Nathu La: A small trade route carries a large signal
A reopened pass cannot undo six years of mistrust between India and China. But it can be the first plank of a bridge that can shorten the distance
On August 1, after a silence of more than six years, trade resumed across the frozen no-man’s-land at Nathu La, the 14,140-foot Himalayan pass linking Sikkim to Tibet. Traders exchanged wool, silk, blankets and borax under the gaze of Indian and Chinese officials — a modest commercial event carrying outsized diplomatic weight. The numbers involved are trivial: the pass moved barely Rs 49 crore worth of goods in its last full year, a rounding error against bilateral trade nearing $150 billion. Yet few border crossings anywhere carry as much history per kilogram of yak wool.
Nathu La’s story mirrors the relationship itself: cordial, then broken, then cautiously mended. The pass shut after the 1962 war and stayed closed for over four decades, reopening only in 2006 as one of the few tangible results of the Special Representatives’ boundary talks begun under Prime Minister Vajpayee. That thaw lasted until 2020, when two things happened almost together: the Covid-19 pandemic shut borders worldwide, and Chinese troops moved aggressively along the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh.
The Galwan Valley clash that June — the deadliest India-China confrontation in 45 years — killed Indian and Chinese soldiers, though the number of Indian soldiers killed was much higher. Trade, tourism and the Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage through Nathu La all stopped, pandemic notwithstanding. Six years is a long time to nurse a grudge between nuclear-armed neighbours. Disengagement in Ladakh’s most contested sectors dragged on well past the pandemic, and real momentum arrived only after Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan in October 2024.
What followed was incremental: a 24th round of Special Representatives’ talks in Delhi last August, Modi’s first visit to China in seven years for the SCO summit in Tianjin, and a shared, unspoken incentive — Washington’s tariff wars have made both capitals warier of leaning on the West, and readier to de-risk relations with each other.
Well, is this a bridge to something larger? The short answer is, only partly. Trade through Nathu La will not touch India’s roughly $100-billion-plus deficit with China, nor settle where the boundary actually runs — the question that has outlasted 24 rounds of talks since 2003. What it does is restore a livelihood to Sikkim’s border communities, and give both governments a low-cost, high-visibility way to show that normalcy is possible. Confidence-building measures rarely resolve disputes on their own; they simply make the next difficult conversation easier to hold. The way forward lies in not mistaking the gesture for the destination. New Delhi should use this goodwill to press the boundary ‘expert group’ both sides have agreed to set up, widen the narrow list of 36 tradeable items, and insist that re-engagement bring fairer market access, not merely larger imports. But it is by no means a small development. It is a confidence-building measure that can pave the way for better relations.
