In this partial wrap about the region’s borders – call it South Asia’s ring of fire – let us begin with a cheeky backhand from Nepal’s court to India’s.

News from Nepal, amplified by several among India’s pro-establishment media in late-October, pegged a decision by Nepal Rastra Bank to print a redesigned series of 100 Nepali rupee notes at the facilities of a Chinese state-run company, the China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation. This decision by Nepal’s sovereign central bank, approved by the cabinet back in May, has set India’s teeth on edge. It is not only because of the China angle but also because the redesigned notes aim to incorporate a map with territories that both Nepal and India claim as their own.

These are the regions of Lipulekh, Limpiyadhura, and Kalapani far to Nepal’s northwest. India claims that these belong in its northern Uttarakhand state. Nepal shares a 1,850km border with India.

When the news initially emerged in May, India’s foreign ministry strenuously objected, spurred on by the need for optics during general elections to India’s parliament that highlighted, among other things, India’s muscular regional presence and policy. The response has been more muted this time.

Perhaps this is seen as old hat. But the more likely reason could be that India is just fresh from concluding an agreement with China to pull back the troops of both countries at Depsang and Demchok, two hotly contested locations along the border with China in India’s northern Ladakh region. There is even a term to describe this border that is little give and mostly take: LAC, or the Line of Actual Control. The two regional behemoths had a brutal encounter in 2020-21 in Ladakh, leaving dozens of soldiers dead and injured on both sides.

India’s supercharged border with China, much of it disputed by China in a bloody-minded sport that originated on a Great Game chessboard, runs nearly 3,500km southeast from Ladakh along the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal – with Nepal and Bhutan providing map breaks, as it were, in between. Much of the dispute stems from agreements conducted between turn of the 20th century Tibet and Britain’s India empire. A case in point: The McMahon Line that demarcated Tibet and British India in the eastern Himalaya through a treaty in 1914. China has disputed this boundary especially since its annexation of Tibet in 1951. The Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, claimed by China, is a bleeding edge of this dispute.

Before escalating anything with Nepal, with which it has strenuously attempted to improve relations since mid-2024 – triggered in part by policy stocktaking after India’s recent foreign policy debacle in Bangladesh – India will now likely wait to see if the new NPR 100 notes contain the disputed territories. Both Ladakh and the geography of the India-Nepal dispute are along the border with Tibet Autonomous Region – or Xizang, as China prefers to call it as a part of its homogenising one-China mission. India ought not to add fuel to an already volatile geography.

If India can de-escalate at least one of its numerous fraught situations with China, it will surely be in its interest to negotiate to neutrality an on-again, off-again border dispute between India and Nepal.

Nepal highlighted the dispute on a bilateral stage in 1997. India then updated its own maps in 2019 which showed these areas as being within its borders. Indeed, India even unveiled a road link via Lipulekh for pilgrims to Kailash-Mansarovar in the Tibet Autonomous Region, a move that drew a diplomatic protest from Nepal. In turn, Nepal reinforced its claim in 2020, when it updated its official map, citing measurements by the Survey Department of Nepal’s Ministry of Land Management.

The flap continued, in part escalated by the formal inauguration of India’s new parliament building in end-May 2023. As I have written earlier in this column, it is a pet project of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, and contains a mural depicting Akhand Bharat, or undivided India, a pet theme of extremist Hindus from pre-Partition years. This mural-map included territories that form nearly all present-day Pakistan, large areas of present-day Nepal, and parts of present-day Bangladesh.

All three countries sought clarifications from India’s foreign ministry. A spokesperson explained the mural as depicting “the spread of the Ashokan Empire and the idea of responsible and people-oriented governance that he adopted and propagated.”

Then Kathmandu’s young mayor, Balendra Shah, played the first of cheeky backhands. From Bengaluru, where he was at the time, Shah, a former hip-hop star and trained engineer, sent word home to place a map of Greater Nepal in his mayoral office. This Akhand Nepal, as it were, is a pre-1816 construct. After the end of the two-year Anglo-Nepalese war with the Treaty of Sugauli, Nepal ceded to the British East India Company the Garhwal and Kumaon regions of present-day Uttarakhand, and swathes of territory in present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Sikkim; even the control of Darjeeling.

This is the northern arc of South Asia’s ring of fire. To the west lies India’s always-tense border with Pakistan, of about 3,000km, with both countries claiming rights over Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Cartography in both countries have for long claimed these territories, much like China and India have done for decades over its disputed territories, or as Nepal and India have more recently done over theirs. The ongoing incidence of militancy and counter-insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir hardly demonstrates a dissipation of cross-border animus. Moreover, Pakistan, as China’s longtime ally, provides a mutually expedient strategic pincer against India.

India’s border with Bhutan is stable, although China and Bhutan have friction. India watches this like a hawk – Doklam, for instance. Doklam is located at the trijunction of India’s eastern Sikkim state, northwest Bhutan, and southwestern China along the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Besides upsetting Bhutan, Doklam unnerves India. China claims a little less than 300sq-km of Bhutan’s territory in Doklam. But the remotest indication of Bhutan ceding territory or losing control would bring China closer to the crucial Chicken’s Neck or the Siliguri Corridor, an approximately 60km long and 22-km wide strip that links India’s mainland to its far-east. A crisis here runs the risk of disconnecting nearly a seventh of India’s landmass. A similar crisis, from India’s perspective, is the possible awarding of a development project in the Teesta Basin in Bangladesh to Chinese interests. In India’s threat perception, this would offer China a strategic advantage dangerously close to the Siliguri Corridor. Another potential anti-India pincer.

Indeed, in 2017 India sent several hundred troops and personnel, and some bulldozers, into Doklam to prevent Chinese troops from constructing a road there. A mutual retreat occurred after weeks of tense standoff. As for the Teesta Basin, New Delhi aims to strenuously counter any Chinese ingress through bilateral talks with Dhaka.

Then there is Bangladesh’s vast 4,096km border with India. This is no longer disputed, but the meltdown in relations since August 5 has led to aggressive rhetoric and positioning from both countries. A spark – more border killings, overwhelmingly by India – can set things aflame. So can hate-mongering by ultra-conservative Indian and Bangladeshi vested interests and their pet media. We will discuss these aspects, and the dynamics of the tense border of Myanmar with both India and Bangladesh, in a future column. South Asia’s ring of fire, alas, offers much material for discussion.

Sudeep Chakravarti works in the policy-and-practice space in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region.

This article was first published in Dhaka Tribune.