India’s strategic predicament in the Himalayas is increasingly shaped by the deepening partnership between China and Pakistan. The operationalisation of a joint boundary commission by Beijing and Islamabad, concerning territory claimed by India, underscores how developments involving one neighbour can affect New Delhi’s security calculations involving the other. The controversy stems from the 1963 Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement, under which Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam Valley to China.

India rejects the arrangement, maintaining that the territory belongs to the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and that Pakistan had no authority to transfer it. The renewed institutional engagement does not settle the dispute, but strengthens the administrative and diplomatic foundations of an arrangement India considers illegitimate. The distinction between legal claims and strategic realities is crucial. An agreement between two countries cannot extinguish a third country’s territorial claim. Yet sustained cooperation, infrastructure development and regularised border management can entrench disputed arrangements in practice.

India must contend not merely with competing maps, but with........

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