When we talk about a genetic link between North Indians and some Europeans and Iranians, what we’re usually referring to is a gene mutation called Rlal, and more specifically, a subgroup called Rlala. This gene is common in North India and among East Europeans such as the Czechs, Poles and Lithuanians.
Dholavira is a good example of a large Harappan urban centre. It is on an island in the Rann of Kutch.
The Sino-Indian border can be divided into two sectors. In the east, the border is called the McMahon line. It was named after Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, who was the chief negotiator for the British. The line is along the crest of the Himalayan range eastwards from Tawang, near the Bhutan tri-border and it also defines the northern boundary of the North East Frontier Agency—what is now called Arunachal Pradesh.
In the middle of the Himalayas, India and China were separated by three kingdoms—Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. The border once again continued in the western Himalayas and ran along what are now the states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, finally running into Ladakh. Ladakh was under Indian control because it had been part of the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir when it joined India. But who was going to control the large Aksai Chin territory that India said was part of Ladakh? Very few people lived there and it wasn’t clear if it was under Indian control or the Chinese. Nineteenth-century British surveyors had drawn the borders here in two different ways.
The first one, called the Johnson line, was drawn in 1865 between Kashmir and Turkestan. This line used the Kunlun mountains as the natural border. This meant that Aksai Chin was within Kashmir. The famous explorer Francis Younghusband visited Aksai Chin in the 1880s and reported that apart from a few groups of nomadic herdsmen and a small fort (used at times by the troops of the Maharaja of Kashmir), there was nothing much in this cold, Deserted area. In 1899, the British drew a new border called Macartney-Macdonald line. This time, they used the Karakoram range as the natural boundary and left out Aksai Chin. They probably did this to create a better defence against the Russians, who they feared were expanding in this region.
The British then went on to use both the lines in their maps till 1947. No Chinese map before the 1920s showed Aksai Chin as part of China. And so, it looked like nobody really was sure who the place belonged to. The Indians probably had a slightly stronger claim.
After Independence, India’s focus was on Kashmir’s western border. The Eastern one was unmarked and not watched. India and China were on very friendly terms in the 1950s—it was the Age of ‘Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai’ which meant that the Indians and the Chinese were brothers. But to Nehru’s shock, it was found in 1957 that, over the previous year, the Chinese had quietly built a highway between Tibet and Xinjiang that went right through Aksai Chin! The Indian government did not even know about it!
The quarrel between the ‘brothers’ began. In 1958, an official Chinese magazine published a map that showed large parts of Ladakh and the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) as part of Chinese territory. You can now fully understand how important a role map-making plays in history! Nehru wrote angry letters to Chou En-Lai, the Chinese Premier. The Chinese responded saying that Aksai Chin had always been part of China. They did not think the McMahon Line was valid because it had been decided upon between Britain and Tibet, not the Chinese. In the middle of all this letter writing, the Dalai Lama fled to India in March 1959.