Populate villages along our borders with China
Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiran Rijiju's plans to populate desolate areas along the long India-China border must be put into action at the earliest. ‘Trained’ local populations serve as a natural frontier force especially against aggressive neighbours and make for the most effective first line of defence. Across the world, Governments actively encourage such border communities and even in different parts of India, the experiment has been successful. The Sashastra Seema Bal, which guards the India-Nepal border, has run a similar project in Assam, Bengal, the hills of Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and ladakh. The scheme has since been extended to Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan and Gujarat. However, along the border with China, border communities have received little support. Over the years, entire villages have moved away from the lAC, which had been deemed as ‘sensitive' by various regimes in New Delhi. Consequently, across large sections of the lAC, there is now no human habitation even 50km into the Indian territory. This makes the areas easy targets for troops from the other side, as the border regions of Arunachal Pradesh stand proof. largely uninhabited and tremendously difficult to access in the absence of motorable roads, they seem like no man's land — except that there are others who are constantly eyeing those tracts of land for themselves. There have been quite a few instances of Chinese troops intruding unnoticed through these areas and parking themselves deep into Indian territory for days together. It is only when they are discovered by patrolling Indian troopers or a stray civilian, that they are moved back to their posts across the lAC. Re-populating the border areas will help reverse this cycle. In the immediate future, it will send a strong signal of sovereignty to aggressive neighbours that such areas are neither contested nor disputed; they are well within Indian territory. And in the eventuality of a full scale land grab, New Delhi will have a far stronger case in its favour if Indian citizens, hundreds of thousands of them, are involved.
Against this backdrop, reports that the new Government will also train locals for basic defence operations as well as earmark Rs5,000 crore for this border development project in its first Budget are welcome. The fund is supposed to be in addition to the previous allocation of Rs28,000 crore. The money will be used to build up civic amenities — roads, schools, health centres, mobile towers — in the remote border areas. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent efforts to expedite major infrastructure projects along the lAC will also play into this initiative. Several such projects, primarily for roads and highways, have been pending — in part because the previous Congress-led Government feared antagonising China, and in part, because some sections within the UPA regime believed that if infrastructure was set up in the border areas, it would be used by advancing enemy soldiers. It was precisely this defeatist attitude that had led Jawaharlal Nehru to claim that not a blade of grass grows in Aksai Chin, after the region was lost to China, even as Chinese soldiers marched up to Tezpur.