How Successive Cartographic Errors have Led To Present-Day Politico-Military Quagmires

By November 1947, India had the the tools and historic treaties necessary for beginning the process of delineating and demarcating her territorial boundaries. These included the McMahon Line to the east, the map of the erstwhile princely State of Jammu & Kashmir (as defined by the Johnson-Ardagh Line of 1897) and the Treaty of Chushul of 1842 (according to which the Maharaja of J & K was referred to as Shriman Inder Mahinder Rajrajeswar Maharajadhiraj Shri Hari Singhji, Jammu & Kashmir Naresh Tatha Tibbet adi Deshadhipati, meaning he was not just the ruler of J & K, but also of the areas of eastern Ladakh, including Aksai Chin as well as the territory he controlled inside Tibet such as Minser estate, which comprised a cluster of villages located 296km deep inside Tibet at the foot of the holy Mount Kailash on the bank of Manasarovar Lake). Yet, despite this, the first definitive map of India that was unveilled by India in 1954 showed a trunciated J & K (by not showing the territories inside Tibet and a unilateral redrawing of J & K’s northern borders by coming down south to the Karakoram mountain range, thereby losing the Trans-Karakoram Tract), instead of the Kuen Lun mountain range further north as defined by the Johnson-Ardagh Line.

Surprisingly, the latest political map of India issued last October perpetuates the same mistakes.

The historical background of the boundaries of J & K (inclusive of Ladakh) is given below.

Notwithstanding the political boundaries of India as prevailing in 1954, further confusion was caused by India when the Indian Army was instructed from 1959 onward to create a string of 60 manned forward posts, whose locations defined the furthest extent to which Indian administrative and military prevailed all over Ladakh (inclusive of Aksai Chin) and this in turn became what is today known as the Line of Actual Control, or LAC. Thus, as the following historical factoids reveal, the LAC was neither a perception nor a concept as has since been referred to by several former Indian military officials and former career diplomats since 1993. In fact, it has always been drawn on navigational maps issued to both the Indian Army and Indian Air Force since the late 1950s, but such maps have never been published or shown in the public domain for unknown reasons.

And between October and November 1962, the LAC became a line drawn with the blood of martyred Indian Army soldiers (as the battle accounts below reveal) who not only fought to the last man in those 60 forward posts, but their mortal remains were also cremated on-site in those battlefields. Consequently, to refer to any violation of the LAC as a ‘transgression’ only serves to dishonour all those who made the supreme sacrifice for India by going way above and beyond their respective calls of duty.