Dr Abhigya Langeh* argues that India’s territorial case in the Himalayas vis-à-vis China’s assertions is strongest when its border communities are participants in it and suggests a rethink on its approach to dealing with the stakeholders on its side of the Tibet-border.
The exchange in October 2026 over twenty-eight Himalayan place names is instructive less for what it says about nomenclature than for the terrain on which the India-China boundary dispute is now conducted. The Home Ministry placed the names on the Survey of India map on October 2, and Beijing replied that it has never recognised the “so-called Union Territory of Ladakh” and that the exercise was illegal and void. New Delhi answered that Ladakh is an integral and inalienable part of India. Neither position was new. What has changed is the register. With disengagement under way since 2022, the contest has migrated to cartography, administrative designation and legal vocabulary, a field in which, as Sankaran Krishna argued of postcolonial India, anxieties about the body politic are expressed as anxieties about maps.
Sovereignty over borderlands, however, is not secured by maps alone. In the long run it rests on legitimacy, on the willingness of border populations to regard the state as their own. The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile made the point indirectly when one of its members, rejecting Beijing’s claims, asserted that the people of Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh identify themselves with India. This is plausibly India’s most valuable strategic resource against Chinese territorial assertion. It is also a resource that can be depleted by the manner in which the state treats those very populations.
The Siang Upper Multipurpose Project illustrates the risk. Its strategic rationale is coherent. The Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister argues that it would sustain the river’s flow and moderate floods should China release water suddenly, and the upstream project it responds to is formidable: Beijing’s Medog scheme, announced at roughly $168 billion. The difficulty lies in process rather than purpose. Central security forces were deployed toward Begging village to enable a pre-feasibility survey, and villagers burnt a hanging bridge to stop them. An activist faced legal action for leading an indefinite protest against the survey, and at least ten people were arrested between October 9 and the clashes in Pasighat on October 23, four of them under the Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. One report described the state government as offering five crore rupees in exchange for consent to survey the river, an arrangement closer to inducement than consultation.
In the vocabulary of securitisation theory, framing an issue as an existential threat licenses measures beyond ordinary democratic procedure, and consultation is readily recast as obstruction. Official messaging that invokes “water bomb” and “water wars” reinforces that tendency, since a threat assessment that villagers cannot examine is hard to weigh against concrete losses: the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum estimates that at least twenty-seven villages would be directly affected. The violence in Pasighat, in which the NHPC office was set on fire, cannot be condoned. Yet participants in the movement disavowed it, and police and protesters offered conflicting accounts of how it began, which warrants independent inquiry rather than assumption.
The same tension is visible in Ladakh, the territory whose status Delhi is defending. The Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance have for nearly five years led a movement for statehood and Sixth Schedule protections. Protests in Leh on September 24, 2025 left four people dead, and Sonam Wangchuk was detained two days later. Negotiations stalled after a February meeting, and Kargil’s leaders rejected a territorial council proposal in April; a “tailor-made” legislative body with Article 371 safeguards was reported in May as a breakthrough, though a panel member urged caution. In the most recent reporting available, the core demands remained unresolved. A Union Territory without a legislature, whose civil society seeks constitutional protection for land and employment, is an awkward platform from which to rebut a neighbour’s claim that its status is illegitimate. Beijing’s objection is legal. India’s best reply is political.
The Tibetan dimension complicates matters further. The Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile cautioned Delhi against allowing trade to take precedence over border security, and one member urged repeal of the One-China policy. Its Speaker linked Beijing’s renaming of places in Tibet and its construction of border villages to India’s own security. The demand on One-China is contestable, but the underlying observation, that Beijing applies a single repertoire across the Himalaya, is difficult to dismiss. Tibet also supplies a sobering comparator for the Siang. At Kamtok in eastern Tibet, protest was met with a crackdown, and the reservoir would relocate an estimated 4,287 people. Medog is described as unfolding under a “calculated quiet.” Candour requires a caveat: one independent Chinese ecologist who visited the canyon doubts that displacement will approach Three Gorges levels. India’s open politics, with public protest, a contesting press and judicial recourse, is a genuine advantage. But superiority over an authoritarian comparator is a modest benchmark for a constitutional democracy, and it erodes if escorted surveys and preventive detention become habitual.
The policy implication follows. A credible answer to Beijing’s vocabulary of illegality requires a frontier legitimated from within: independent environmental and seismic assessment of the Siang project with published findings; restraint in deploying security forces to villages that have objected; review of preventive provisions used against protesters; and a time-bound settlement of Ladakh’s constitutional claims. India’s case in the Himalaya is strongest when its border communities are participants in it rather than instruments of it.
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Dr Abhigya Langeh is a Research Assistant and Head of Chinese & Tibetan Studies at the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS), HQ IDS, Ministry of Defence, where she also serves as Nodal Officer for the Internship Programme. She holds a PhD from the Department of National Security Studies, Central University of Jammu, an M.Phil in Defence and Strategic Studies from the University of Madras, and a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi. Her research centres on India’s foreign policy and Sino-India relations, both historical and contemporary, alongside the strategic and security dynamics of South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region. Her broader academic work extends to border management, regional geopolitics, and emerging security challenges.