Former trade route between India, China reopening

NATHU-LA, India — As the rain sweeps across the high Himalayan pass, a Chinese soldier arrives at the three strands of barbed wire that separate his country's territory from that of longtime rival India.

But this soldier is no longer brandishing a gun, on this once most sensitive of borders between the world's two most populous countries. Instead he takes some video for his family back home and pauses to shake hands across the rusty fence.

Just a few yards away bulldozers on both sides of the front line are building not fortifications but a road, to connect India and China and reopen a historic trade route. New Delhi and Beijing plan to reopen the Nathu-la pass this month after more than 40 years, a potent symbol of rapprochement between Asian giants who fought a Himalayan war in 1962.

For an initial five-year period the pass, at an altitude of 14,200 feet, will handle limited border trade between the tiny northeast Indian state of Sikkim and southern Tibet. It will be a modest start, but it promises much more.

"We are very much looking forward to the opening of the pass," said B.B. Gooroong, adviser to Sikkim's chief minister. "It is symbolic ... but we have to break the ice."

The Sikkim government's enthusiasm is not entirely matched in New Delhi, where the establishment remembers being caught off guard by China's sudden advance across the Himalayas in 1962.

Much of the 2,200-mile common border remains disputed, and Indian officials say they are not ready to throw open the doors.

Nevertheless a gradual process is under way that could eventually lead to a significant trade route opening up from the Indian port of Calcutta to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

"They will go slowly, and there is still some distance before we get full-fledged transit trade," said foreign-policy analyst C. Raja Mohan. "But there is potential."

Former Silk Road

A study commissioned by the Sikkim government suggested trade across Nathu-la could reach $2.8 billion a year by 2015.

Today that figure appears a little fanciful. It is hard to imagine anything larger than a minibus negotiating the narrow road that snakes for 35 miles through the steep forested hills from Sikkim's capital, Gangtok.

A few warehouses have been built to handle customs and immigration formalities, and a small trade mart has been erected to exchange goods at Sherathang, a chilly hamlet five miles below the pass.

Nor has the Sikkim government yet won New Delhi's approval for its plan to build a two-lane $500 million highway from Nathu-la to western India, bypassing Gangtok's congested streets.

But pressure is building from China, as it tries to bring economic prosperity and extend political control over its vast, remote and sometimes neglected west. Lhasa lies 320 miles by road from Nathu-la; Calcutta is a stone's throw away compared to Beijing.

The passes between Sikkim and Tibet were once part of the Silk Road, a network of trails that connected China with India, Western Asia and Europe.

Revived during British rule in India, trade across Nathu-la took off after independence in 1947 and China's invasion of Tibet in 1950. A decade later, more than 1,000 mules and horses and 700 people took the narrow trail every day.

India imported raw wool, animal hide and yak tails for use in shrines. It sent clothes, petrol, tobacco, soap, Rolex watches and even disassembled cars, including one for the Dalai Lama, the other way.

Trade ended abruptly in 1962. Five years later skirmishes at Nathu-la left scores dead on both sides.

Tourist trade

As India and China rebuilt relations, two minor trade points were opened at the western end of the border in the 1990s, but agreement to open the more significant Nathu-la pass came during then-Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's trip to China in 2003.

At the same time, China indicated it was ready to drop its claim to Sikkim, a former Buddhist kingdom that had merged with India in 1975.

"That was a very major landmark agreement from the political perspective," said one Indian official. "Now it is the economic side which will come into play."

Sikkim has few industries, but officials hope the local Dansberg and Yeti beers will prove popular across the border.

Even more exciting could be the prospect of tourist traffic one day crossing Nathu-la. Officials hope that Sikkim could eventually be the center of an international Buddhist pilgrimage circuit, from Tibet to Thailand and India to Nepal.

But even in Sikkim, there are concerns. Representatives of the mainly Buddhist Bhutia and Lepcha minorities worry that unregulated development will bring in tens of thousands of outsiders and swamp their fragile cultures. Truck traffic could bring alcoholism, prostitution and AIDS. Roads mean pollution, landslides and ecological damage, they say.

"Negative effects are bound to come," says Ram Bahadur Subba, state industry and commerce minister. "But development work has to be carried out."