Editorial: Nathula Beyond Tokenism

Little over a week ago, the Institute of Peace & Conflict Studies, a New Delhi think-tank, released a set of recommendations aimed for various Ministries of the Central Government on how the reopening of Nathula for trade in 2006 could be taken forward to “expand economic interactions along the India-China border”. Kicking off from Nathula, the IPCS report was looking at Trans Himalayan Trade and Development by 2020. While recommendations by think-tanks even when commissioned by government agencies have a way of joining the stacks of well intentioned advice gathering dust in the corridors of power, this latest initiative should not be allowed to sink without trace and this can be achieved if the State Government leverages it effectively to support its submissions to the Centre to take Nathula to the next level. The recommendation already enjoys some currency where it matters in that it was released jointly by the Union Minister for Tribal Affairs and Panchayati Raj, V Kishore Chandra Deo, and Union Minister of State for Urban Development, Prof Saugata Roy, both of whom were frank enough to admit that affairs of the border regions when it comes to issues like border trade have been poorly informed in the past. The set of recommendations reads like a wish-list that Sikkim has prepared on how Nathula should be developed and includes all demands that Sikkim has frequently made with Delhi in this regard. That an agency from outside Sikkim is in sync with the State on how the nation can look beyond Nathula should reinforce the State’s demands pending with Delhi and should be underlined to justify the potential Sikkim is offering the nation. Nathula continues to be limited to border trade and all its attendant limitations at present, and the IPCS task force recommends that the Centre look beyond such confines and engage in a three tier Trans Himalayan approach at domestic, sub-regional and bilateral levels. It recommends for infrastructure to be developed beyond the Gangtok-Nathula corridor and expand to creating linkages between Sikkim and Nepal and Bhutan. It ironic that although Sikkim has three international borders, the only border connectivity it has by way of roads is to a country with which it has fought a war; there are still no roads connecting Sikkim to Nepal or Bhutan, both of which are friendly countries. The set of recommendations also includes the lifting of travel regulations to the border and the opening of Nathula for more than trade and for tourism as well.
These, and the other recommendations, are demands that the State Government has been raising with Delhi for a while now, in fact since before Nathula was reopened in 2006. The demands remain in consideration and will remain so for perpetuity unless there is an attitudinal change in how the Centre engages the border regions. The idea of border regions as buffer states needs to change. Not only is this branding outdated, it is has also been proven defective. The sooner New Delhi recognises the Himalayan borderlands as the links of liaison between [geographically] different lands, the better it will be for everyone - the mainland and the borderlands. Unfortunately, this attitude of segregating the border areas as buffers continues to manifest and Sikkim has suffered from it often. Infrastructure development becomes priority only when it is for defence use or to service hydel projects [to power an increasing energy deficit rest of the country], and Nathula, it appears was reopened only to earn de facto recognition by China of Sikkim’s merger with India. How else does one read the disinterest with which Delhi handles border trade issues? Take the recent expansion of the trade list for example. Border Trade by general understanding is duty-free trade, and yet, when new items were added in the seventh season of trading earlier this year, the Customs office insisted on demanding Customs Duty because the new items had not been explicitly exempted. The Customs office for Nathula Border Trade is in place to police against smuggling, not raise Customs duty and even if its officers preferred to over-interpret the concerned notification expanding the list of items allowed for trade, all it would have taken was a phone call or a fax to clear the confusion. But no, the uncertainty was allowed to prevail for more than a month for a trade which had already been delayed due to bad roads. This would not have been the case if Delhi saw Border Trade over Nathula as an opportunity not only for the Sikkimese but also the country and played the role of facilitator instead of a controller. At the end of the day, improved infrastructure and larger trade baskets will only achieve limited success unless there is a paradigm change in attitude in Delhi. It is in this regard that the IPCS recommendations become significant, not so much in how seriously Delhi takes it, but in the sense that a non-Sikkim agency is flagging the same issues that Sikkim has been arguing for many years and now has a non-partisan endorsement.