Rail rivalry in Kashmir

If and when this breath-taking rail line is completed, Beijing will get comprehensive access to the warm water ports at Karachi and Gwadar. China and Pakistan already plan to upgrade the Karakoram Highway, completed at great financial cost, human sacrifice and engineering ingenuity two decades ago.

For China the rail and road links via Pakistan will constitute a modern trade corridor for land-locked Xinjiang and Western China. For Pakistan, it will offer more intensive trade and transit links to Central Asia.

Beijing and Islamabad are also talking about laying an oil pipeline across the Karakorams. Pakistan8217;s president, Pervez Musharraf, has declared that the trans-Karakoram rail and oil pipelines projects will be the 8220;eight and ninth wonders of the world8221;. Although many obstacles will have to be overcome in realising the trans-Karakoram transport and energy corridor, it is bound to alter the geopolitics of Jammu and Kashmir and reinforce the role of Northern Areas as a bridge between China and Pakistan.

A train to Kashgar

Just as it was surprised by the Chinese road building in Aksai Chin in the late 1950s, India has once again been caught napping by the boldness of Chinese strategy on developing infrastructure in Tibet, Xinjiang and Yunnan, all of which border the subcontinent.

It took the Chinese rail line to Lhasa to finally shake India out of its stupor. As a consequence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ordered the development of new road networks all along the Sino-Indian border.

But the Indian government has ignored another rail line that crept upto the subcontinent less than a decade ago 8212; the South Xinjiang Railway to Kashgar in 1999.

When the People8217;s Republic was proclaimed in 1949, Xinjiang did not have even an inch of railway. By the end of 1962, China brought the Lanzhou-Xinjiang Railway to Urumqi, the capital of the province. Then China turned southwards. A 476-km-long western section of the Southern Xinjiang Railway, from Turpan to Korla, was opened to traffic in 1984.

In 1999, the 975-km section of the Southern Xinjiang Railway was completed, extending from Korla to Kashgar and opened to traffic. By 2001, the operating rail network in Xinjiang totaled more than 3,000 km. Xinjiang railway is already connected to Central Asia. Kashmir and the Karakorams, not too far from Kashgar, now beckon China.

Kunming calls

China8217;s offensive on the infrastructure front also continues from the east. China has already announced plans to build an oil pipeline from Kunming in the South Western province of Yunnan to Sittwe on the northern Arakan coast of Burma.

While the Indian government dithers about plans to develop the Sittwe port and linking it to southern Mizoram, the Chinese are relentlessly moving with a grand strategy to develop the southern silk roads to link Yunnan with Burma and Bangladesh.

This involves building not just road networks, but also pushing a rail line from Kunming into Burma. If a pipeline can be brought from Kunming to Sittwe, so can a rail line.

Thinking geo-economics

There was a time in the 1970s and early 1980s when India routinely objected to the development of Chinese transport infrastructure in the Northern Areas and the Aksai Chin.

As Sino-Indian relations improved since Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi8217;s visit to China in 1988, India8217;s protests steadily got muted and eventually disappeared, at least from public view.

Sending protest notes to Beijing on the proposed Karakoram rail line project would be of no real help in changing the dynamic on the ground. For the current momentum behind the rapid Chinese development of infrastructure in Western China appears unstoppable.

Rather than objecting to the Chinese development of infrastructure in PoK, in Bangladesh and Burma, India should be focusing on the development of its own infrastructure along the frontiers.

While the UPA government has ordered new border road-building, India remains conservative about pushing the rail networks towards and across the Himalayas.

Instead of merely focusing on the financial costs of, say, taking a railway line into Kathmandu valley or Nathu La in Sikkim, India should also factor in the strategic consequences of falling behind China in rail connectivity to the Great Himalayas.

And more important, if we can8217;t beat China, let8217;s join Beijing in developing shared road and rail networks between Western China and the subcontinent. After all, why shouldn8217;t India take advantage of Beijing8217;s plans to connect Western China with the subcontinent? That would require a leap of faith for the Indian security establishment that suffers from thickened arteries, a defensive mindset and a long tradition of ignoring geo-economics.