Prior to the Indo-Pak Conflict in Kargil, 1999, Tashi Namgyal, a resident of Daras, while looking for his missing yak, noticed Pakistani Army soldiers where he had been grazing yaks since childhood. The rest is history. Strategic thinkers have always emphasised that the presence of a friendly population along the borders safeguards national interests.
In the Chinese scheme of things, Hanisation of Tibet and development of Xiaokang or “well-off villages” for border defence are a part of China’s strategic infrastructure development initiative along its borders, particularly along the LAC with India. These villages have now been enlarged and house the civilian populace as well as the army.
Pakistan, on the other hand, trusts its Punjabi soldiers the most and has allotted millions of acres of land along many canal development sites along the Cholistan border to senior Punjabi army officers and a Pak Army company for the development of model farms. In 1923, another one million acres of land was allotted to one such military company as part of a food security initiative, launched through a collaborative effort between the civil and military sectors. The stated objective was to bolster crop production by establishing army-operated farms on state-owned land.
By definition, borderlands are far from the populated areas and are generally less developed. In the South Asian context, where the power elite are often small landholders, land grab by inimical neighbours is still a worthwhile military objective.
Since its creation, the state of Uttarakhand, an important border state of the nation, has grappled with different problems. Prior to the grant of statehood, the political class, which had tasted the perks of power in faraway Lucknow and Delhi, refused to endorse the creation of the state. When the bifurcation of Uttar Pradesh was forced by the will of the people, they were content to stay in the relative comfort of Dehradun and larger cities in the plains.
Uttarakhand is administratively divided into two regions. Among its 13 districts, four districts (Dehradun, Udham Singh Nagar, Haridwar, and Nainital) are classified as plain areas, while the remaining are hilly regions. Geographically, it shares its borders with China and Nepal while being adjacent to Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana.
The ease of doing business in the plains and uncertain surface communication in the hills, coupled with a lack of medical and educational infrastructure, has led to an exodus of people from the hills to the cities and townships in the plains. The lack of land reforms like consolidation has rendered the hill land holdings agriculturally unviable. Rampant poaching of predators has led to an explosion in the population of simians and wild boar, which has ruined even marginal farming and horticulture.
The 2011 Census revealed that Uttarakhand’s overall population growth rate was 1.7%, with significant variations across the state’s plains and mountainous regions. There has been an evident inclination of migration out from the state’s mountainous parts as the hilly regions saw a population increase of 0.70%, significantly lower than the 2.82% growth observed in the plain districts, confirming the large migration trend away from the hilly areas of the state.
The census showed a decline of 17,868 individuals in Almora and Pauri Garhwal between 2001 and 2011. Today, there exist a large number of ‘Ghost Villages’. There were 1,048 villages with zero population and another 44 villages with a population of less than 10 persons. A very large number of other villages are currently populated only by the old, infirm, or physically challenged category of residents.
As part of the lessons learnt after the Chinese aggression six decades ago, the central govt trained able-bodied volunteers from the residents of the border areas in guerilla warfare. Four decades later, with the improvement of surveillance means and a change in decision-makers, their services were dispensed with rather unceremoniously. The erstwhile trained fifth columnists protested but are now probably too old and infirm to even matter.
However, even if the govt were to revitalise this scheme, the border area people in their present age and having given up farming may not be up to the task.
The problems of outward migration, unviable land holdings, and ghost villages are agricultural, economic, and social problems. The state govt is seized of it and has instituted various task forces and think tanks to deal with it. So far, the output of these bodies is limited to making recommendations to the state govt. Sadly, they find no takers in the hustle and bustle of electoral politics.
The central govt’s ‘Vibrant Village’ programme aims to modernise 663 border villages, with 17 selected for development along the China-India border in regions like Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh. The Border Area Development Programme is another centrally-sponsored scheme to meet the needs of people from the border areas. These programmes aim to carry out development for ease of religious and adventure tourism. It needs to be remembered that places of tourist interest have attracted people for long and are slightly better developed than other areas. Boys and girls who work in the tourism sector and the fair-weather tourists who flock to these places can hardly be entrusted to defend the borderlands.
The influx of high-profile visitors to these spots has seen the creation of a number of airstrips and helipads at places, hitherto accessible only on foot. This lop-sided development meant only to cater for the needs of tourists and govt dignitaries, reminds me of the air bases and ports developed by the British Airforce and Navy without consultation with the army in Malaya. They were meant to support the operations of the Royal Airforce between India and Australia. The Japanese were attracted to them like flies to honey and the vanguard of Gen Yamashita’s 25th Army occupied the entire country in a matter of less than two months.
National defence is a subset of statecraft. While tourism is great for photo-ops, the defence of our borderland demands a holistic development of vibrant villages that are economically self-sustaining and act as blocks to the advance of an adversary, come what may. After all, Kautilya asserts in the Arthashastra that “the ultimate source of the prosperity of the kingdom is its security and prosperity of its people”.
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