India celebrates Republic Day on January 26. a day that commemorates the date on which the Constitution of India came into force replacing the Government of India Act 1935, as the governing document of India. On the eve of Republic Day, it would be appropriate to contemplate an incident that occurred in May 2010.
My friend Girish alerted me to an advertisement on a website shared by two multinational corporations, offering a special travel package deal. You could click on the map of one of several countries to book tickets from those countries and for information.
The map of India had Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) missing. Further, the tilt of the map almost hides this error. This is glaring because none of the other countries' maps are similarly tilted.
Why does it matter?
After India was partitioned in 1947 to form India and Pakistan (West Pakistan and East Pakistan; the latter became Bangladesh in 1971), the position of J&K became a point of contention between the two countries. Each claimed the region as its own territory. This is still unresolved not only between the two countries.
India and Pakistan have fought several wars, the most recent one being the Kargil war in late 1999.
The claims over territory are represented in each country's maps. Maps produced by a country's government reflect the official position of that country. Because of these competing claims over J&K, maps show J&K differently depending on which country produces them.
Therefore, in India, it is illegal to show boundaries in any way other than the way the Government of India defines them. The Survey of India (www.surveyofindia.gov.in/) is the authority that publishes the official boundary lines of the country. The criminal law amendments of 1961 and 1990 provide punishment for showing boundaries different from the Government of India's official publications.
Similar laws perhaps exist in all countries for their own boundaries, including China and Pakistan, where our maps would be considered illegal and punishable under their laws.
Why is ‘wrong' depiction an issue?
A country is not just a state or just an area of land. People have both emotional and practical attachments to the land they live in. Some call this “nationalism”. Dr. Yi-Fu Tuan, a famous geographer, calls it ‘geo-piety' (meaning attachment for places).
Geopiety is a part of people's sense of belonging to a nation (a group of people belonging to a particular area of land and sharing a common culture). They object to anything that they see as threatening that idea. This is also a right. From all these, it is understandable why my friend Girish objected to the map that I mentioned earlier.
After several of us joined him and wrote to the person concerned at the website, they responded with an apology and replaced the map. In the rapidly growing online world, the very concept of “boundary” becomes difficult to grasp and even more difficult to enforce. This is only one of the many instances where technology unsettles geography.
How do countries determine boundaries?
This complex process involves geography, history, culture, politics, economics, and so on. Internationally, several steps are broadly recognised: allocation (definition of sovereignty over an area of land and its people), delimitation (marking the line that divides any two countries on a map using geographical coordinates), demarcation (building a wall, fence, etc. on the ground), and administration (now called ‘border management'; includes the enforcement of rules and regulations such as customs taxes, entry, exit, etc.).
These are then made part of a bilateral (i.e., between two countries) treaty to which both countries agree. Once this agreement is reached, both countries will depict the border lines in the same way on all their maps. If there is no agreement, the lines will be in different places on the map and on the ground — this has happened between India and Pakistan, and between India and China (in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and part of J&K). These disagreements have led to tensions, even ‘skirmishes' and wars between the concerned countries.Read more on this and other topics on the interactive blog at http://tiigs.org
Author information: Dr. Balachandran is a geographer. Contact: geo@tiigs.org
