67-s-pdf/.

———. 1868. “1868 General Report of Revenue Survey Operations of Upper Circle for Season
1867-68.” Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Governmnet Printing.
https://pahar.in/pahar/1868-general-report-of-revenue-survey-operations-of-upper-circle-f
or-season-1867-68-s-pdf/.

———. 1870. “1870 General Report on Revenue Survey Operations of Bengal Presidency
Upper Circle for Season 1868-69.” Office of Superintendent of Governmnet Printing.
https://pahar.in/pahar/1870-general-report-on-revenue-survey-operations-of-bengal-presi
dency-upper-circle-for-season-1868-69-s-pdf/.

Glennie, K. W., and G. Evans. 1976. “A Reconnaissance of the Recent Sediments of the Ranns of Kutch, India.” Sedimentology 23 (5): 625–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3091.1976.tb00098.x.

Grover, Verinder, and Ranjana Arora. 1998. 50 Years of Indo-Pak Relations: The Recent Phase:
Role of World Community, Indo-Pak Trade Relations, Efforts Towards Lasting Peace.
Vol. 2. 3 vols. 50 Years of Indo-Pak Relations. New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications.

Guhathakurta, P., O. P. Sreejith, and P. A. Menon. 2011. “Impact of Climate Change on Extreme
Rainfall Events and Flood Risk in India.” Journal of Earth System Science 120 (3):
359–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-011-0082-5.

Gupta, Hari Ram. 1969. The Kutch Affair. Delhi: Kapur & Sons.
http://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.111121.

High Commission of India. 1965. The Rann of Kutch & Sind-Kutch Border—- British Historical
Evidence. London: Indian Information Service.

Holland, J. 1855. “Routes Between Bhooj and Ahmedabad, &c. &c.” In Selections from the
Records of the Bombay Government, edited by R. Hughes Thomas. New Series 15.
Bombay: Government of Bombay.

Hopkins, Benjamin D. 2020. Ruling the Savage Periphery. Frontier Governance and the Making
of the Modern State. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674246164.

Ibrahim, Farhana. 2004. “No Place Like Home: History, Politics and Mobility Among a Pastoral
Nomadic Community in Western India.” Nomadic Peoples 8 (2): 168–90.

———. 2017. “Bureaucracy and Border Control: Crime, Police Reform and National Security in
Kutch, 1948–52.” Economic and Political Weekly 52 (15): 79–86.

———. 2018. “Cross-Border Intimacies: Marriage, Migration, and Citizenship in Western
India.” Modern Asian Studies 52 (5): 1664–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X16000810.

———. 2021. From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border.
Police/Worlds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=jhU0zgEACAAJ.

Indian Information Service. 1965. “Facts about Kutch-Sind Boundary (in Maps).” New Delhi:
Indian Information Service.

Khan, Farzana. 1998. “The Rann of Kutch Award.” In 50 Years of Indo-Pak Relations. Vol. 2.
New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications.

Krishnamurthy Rao, K. 1965. The Kutch-Sind Border Question: A Collection of Documents with
Comments. Indian Society of International Law.
https://books.google.com/books?id=5_e1AAAAIAAJ.

Lagergren, Gunnar, Nasrollah Entezam, and Ales Bebler. 1968. “The Indo-Pakistan Western
Boundary (Rann of Kutch) between India and Pakistan.” Reports of International
Arbitral Awards 27 (February): 1–576.

Lee, Melissa M., and Nan Zhang. 2017. “Legibility and the Informational Foundations of State
Capacity.” The Journal of Politics 79 (1): 118–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/688053.

Lewis, Elias. 1873. “Earthquake Phenomena.” The Popular Science Monthly 2 (March).
http://archive.org/details/popularsciencemo02newy.

Lumsden, J.G. 1855. “Observations, By Mr. J.G. Lumsden, Political Agent, on a Map Prepared
by Him, Showing the Possessions of His Highness the Rao, and the Dependent Chiefs,
&c. in Kutch.” In Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government. New Series Bombay: Government of Bombay.

Munshi, Aziz A. 1998. “The Background and Basis of the Rann of Kutch Award.” In 50 Years of Indo-Pak Relations. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications.

Olson, David M., Eric Dinerstein, Eric D. Wikramanayake, Neil D. Burgess, George V. N. Powell, Emma C. Underwood, Jennifer A. D’amico, et al. 2001. “Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth: A New Global Map of Terrestrial Ecoregions Provides an Innovative Tool for Conserving Biodiversity.” BioScience 51 (11): 933–38. https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0933:TEOTWA]2.0.CO;2.

Pasricha, Anjana. 2021. “In South Asia, Rising Ocean Pushes Out Those Living at the Shore.” Voice of America. September 5, 2021. https://www.voanews.com/a/south-central-asia_south-asia-rising-ocean-pushes-out-those-living-shore/6219259.html.

Patel, Kasha. 2021. “India’s White Desert.” Text.Article. NASA Earth Observatory. April 17, 2021. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148168/indias-white-desert.

Pottinger, Henry. 1814. “A Map of Beloochistan and Sinde.”
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12417/1/W8Mapp.170.pdf.

Raghavan, Srinath. 2013. 1971 : A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Raikar, Sanat Pai. 2023. “Rann of Kachchh.” In Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia
Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/place/Rann-of-Kachchh.

Raikes, S.N. 1855. “Memoir and Brief Notes Relative to the Kutch State.” In Selections from the
Records of the Bombay Government, edited by R. Hughes Thomas. New Series 15.
Bombay: Government of Bombay.

“Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency.” 1915. Bombay.
https://www.jstor.org/site/south-asia-open-archives/saoa/report-administration-bombay-presidency-26318850/?searchUri=%2Fsite%2Fsouth-asia-open-archives%2Fsaoa%2Fbombaypresidencyreports-30734807%2F&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&searchkey=1704520227852.

Risley, Herbert Hope, William Stevenson Meyer, Richard Burn, and James Sutherland Cotton. Atlas. Vol. 26. 26 vols. Imperial Gazetteer of India. Oxford: Oxford. http://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.74946.

Roxy, M. K., Subimal Ghosh, Amey Pathak, R. Athulya, Milind Mujumdar, Raghu Murtugudde, Pascal Terray, and M. Rajeevan. 2017. “A Threefold Rise in Widespread Extreme Rain Events over Central India.” Nature Communications 8 (1): 708. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00744-9.

Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2019. The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199468119.001.0001.

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed : An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale Agrarian Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Singh, Biswanath. 1998. “Kutch-Award: A Study in Indo-Pakistan Relations.” In 50 Years of Indo-Pak Relations, edited by Verinder Grover and Ranjana Arora. Vol. 2. New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications.

Sorkhabi, Rasoul. 2014. “The Fault Blocks of the Kutch Basin in Western India Offer to the Visitor a Unique Opportunity to Observe the Jurassic- Cretaceous-Paleogene Sediments Rarely Outcropping Anywhere Else on the Western Indian Continental Margin. A Visit to Kutch Also Gives an Opportunity to View and Enjoy the Rich Cultural Traditions and Handicrafts of Western India.” GEO Tourism 11 (6): 30–34.

Springer, Kate. 2018. “Rann of Kutch: Explore India’s Largest Salt Desert.” CNN, July 8, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/india-rann-of-kutch/index.html.

Thakkar, M.G., and Amal Kar. 2017. Geomorphological Field Guide Book on Kachchh Peninsula. New Delhi: Indian Institute of Geomorphologists. https://indiageomorph.org/uploads/docs/IGI%209th%20ICG%20Field%20Guide_Kachch h%20Peninsula_Thakkar%202017.pdf.

Tremenheere, C. W. 1867. “On the Lower Portion of the River Indus.” The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 37: 68–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/1798519.

Walker, John, and Charles Walker. 1833. “India V.” Baldwin & Cradock. https://maps-prints.com/antique-maps-india-ceylon/9289-pl-5-antique-map-of-the-region-of-gujarat-and-cutch-by-walker-1833.html.

Wynne, A.B. 1872a. “Geological Map of Kutch.” Geological Survey of India.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kutch_geology.jpg.

———. 1872b. “Memoir on the Geology of Kutch, to Accompany a Map Compiled by A. B.
Wynne and F. Pedden during the Seasons 1867-68 and 1868-69, by A. B. Wynne, F. G.
S., Geological Survey of India.” In Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India. Vol. 9.
Calcutta: Government of India. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Memoirs_of_the_Geological_Sur
vey_of_India_%28IA_memoirsofgeologi91872geol%29.pdf.

Young, Marianne. 1839. Cutch; or, Random Sketches, Taken during a Residence in One of the
Northern Provinces of Western India; Interspersed with Legends and Traditions. London:
Smith, Elder, and Co. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cpsb3swk/items.

Zimmerman, Carl. 1851. “Map of the Cutch Region of India and Its Border with Neighbouring
Baluchistan.”
https://www.meisterdrucke.ie/fine-art-prints/German-School/106152/Map-of-the-Cutch-r
egion-of-India-and-its-border-with-neighbouring-Baluchistan%2C-by-Carl-Zimmerman
%2C-1851-.html.

This essay won 2nd Place in the 2024 YRIS High School Essay Contest for its response to the following prompt: “Evaluate an example of a foreign policy, historical or contemporary, that can be considered a success.”

Officially, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region is the city of Lhasa in Southwestern
China. Legislatively, executively, and judicially, though, the seat of the Tibetan government
lies in the quaint hill town of Dharamshala in India. This “government-in-exile,” as it has been
called, is part of India’s larger policy on China. Although criticised for its Laodicean approach
in falling short of recognising an independent Tibetan state, India’s Tibet Policy has been hailed
as a success for functioning as a bulwark against Chinese hegemony in the region.

Background
On October 7, 1950, the newly founded People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet in an attempt
to expand and consolidate the frontiers of the young nation. By 1954, resistance in Tibet against
the increasingly absolutist Chinese regime had grown and in 1959, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual
and political leader of Tibet, fled to India, never to return. In the backdrop of this political
unrest, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, implemented India’s Tibet Policy that
intended to provide refuge to Tibetans. Domestically, the policy was popular among the public
who believed in the sovereignty of India and its leader post independence in 1948. Globally,
too, the policy gained little to no backlash owing to Nehru’s prominent role as one of the
pioneers of the Non-Aligned Movement. Today, while India does not officially recognise Tibet
as an independent state, India’s Tibet Policy extends shelter to Tibetans as “foreigners” under
domestic law, allows the Tibetan government-in-exile to operate out of Dharamshala under the
Dalai Lama and limits their involvement in Indian politics.

Standing Up to the Dragon
Clashes along the Galwan in 2020 and skirmishes along Arunachal Pradesh in 2022 have
marked a particularly turbulent period in Sino-Indian relations in recent years. The annexation
of Tibet in 1951 expanded China’s land border along India, Nepal and Bhutan and paved the
path for a strategic Sino-Pakistani axis. Given this precarious relationship, Tibet is a crucial
buffer zone between India and China. Maintaining close ties with Tibet provides India with an
ally in the face of Chinese aggression at the very least. In the best case, strengthening ties with
Tibet helps deter conflict owing to Chinese fears of a Tibetan uprising that might hamper any
such war effort. Beyond the political, though, the potential environmental ramifications of
China’s unchecked advances in Tibet warrant India’s Tibet Policy. China’s extensive mining
in the resource-rich Tibetan plateau threaten India’s waters, primarily the Siang, a major
tributary of the Brahmaputra River system. The strategic mining by China is also an attempt to
heavily populate the region with Chinese migrants to counter Indian influence in Arunachal
Pradesh. India’s Tibet Policy has so far kept that at bay.

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakum
The Indian mantra of vasudhaiva kutumbakum (one world, one family, one future) was
popularised during the G20 Summit in India last year. It is, perhaps, most relevant, though, to India’s intake of Tibetan refugees in the 1950s, a shot in the arm to India’s image on the global
stage as a newly independent nation at the time. In stark contrast to the reluctance of other
countries in the subcontinent, India welcomed Tibetan refugees with open arms. Ever since
India sheltered the Dalai Lama in 1950, it has taken up the issue of providing basic Indian
necessities to all Tibetan refugees residing in India. In 2014, India implemented the Tibetan
Rehabilitation Policy, under the larger Tibet Policy, which was intended to increase the benefits
available to Tibetan refugees in India. It provided these refugees with the access to Indian
amenities such as, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Public
Distribution System, Indira Awas Yojana, National Rural Livelihood Mission, Rajiv Awas
Yojna, National Rural Health Mission and the extension of loan facilities by the Nationalised
Banks. India allowed Tibetan refugees residing in India to be in charge of their own foreign
affairs, defence and communication. All of this aided the preservation of Tibetan culture which
was under threat due to the Chinese invasion. The implementation of The Tibetan
Rehabilitation Policy successfully provided relief and rehabilitation for Tibetan refugees and
strengthened India’s Tibet Policy. In 2002, the Dalai Lama presented the International
Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth Award to Indian citizens for warmly welcoming Tibetans
for more than four decades.

The Way Forward
Critics argue that India’s Tibet Policy, which aimed at helping Tibetans, has failed to do so by
not recognising it as an independent nation as well as not according refugee status to Tibetan
exiles. On the contrary, India’s Tibet Policy must be lauded for taking a stand against China
while concurrently striking the right balance so as to avoid conflict. More can be done,
however, to further strengthen India-Tibetan ties. The first step would be for India to officially
recognise Tibetan exiles as “refugees” and to consider reversing at least partially its
unconditional recognition of Tibet as Chinese territory. The rest is a path best chalked not by
New Delhi and Beijing but by New Delhi and Dharamshala. Only then will the Snow Lion be
able to stand up to the Dragon.

References

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Tibet – Mount Everest, taken on October 27, 2011, Photo by Göran Höglund (Kartläsarn) | Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

1. Mehrotra, L.L. India’s Tibet Policy, May 2017, tibet.net/wp-
   content/uploads/2017/05/Inidas-Tibet-Policy.pdf.
2. Tibetan Refugees, 2014, www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/2022-
   08/FFR_ANNEXURE_A_17092019%5B1%5D.pdf.
3. Choetso, Tenzin. “Tibet: Time to Review India’s Tibet Policy – Central Tibetan
   Administration.” Central Tibetan Administration – Restoring Freedom for Tibetans,
   24 Dec. 2020, tibet.net/tibet-time-to-review-indias-tibet-policy/.
4. Reporter, Staff. “About CTA – Central Tibetan Administration.” Central Tibetan
   Administration – Restoring Freedom for Tibetans, 15 Dec. 2011, tibet.net/about-cta/.
5. International Journal of Humanities and Peace, 2004,
   www.proquest.com/docview/614350513/.
6. “Light of Truth Awards.” International Campaign for Tibet, 24 Aug. 2018,
   savetibet.org/what-we-do/light-of-truth-awards/.
7. International Campaign for Tibet. “India Should Formalize a Holistic Approach to Its Tibet Policy.” International Campaign for Tibet, 8 Sept. 2023, savetibet.org/india-should-formalize-a-holistic-approach-to-its-tibet-policy/.
8. Tsering, Dawa. “Recentering Tibet in India’s Approach to China – Central Tibetan
   Administration.” Central Tibetan Administration – Restoring Freedom for Tibetans, 3
   May 2023, tibet.net/recentering-tibet-in-indias-approach-to-china/.
9. Sikri, Rajiv. The Tibet Factor in India China Relations, 2011,
   www.jstor.org/stable/24385534.
10. Protective Area Permit to Visit Tibetan Settlements, papvt.mha.gov.in/. Accessed 11
    June 2024.
11. “Claudearpi.” India Tibet Relations 1947-1949 – India Begins to Vacillate ,
    www.archieve.claudearpi.net/maintenance/uploaded_pics/60_01_22_ITA_Yatung.pdf
    . Accessed 11 June 2024.
12. Q. 495 – India’s Stand on Tibet, www.mea.gov.in/rajya-
    sabha.htm?dtl%2F10258%2Fq+495++indias+stand+on+tibet=. Accessed 11 June 2024.
13. Fang, Tien-sze. “The Tibet Issue in Sino-Indian Relations.” OUP Academic, Oxford University Press, 1 Oct. 2013, academic.oup.com/book/3687/chapter-abstract/145052956?redirectedFrom=fulltext.
14. Ministry of External Affairs – Government of India, 2 Apr. 2024, www.mea.gov.in/response-to-queries.htm?dtl/37761/Official+Spokespersons+response+to+media+queries+on+rena ming+places+in+Arunachal+Pradesh+by+China.
15. Chellaney. “Why Tibet Matters Ever More in India-China Ties.” Stagecraft and Statecraft, 1 Apr. 2019, chellaney.net/2019/04/01/why-tibet-matters-ever-more-in-india-china-ties/.

This essay won 3rd place in the 2024 YRIS High School Essay Contest for its response to the following prompt: “Evaluate an example of a foreign policy, historical or contemporary, that can be considered a success.”

“The wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

These words by Ismail Serageldin, former Vice President of the World Bank, were spoken in
1995 in response to the growing water scarcity issues faced all over the world (Boccaletti). His
words are even more relevant today as conflicts brew all over the world from Eastern Europe to
South America, over shared waterways. The Indus Water Treaty (IWT), signed in 1960 to
allocate the shared Indus River System between India and Pakistan, is a rare example of
international diplomacy that has lasted over the past six decades in spite of strained geopolitical
relations between the two countries.

In 1947, marking the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent, British India was partitioned
into two independent countries – India and Pakistan (Bauer). Initially, the two newly-formed
nations faced significant turmoil most notably over the usage of the Indus River system. This
shared waterway flows through India into Pakistan, traversing Kashmir and the Punjab plain,
before emptying into the Arabian sea in Pakistan (Bauer) and is vital for agriculture, electricity
and more (Boccaletti). Due to ongoing conflicts following the partition, India began withholding
water from Pakistan in 1948, further escalating the existing animosity between the nations. This
triggered international intervention, most notably from The World Bank and led by its former
President Eugene Black. Six years later, on September 19, 1960, the Indus Water Treaty was
signed by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub
Khan, marking the end of almost a decade of a protracted and bitter dispute (Bauer). The Treaty meticulously divided the rivers of the Indus Water system allotting the water from the Eastern
Rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India, and the Western Rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) to Pakistan
(Bauer). The “Permanent Indus Commission” was also created to ensure cooperation and handle
any potential disputes (The World Bank). After a 10-year Transition Period, between April 1,
1960 and May 31, 1970, the Indus Water Treaty was successfully integrated, providing both
countries with an ample supply of water and stability.

The IWT was a resounding success surviving three wars and over 60 years of hostile relations
between India and Pakistan (Sultan). Its triumph depended upon the simplicity of the treaty,
detailed legal provisions included incase of any future conflicts, and the presence of a neutral
mediator to handle any disputes. For instance, compare it with the 1944 US-Mexico Water treaty
intended to allocate water from the Rio Grande to southern states in the US and Mexico. This
treaty eventually failed due to the “extremely complex system of water rights” outlined in the
agreement creating lengthy and complicated policies that could not be sustained (Felbab-Brown).
By comparison, the straightforwardness of the IWT sets it up for success. Similarly, the IWT
includes detailed provisions and checks and balances to ensure that every issue is equitably and
fairly resolved. For example, the Permanent Indus Commission, overseeing the adherence to the
provisions of the treaty, is composed of a Commissioner from each country to address any
questions, a neutral expert to handle differences, and an “ad hoc arbitral tribunal” to handle any
disputes (The World Bank). This clear delineation of roles ensures fairness and that there are no
biased decisions. Furthermore, the treaty was mediated by the World Bank – an external, neutral
party. As India and Pakistan have had a history of war and distrust, this was crucial in facilitating
effective arbitration and resolution (Sultan). In spite of recent turmoil following the 2016 Uri attack where terrorists from Pakistan killed 19 Indian soldiers, and disagreements over India
building new hydroelectric dams such as Kishenganga and Ratle (The World Bank), the IWT’s
framing and thoughtful dispute resolution process have contributed to its sustained success.

While the IWT is a great accomplishment, it is time for it to evolve. Currently, it faces severe
limitations due to climate change. Due to increasing global temperatures, current projections
indicate that “the Indus River Basin will face a water deficit of 50 percent” by 2030 (Mathur).
With certain rivers drying up, this could potentially skew the proportion of water dedicated to
each country. Climate change is also expected to disrupt agriculture, trigger energy shortages,
and lead to unpredictable hydrological cycles such as erratic flooding and drought. In 2022,
Pakistan experienced devastating floods across a third of the country and extensive landslides in
the Indus River Basin leaving more than “30 million people homeless and result[ing] in 1000
deaths” (Hong et al.). To address these known and unknown challenges, the IWT should be made
future climate change proof through new ideas such as the “quantification and trading of river
resources” (Mathur) moving from a volumetric view of the water sharing to a more
relationship-based assessment of the benefits of using water. One suggestion could be an annual
trading window to renegotiate the water sharing percentage which can be offset in future years –
similar to a loss and share gain in the stock market to smooth out fluctuations.

From the Kakhovka Reservoir conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the partition of the Nile in
Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, and the dams built on the Mekong Basin in China, water wars
threaten the livelihood and sanctity of our world (Boccaletti). The IWT is a rare example of how
international mediation and clarity are crucial in constructing a long lasting agreement between two countries with strained relations (Sultan). The treaty improved the lives of roughly “300
million people” (Mathur) who use the waters from the basin and set a precedent of facilitating
cooperation to enforce change. It can be made future proof and taken from good to great by
adding provisions to address climate change keeping it a paragon of global excellence in foreign
policy.

References

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Indus River in Ladakh, India – near Alchi bridge, taken on May 11, 2018, Photo by Bernard Gagnon | Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

1. Bauer, Patricia. “Indus Waters Treaty | History, Provisions, & Facts.” Encyclopædia Britannica,
   20 Mar. 2024, www.britannica.com/event/Indus-Waters-Treaty. Accessed 12 June 2024.
   
2. Boccaletti, Giulio. “The Water Wars Myth.” OpenMind Magazine, 9 June 2022,
   www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-water-wars-myth. Accessed 12 June 2024.
   
3. Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Not Dried Up: US-Mexico Water Cooperation.” Brookings, 26 Oct.
   2020, www.brookings.edu/articles/not-dried-up-us-mexico-water-cooperation/. Accessed 12 June 2024.
   
4. Hong, Chi-Cherng, et al. “Causes of 2022 Pakistan Flooding and Its Linkage with China and Europe Heatwaves.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 14 Oct. 2023, www.nature.com/articles/s41612023004922#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20Pakistan%20experienced%20a,one%2Dthird%20of%20the%20country.
   
5. Mathur, Smiti. “Climate-Proofing the Indus Water Treaty | New Perspectives on Asia | CSIS.” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 Oct. 2023, www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/climateproofinginduswatertreaty#:~:text=Effects%20of%20Climate%20Change&text=Projections%20indicate%20that%2C%20due%20to. Accessed 12 June 2024.
   
6. Sultan, Saud. “The Indus Waters Treaty: An Exemplar of Cooperation.” South Asia@LSE, 25 June 2018, blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2018/06/25/the-indus-waters-treaty-an-exemplar-of-cooperation/. Accessed 12 June 2024.
   
7. The World Bank. “Fact Sheet: The Indus Waters Treaty 1960 and the Role of the World Bank.” World Bank, 11 June 2018, www.worldbank.org/en/region/sar/brief/fact-sheet-the-indus-waters-treaty-1960-and-the-world-bank. Accessed 12 June 2024.

In September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an announcement that sent shockwaves through international politics: he accused the government of India of assassinating Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh independence leader, on Canadian soil. What followed was a diplomatic crisis that brought relations between India and Canada to their lowest point in years. India rejected Canada’s accusations as “absurd.” Tensions escalated when both countries expelled top diplomats in tit-for-tat moves. India issued a travel advisory to its citizens in Canada and suspended visa applications from Canadians. Canada updated its travel advisory, putting India in the high-risk country category. All of this occurred just weeks after world leaders met at the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi. 

The situation became even more chaotic in the following months. In late November, reports emerged that the United States had thwarted a plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist, on American soil. Biden administration officials confirmed the incident, noting that they were discussing the issue with the Indian government. On November 29th, the Justice Department announced charges against Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, alleging that he was directed by an Indian government employee to hire a hitman to assassinate Pannun. The unprecedented fallout between the three democratic countries has raised questions about India’s relationship with its diaspora and put a spotlight on the movement to establish a Sikh state. The history of the Khalistan movement, the support for Khalistan in the Sikh diaspora, and why the call for a Sikh homeland is louder overseas than among Indian Sikhs are all essential to understand in examining the current situation.

Nijjar and Pannun were leaders in the Khalistan movement, which calls for an independent state for Sikhs in the Punjab region. The movement and its history are long and bloody. The birthplace of several of the world’s major religions, India is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. Sikhism is a monotheistic religion founded in the Punjab region in the late 15th century and has about 25 million adherents worldwide, most of whom live in India. Calls for a Sikh homeland originated as the British Raj neared its end in the 1930s. During the partition of India in 1947, the British Punjab Province, where Sikhs were concentrated, was split between India and Pakistan. The result was a mass migration of Sikhs from the Pakistani Punjab to Indian Punjab.

The partition was a particularly painful time in South Asia as millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were displaced from their homes and hundreds of thousands were killed as violence erupted on both sides of the newly-drawn border. The tragedies of the partition inflamed religious tensions and led to concerns around Sikh identity, with many Sikhs lamenting their lack of autonomy within the new Hindu-majority India. Calls for an independent Sikh nation increased in the following decades and reached a deadly climax in the early 1980s. In 1982, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale emerged as a leading Sikh separatist leader and quickly gained thousands of supporters. Bhindranwale and his militant followers moved into the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism, in July of 1982. They then began stockpiling weapons and carried out a violent campaign that killed thousands. Tensions between the militants and the Indian government came to a head in June 1984, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian Army to attack the Golden Temple complex in Operation Blue Star. After 4 days of intense fighting, the Indian Army regained control of the site. The operation left thousands dead, including Bhinranwale. Scores of civilians, mostly Sikh pilgrims, were also killed. 

The brutality of the incident angered the global Sikh community. Many viewed the operation as an attack on Sikhism. The fallout led to the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two Sikh bodyguards four months later and subsequent anti-Sikh riots across India in which thousands were killed. Operation Blue Star also marked the start of a decade of unrest in Punjab as Khalistani insurgents undertook an armed campaign against the Indian government. The insurgency was eventually quelled by the mid-1990s through a combination of more effective Indian military operations and a collapse of support in the Sikh community. The violence stopped almost as quickly as it started, and Khalistani violence in Punjab is almost nonexistent today.

Since the 1990s, the Khalistan movement’s most vocal proponents have been a small minority of the Sikh diaspora. This is largely because of a divergence in experiences between Indian Sikhs and Sikhs who have emigrated from India. Large numbers of Sikhs left India in the 1980s and 1990s when armed conflict involving Sikh militants and communal violence against Sikhs was at its peak. Some Sikh immigrants view their journeys as an escape from persecution in India. These views have trickled down to future generations, leading to present support for Khalistan among a small number of diaspora Sikhs. Most Sikh immigrants settled in Europe or North America, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States hosting especially large communities. 

The 1980s saw a rise in extremism in the Sikh diaspora. In June of 1985, Canadian Sikh separatists planted a bomb on an Air India flight flying from Montreal to London. The explosion over the Atlantic Ocean killed all 329 people on board. To this day, the bombing is the deadliest terrorist attack in Canadian history and, until 9/11, was the worst terrorist attack in aviation history. Canadian officials suspect that the bombing was organized by Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh militant group that has a presence in South Asia and many western countries. Other pro-Khalistan groups such as the International Sikh Youth Federation and the Council of Khalistan, along with more peaceful Sikh groups such as the World Sikh Organization were founded by diaspora Sikhs in the early 1980s. In the 21st century, new Khalistani groups have been created, such as the US-based Sikhs for Justice (which Hardeep Singh Nijjar was associated with).

For Indian Sikhs, support for the Khalistan movement is remarkably low. In an interview with the CBC, one Punjabi Sikh stated, “There is a fierce anger here at the Indian government, in the sense that Punjab has been slighted and not given its due but also the sense that fighting for Khalistan isn’t the answer.” Another man served as a police officer in New Delhi in the 1980s. “There were dead bodies in the streets. Many don’t remember the dark days,” he said, describing the massacre of Sikhs in anti-Sikh riots. “Why would we want to return to that unrest?” he asked. 

In the Indian Sikh community, there is a widespread desire to maintain peace and most have integrated into the political mainstream. Many Indian Sikhs believe that support for the Khalistani movement has been greatly exaggerated. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly chastised leaders of other countries for their lenient policies towards pro-Khalistan groups. He has argued that the Khalistan movement poses a significant threat to India’s national security. In reality, there is very little appetite for separatism among Sikhs in Punjab today. As a New York Times article put it, “Modi has amplified a separatist threat that in reality is largely a diaspora illusion.” These actions have benefitted him politically by projecting the image of a strongman leader who is willing to fight for his country. For Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, using Khalistan as a political boogeyman carries a large political reward by energizing the BJP’s base, but the cost to India and especially the Sikh community has been considerable. Among Sikhs, there is the fear that this narrative of a Khalistani threat will heighten religious divisions, resurrecting violence from a painful period from which wounds are still fresh. There are also concerns in India that the dual crises in the United States and Canada will portray India as an irresponsible global power, threatening India’s quest to challenge China as leader of the Global South.

There have been considerable differences between the responses to the Nijjar assassination and the alleged plot to assassinate Pannun. The Indian governments’ reaction to accusations over Nijjar’s killing and the ensuing diplomatic battle were defined by a series of rebukes and mutual outrage, with the Indian press directing an inferno of criticism at Trudeau and questioning his allegations and personal character. The atmosphere in India after Trudeau’s announcement can be encapsulated in a tweet by Sushant Sareen, a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi: “If we did it, it was right; if we didn’t, you were wrong”. The United States and India have been more muted as they handle the fallout over Pannun. Part of the disparity can be attributed to the fact that, unlike Nijjar’s killing, the threat to Pannun never came to fruition. Nijjar was shot dead in June outside a Sikh temple in British Columbia. The Canadian government has yet to make any arrests in connection with the murder. Canada’s accusations also came to light in a far more dramatic fashion, by way of an address by PM Trudeau in Parliament. Canadian officials claimed that Trudeau chose this path after learning that the story was about to come out in the media.

In contrast, the revelations regarding Pannun were first reported by the British newspaper Financial Times before a White House spokesperson affirmed the account and stated that the U.S. had issued a diplomatic warning to India on account of the incident. The stifled reaction to the Pannun plot is likely due to the U.S. and India having far more to lose if their relationship sours. The Biden administration has made deepening ties with India as a counterweight to China a tenet of its foreign policy. For India, American investment is essential as the country seeks an economic miracle to rival China’s rise. The White House has drawn some criticism for not being more forceful in its condemnation and has focused on the investigation. Unlike the Canadian government, which claims that it cannot disclose its proof due to the necessity of protecting its intelligence sources, U.S. prosecutors decided to go to court with their evidence. The DOJ charged Nikhil Gupta a week after news of the plot emerged.

The allegations against India are especially surprising given that India had so little to gain from killing the Sikh separatists but would have risked so much. While Modi’s government might have viewed Canada as relatively insignificant on the world stage, numerous commentators pointed out that if India was caught lying about Nijjar’s killing, it would have done far greater damage to its international reputation than the Khalistani leader ever could have inflicted. Paradoxically, the accusations by the United States contributed to a de-escalation of the diplomatic standoff between India and Canada, with the Modi government choosing to proceed more carefully after the Pannun plot came into public view. 
Various actions will have to be taken for the three countries to weather the current crisis. As a small minority of India’s population, the Sikh community has long had to deal with feelings of alienation from the Indian state. However, the widespread desire among Sikhs in Punjab to put the separatist movement behind them means that Khalistan is no longer a major threat to India’s security. The members of the Sikh community who are the most supportive of an independent Sikh state are the furthest away from India. The ability of the Modi government to acknowledge this will play a pivotal role in whether India, Canada, and the U.S. will be able to move past the events of the past few months. Western nations have a role to play too. They need to protect free speech while also ensuring they don’t condone odious views. Many pro-Khalistan Sikhs have advocated peaceful change, but some, including Pannun, have been more forceful by threatening India and members of the Indian diaspora. Being more assertive in condemning this rhetoric could go a long way in assuaging Indian perceptions of dangers from abroad.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken speaks with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the G20 Summit in Rome on October 31, 2021; photograph by Ron Przysucha | Image sourced from Flickr

In a speech delivered in November, Indian Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju, who is tasked with overseeing the judiciary, called the body’s so-called “Collegium” appointment system both “opaque” and “alien to the Constitution.” Interestingly, in the following weeks, the Supreme Court, while inspecting files following the hastened appointment of Arun Goel as the Election Commissioner, questioned the process by which he was selected by the Law Minister, raising similar issues of opacity and lack of transparency. 

Presently, the judiciary’s appointments go through the Collegium whereby the Chief Justice of India, with four senior judges, recommends appointments and transfers. Once the Collegium recommends someone, the Executive (through the President) formally appoints the judges. The sheer lack of transparency in appointments to higher courts, the lack of coherent guidelines on what determines these appointments, and the lack of accountability from any other arm of government or the broader public in the process has resulted in a judiciary that looks like an old boys’ club of upper-caste men. Despite Constitutional amendments to the system, scathing criticisms of unreasonable transfers of senior judges without elevations to Chief Justice positions or the Supreme Court, and walkouts and protests by advocates associations of its arbitrary exercise of power, the Collegium survives. 

The Election Commission (EC) has sprung into Indian discourse recently with a batch of petitions challenging the process, but it too faces issues of opacity. As per 324(2) of the Constitution, the Election Commissioners are appointed by the President, subject to any law made by the parliament in this regard, and under the guidance of the cabinet (the Executive). No checks, no guidelines, no scrutiny. 

In the last month, the appointment of the Election Commissioner has been criticized as hasty, with a “lightning speed, 24-hour procedure,” for filling a post that had been vacant for over six months. However, the appointment of Supreme Court judges has been riddled with concerns about a slow process where the Executive sits on files sent by the Collegium without approving the names of judicial appointments, leading to significant delays in the administration of justice. While the Executive has the sole power in determining the Election Commissioner (a practice currently listed for future Supreme Court review), it only has the power to send names for reconsideration in judicial appointments. 

The exclusive right to appoint an Election Commissioner, combined with a fear of judicial intervention in determining the constitutionality of the process, is perhaps why a “lightning speed” appointment was made. Conversely, the Executive has to technically clear the names sent by the Collegium for judicial appointments, if they have been re-iterated by the Collegium even after a preliminary rejection by the Executive. Instead of such a process, the Executive keeps names pending for months without clearing them, neither rejecting nor accepting them. This leads to judicial vacancies and inordinate delays in appointments. 

The Collegium system of judicial appointments is where the Executive has no role to play except for a review mechanism. In contrast, the Executive directly makes the EC appointments, which is at the heart of this issue. While these two issues are seemingly disparate, the reason for fast-tracking one process while sitting on the other ultimately boils down to a familiar concern democracies around the world have to grapple with: how can one maintain the independence of institutions like the judiciary and EC from executive influence while still retaining accountability in their functioning?

Here, it becomes crucial to appreciate the powers of these two institutions to understand the gravity of maintaining their independence. The Indian judiciary is, by some accounts, the most powerful in the world. It exercises vast executive powers through the PIL (Public Interest Litigation) system, allowing any citizen with “sufficient interest in instituting an action for redressal of public wrong” to move the court. It has extensive judicial review powers, with the power to strike down constitutional amendments if they violate the “basic structure tests,” the ability to initiate suo moto proceedings, and at times, even place stays on legislative actions absent a constitutional basis. 

The EC exercises regulatory power—it directs the number and location of polling stations, decides schedules and the number of phases required for any given election, prepares voter rolls, registers candidates and political parties, oversees the implementation of Code of Conduct rules, etc. While seemingly administrative, taken together, the number and location of booths determine the extent of voter participation, the EC’s allocation of symbols to candidates (a reform undertaken by the EC) determines how illiterate voters access the system, enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct circumscribes the nature of campaigning that can be undertaken, etc. Combined with the deferential approach of courts towards the policies on, for instance, adjudicating party symbols in case of party splits, the power exercised by the EC in electoral outcomes is undervalued but immense. They have, in many cases, been deemed co-equal, if not even greater than parliamentary law when it comes to administrative election matters. 

Thus, the executive need to wield control over these institutions is understandable. The judicial need to insulate these institutions from government influence is also appreciable. Both these institutions are expected to be politically distant to ensure a check on the legislature and run the democratic machine smoothly. However, such insulation inevitably comes at the cost of being “anti-democratic” in character since they cannot be subject to the rules of the legislature (the only arm of government that is democratically elected), when their role is to place rules on said legislature and their parliamentarians. However, as an institution becomes more opaque and less accountable to the public, it is much easier to bend backwards to the Executive when there is no formal mechanism of public scrutiny.

For instance, despite having no role to play in judicial appointments, the judiciary of the infamous Justice Rajan Gogoi was widely known to be an executive’s bench. In retrospect, this is not shocking given his position as a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house of parliament), a near-perfect retirement under the ruling establishment. The Supreme Court has not once (across electoral bonds, the revocation of Article 370, PM Cares Covid Fund, and demonetization), actually struck down any scheme on constitutional grounds. The EC, for its part, has been mired in controversy around appointments being biased towards the ruling party, for e.g., the partial enforcement of code of conduct rules (most notably concerning Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent road rally during the Gujarat elections), biased scheduling of elections, irregularities in voter lists, and more. However, it is equally significant to illustrate the independence these institutions can exercise. When Modi dissolved the Gujarat assembly elections post the 2002 riots, the EC led by James Lyngdoh ruled out early elections in the state. 

None of this is unique to the current ruling regime. In fact, the nature of the judiciary and the EC as they stand today come from a very specific post-emergency context. It was the Congress (a national political party, and the most dominant party in the early decades of Indian independence) during TN Seshan’s term as Chief Election Commissioner (a fiercely independent head) that the structure of the EC was changed from having one head, to having two additional Election Commissioners. TN Seshan (rightly) argued that by appointing two more Election Commissioners, the then-government the government wanted to “sideline the CEC [Chief Election Commissioner] and to erode his authority so that the ruling party at the center could extract favorable orders by using the services of the newly appointed ECs”. Even the current Supreme Court Collegium system, which firmly has judicial primacy at its heart, is a product of post-emergency India, where the judiciary felt the need to rise as an institution of integrity and protect itself against Executive overreach. 

Thus, while shielding from executive influence is necessary to have independent institutions, it is hardly enough. Furthermore, the more insulated an institution like the judiciary becomes, the harder it is to hold the institution itself to any accountability when it does acquiesce to the whims of the Executive. While this is a tough tradeoff to resolve, transparency is a base-line requirement for these institutions. 

The Collegium conducted a failed experiment in transparency when it decided to publish the resolutions of collegiums concerning the appointment of judges. But since 2019, the resolutions only contain the list of nominated judges without any disclosure about who recommended whom, what considerations were taken into account, the number of people consulted, their feedback, and who concurred and dissented concerning specific appointments. Building accountability and trust must start with more precise guidelines from the Supreme Court when appointing judges or Election Commissioners, as well as public availability of Collegium and Union Law Minister meetings about such appointments. Undoubtedly, it is essential to conceptualize different systems of appointment that strike a balance between accountability and independence. However, transparency in the existing appointment processes is the first step in establishing such a balance. 

References

1. Niranjan Sahoo & Anindita Pujari, “The Indian judiciary @ 75: A crucial pillar of democracy” ORF, August 15 2022. https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-indian-judiciary-75-a-crucial-pillar-of-democracy/. 
2. The Mint, “The Judiciary is shifting the balance of power” The Mint, May 18, 2016 https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/lPqfldPjTc9t4aBYupFZKK/The-judiciary-is-shifting-the-balance-of-power.html. 
3. Sanjay K. Jha, “Narendra Modi’s voting spectacle in Gujarat draws fire from Congress and Mamata” The Telegraph India, December 06, 2022. https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/narendra-modis-voting-spectacle-in-gujarat-draws-fire-from-congress-and-mamata/cid/1902180.  
4. Rangin Pallav Tripathy, “Supreme Court Collegium and Transparency” Economic & Political Weekly May 29, 2021. https://www.epw.in/journal/2021/22/insight/supreme-court-collegium-and-transparency.html
5. EPW Engage, “Collegium System in the Indian Judiciary Needs to be Reformed for Greater Transparency and Accountability” https://www.epw.in/engage/article/collegium-system-indian-judiciary-needs-be#:~:text=Without%20a%20transparent%20process%20of,act%20in%20a%20transparent%20manner. 
6. Krishnadas Rajagopal, “Supreme Court questions ‘lightning speed’, 24-hour procedure appointing Arun Goel as Election Commissioner” November 24, 2022. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/supreme-court-questions-appointment-process-of-election-commissioner-arun-goel/article66177483.ece. 
7. Umang Poddar, “Interview: Why the Election Commission’s appointment is being questioned by the Supreme Court” December 02, 2022 https://scroll.in/article/1038308/interview-why-the-election-commissions-appointment-is-being-questioned-by-the-supreme-court. 
8. M Mohsin Alam Bhat, “Governing Democracy Outside the Law: India’s Election Commission and the Challenge of Accountability” Asian Journal of Comparative Law, 16 September 2022. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/85D606E872CE3FD16077C2170621196D/S2194607821000302a.pdf/div-class-title-governing-democracy-outside-the-law-india-s-election-commission-and-the-challenge-of-accountability-div.pdf.  
9. Khosla, Madhav, Judicial Accountability and Independence (2019), 17 May 2019 Re-forming India: The Nation Today, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3374484. 
10. Atul Dev, 01 July 2019 The Caravan “In Sua Causa: What the judiciary has done to itself” https://caravanmagazine.in/law/what-judiciary-done-itself.