Passage to India and China, via highest mountain pass

But there it is, the essence of the ‘‘art of war’’ handpainted on a board that you cannot miss as you slowly climb through the rarefied air to what is not only the highest pass on Indian territory, but perhaps the only place along the entire 4,000-km-long border with China where both armies actually come into contact with each other. The times are changing, even though Sikkimese chief minister Pawan Chamling has been in power here for eight long years. For the last two of those, Indian tourists are now allowed to come right up to Nathu La—meaning, Pass of the Listening Ear in Tibetan—after sidestepping the slate-grey Chhanggu lake at a mere 12,400 feet.

Now, Chamling wants to go where no politician has been since Sikkim acceded to India in 1975. He wants New Delhi, that amorphous establishment thousands of kms away from Gangtok, to allow the reopening of the old, historic Silk Route from Sikkim to Tibet.

‘‘So much has changed in India in the last few years,’’ Chamling told a group of visiting reporters in Gangtok, ‘‘Prime Minister Vajpayee has opened bus routes across the borders on both the east and the west, from Kolkata to Dhaka in Bangladesh and from New Delhi to Lahore in Pakistan. The time may have now come to open a bus route from Gangtok to Lhasa.’’

Chamling’s request is based on more than an evocative notion of history. With a very small population (five lakh), low industrial output and a disconnect with the rest of India that is a common feature of the North-East, the government in Gangtok hopes that opening the old trade route will rejuvenate an economy that survives on a 90% central government handout.‘‘We’re looking at Sikkim as an inland entrepot,’’ says Chief Secretary Sonam Tenzing, pointing out that the pilgrim routes to both Lhasa and Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet are shortest through Nathu La. ‘‘Trade and commerce that followed would be a powerful instrument to resolving poverty and unemployment, both of which are factors in this insurgency-wracked region.’’

Significantly, at a time when Sino-Indian relations are improving and there is even serious talk of a visit by Prime Minister Vajpayee to Beijing, what has been known as the ‘‘Sikkim Question’’ for the last 27 years since Chogyal Palden Thondup acceded to India, becomes even more important. At the heart of New Delhi’s refusal to consider pathbreaking moves such as opening up the border at Nathu La to trade and pilgrimage is the fact that China has never reconciled itself to the accession of Sikkim to India. Chinese maps continue to show the Indian state as separate territory.

Lately, though, straws in the wind from China have begun to speak in glowing terms about the positive aspect of border trade at Nathu La. Beijing is said to have privately accepted, sources say, that the stamping of passports or travel documents with the Indian stamp at Nathu La and Jelep La—border passes that connected Gangtok and Kalimpong, respectively, with Lhasa during the British years—would in effect indicate an acceptance that Sikkim belonged to India.

Analysts pointed out that Sikkim, sandwiched between Nepal, Bhutan and China, offered New Delhi the opportunity to play a new great game in the Himalayan region. A few hundred yards short of Nathu La a signpost realigns the mind and the map. The Chinese town of Chubitang is a mere 13 km away, Chema is 20 km away, Yatung, where the Chinese have built a container terminal in anticipation of opening trade is 25 km away, and Lhasa 420 km away. On this side, Gangtok is 53 km far.

At Nathu La itself, Colonel Anil Rai of the 15 Rajput Rifles which looks after the post at the moment, speaks about the ‘‘exchanges’’ between the world’s largest armies. A couple of years ago, twice a week on Sunday and Thursday, the two sides decided to exchange mailbags, stuffed with the mail that Tibetans on the Indian side send to family and friends in Lhasa and Shigatse. Twice a year, moreover, the commanders of the two sides cross the concertina wire to sort out possible problems on the border.

The soldiers will not speak on record about the advantages of opening up to China, but privately in New Delhi and elsewhere, senior officers admitted that the peace at Nathu La had hardly been disturbed since 1967.

‘‘The Indian army is fully in control at the border, we would have no problem if trade is carried out,’’ one officer said. It was chief secretary Tenzing who put it best: ‘‘The Himalayas have so far been a watershed,’’ he said, adding, ‘‘but I conceive it as a passage to two big civilisations and markets.’’