Ever since independence, India has been concerned about the depiction of its northern borders, as Pakistan and China laid claim to territory. After the 1962 war with China, India began to stamp inaccuracy notices on maps in imported books and atlases that deviated from its official map. In 1976, customs inspectors were empowered to prohibit literature with maps that did not cleave to the line. In January 1995, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was banned for presenting a map that showed Pakistan Occupied Kashmir as part of Pakistan.

Arunachal Pradesh, too, is an old issue. Editorialists, including me, had fun at the expense of the government as it slogged on grimly like a resident’s welfare association uncle trying to maintain order.

Maps can depict the world both as it is and as it should be. The merits and demerits of these competing perceptions were hotly debated in important forums like the bar of the India International Centre in Delhi. Some uncle could be counted upon to pipe up: “But what about Aksai Chin?” This stock character was lampooned by those who wanted to leave map mania behind.

But in hindsight, there was nothing funny about it, because China is now relying on idealised maps to legitimise expansionist aims in South Asia. When Zhou Enlai visited Delhi in April 1960, he proposed a compromise to settle territorial disputes between China and India over Aksai Chin and the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA). Jawaharlal Nehru rejected the offer, insisting that both regions were part of India. Border skirmishes continued, followed by the Indo-China war.

A decade later, most of NEFA became Arunachal Pradesh. And this week, Indian citizen Pema Wang Thongdok was held for 18 hours in Shanghai’s international airport while transiting from the UK to Japan because her passport identified her place of birth as Arunachal Pradesh, India—which is Zangnan or Southern Tibet on Chinese maps. They told her to go apply for a Chinese passport.

This rerun of an old story got global attention perhaps because the Indian woman in question is resident in the UK. From the 2000s, China has caused diplomatic uproars by stapling plain paper visas to the passports of visitors from Arunachal Pradesh, including athletes and officials. It even denied visas, arguing that it was absurd for Chinese residents to need a visa to visit China. Arunachali athletes headed for the 2023 Asian Games could not travel.

China has stolen a march on India, which obsessively renames domestic locations to appropriate them politically, by renaming 27 locations in Arunachal, including mountains and a lake, to appropriate them geographically.

This summer, India dismissed China’s renaming project as “vain and preposterous”, but it’s actually in deadly earnest. Alternative maps can become the persuasive basis for alternative realities. European explorers claimed territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the name of their monarchs, which were essentially signed fictions. Speedily, these fictions became true as the map of the modern world.

The same stratagem is at work here. The alternative map of Arunachal Pradesh and alternative Chinese citizenship for its residents are psychological cues intended to acclimatise Indians to China’s preferred realities. It is part of the Three Warfares doctrine, apparently based on Sun Tzu’s ideas, which uses media, psychological, and legal warfare or ‘lawfare’ to achieve strategic goals without direct military conflict.

Lawfare provides the scaffolding of the strategy by laying legal claim to territory. Psychological warfare builds upon it with the visa game, infrastructure, and real estate developments on both sides of the Line of Actual Control, the People’s Liberation Army’s incursions, and encounters with Indian civilians.

The doctrine has informed PLA’s work since it was formally adopted in 2003. In 2020, China constructed a village in Arunachal’s Upper Subansiri district. Other new settlements abut the border and are connected to mainland China by expressways. The most colourful incursions left visible traces—rocks were spray-painted ‘2024’ in red during the September 2024 Kapapu incident in Arunachal. Graffiti, food, drinks, and tobacco in Chinese packaging have been deliberately left behind for the delectation of villagers since 2011.

In 2017, China extended a border road in Doklam, at the trijunction of India, China, and Bhutan, leading to a military standoff. If it were finished, the road would have put the PLA within striking range of India’s weakest point—the Chicken’s Neck, the narrow stretch in West Bengal connecting the Northeast with the rest of India.

In comparison, passport crises involving Arunachali Indians seem relatively tame. In June 2014, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said with a straight face that stapled visas were a “friendly gesture” to allow Arunachal residents to travel freely.

And at the other end of the Himalayas, the other old question remains unanswered: “What about Aksai Chin?” China built a strategic highway through the region in the 1950s, connecting Xinjiang with Tibet. India discovered it only after its completion in 1957. The brief 1962 war confirmed China’s hold on Aksai Chin. So, should our school geography books lop off that bit of India, which looks like the nose of a laughing Kashmir? Of course not, because if we abandon our maps, the last laugh would be at our expense.

Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University

(Views are personal)

(Tweets @pratik_k)