Its striking beauty is not the only thing that hits you when you visit Kashmir valley.

Though it was the kind of paradise I had imagined, I didn’t know there would be so many shanty towns set in such picturesque locales.

As I travelled through Kashmir, the breathtaking views did make me breathless but so did the smoke and dust. 

An article by Shakil Ahmad Romshoo, Associate Professor with Kashmir University, says the valley has been experiencing erratic snowfall and hotter summers for the last decade or so.

A report on ‘Climate Change in Kashmir’ by ActionAid, an international anti-poverty agency, says the Pampore-Khrew belt, famous for its saffron production, has been witnessing an unusual phenomenon over the last two decades — receiving the least snowfall in Kashmir.

The report also said locals attributed this phenomenon to industrial units which have come up in the area since 1982.

Locals from the Valley say that it’s unusually hot this year.

Many believe it is the wrath of God for the evils in society. Special prayers are being offered in mosques to deal with the changing phenomena.

The ActionAid report says, “Temperature on an average in Kashmir region has shown a rise of 1.45 Celsius while in Jammu region the rise is 2.32 Celsius. The Indian Meteorological Department’s monitoring reveals that temperatures are increasing in both Jammu and Kashmir valley, with significant increase in maximum temperature of 0.05 degrees Celsius per year.”

Romshoo says there are a number of indicators of climate change discernible in the Kashmir valley.

“Glaciers are receding, scanty and erratic snow fall, change of growing season, shifting of vegetation from lower to higher altitudes, shrinking/loss of wetlands, etc,” he said.

“Mountainous regions are generally more susceptible to the climate change impacts and climate change is going to affect every aspect of the environment, social and economics systems.”

Enviroment Minister Jairam Ramesh says there is no conclusive scientific evidence that climate change is causing glaciers to recede.

Ramesh says some glaciers like the Siachen are advancing and there needs to be more study done on this subject.

Though climate change is caused by natural influences as well, Romshoo attributes it to more use of fossil fuels, burning of forests, reckless industrialization and anti-environmental lifestyles.

The ActionAid report also mentions the movement of heavy military vehicles as one of the reasons for excess pollution in the Valley.

It says convoys and heavy military vehicles produce a high level of greenhouse gases and are out of the purview of the law enforcing agencies in pollution control.

Can the government do something about the reduction of greenhouse gases in the Valley? Will education and awareness among locals and tourists help slow climate change?

– Saritha Rai writes for the GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. –

It is dawn in Kerala, a palm frond of a state in India’s South West. As the sun’s first rays hit the church steeple, a Holy Mass is being conducted in the local Malayalam language.

Only, the prayer is dedicated to a newborn by his Catholic family half a world away in the United States.

Requests for these so-called Mass Intentions, or prayers offered for a specific reason, pour into India from the United States, Canada and Europe, where there is a huge shortage of priests.

This outsourcing to faraway India is a quaint practice that has been called “religious outsourcing.”

But now, the severe global economic crisis and bankruptcies in Western churches are hitting even this unusual practice. In Kerala and other parts of India, where the Roman Catholic Church still thrives, outsourced mass intentions are dwindling and striking the income of poorer priests and impoverished churches.

Sebastian Adayanthrath, bishop of Kerala’s Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese, one of the oldest in the country, said he is observing a big slowdown in incoming requests for mass intentions from the West.

“There is a 50 percent fall recently in outsourced mass intentions,” Adayanthrath told GlobalPost in a telephone interview.

Church bankruptcies, diminishing Sunday collections and falling donations from the faithful in Western parishes are all reasons, Adayanthrath said.

Outsourcing, a practice where tasks are sent to cheaper, more efficient locations, has been a sore point for Westerners especially in these economically depressed times.

For the last decade, India has particularly benefitted from the outsourcing of a multitude of tasks such as writing software code, providing customer service, reading x-rays and filing tax returns.

With religious outsourcing, Westerners request Indian churches to hold Holy Mass in memory of a dead family member, or thanksgiving for a child’s college admission, to celebrate a wedding anniversary or even for unusual causes such as the well-being of their favorite sports stars.

“Each mass is paid a stipend of $5 (250 rupees) upwards, supplementing the income of priests who are otherwise paid 50 rupees for the same service by locals,” said Rector Father Augustine Thottakara of Bangalore-based seminary Dharmaram College.

About two percent of India’s 1.2 billion population is Christian, mostly of the Roman Catholic faith. Kerala in Southern India has a big concentration of churches and the faithful.

The requests come to the churches and the local clergy through the Vatican, through clergymen in overseas churches and even through religious bodies. In these days of digital communication, requests have speeded up through email.

Western labor unions have criticized such outsourcing as commoditizing spirituality.

The Indian church stoutly defends the practice. “Offering mass intentions on behalf of Westerners are not a business, it is a custom that benefits both sides,” said Father Paul Thelakkat, spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala’s Cochin town.

But the eastward flow of prayers has ebbed somewhat recently, following the graph of the worldwide economic state.

Where thousands of prayers were flooding parishes in Kerala, church leaders say that they are unable to get or route Western prayers and stipend to cash-strapped parishes and needy priests.

The trends in Kerala mirror what is happening in churches elsewhere in India.

The drop in religious outsourcing is hurting those like Father Bosco Puthoor, rector at the St. Joseph’s Pontifical Seminary in Aluva near Cochin.

Father Puthoor earns 2,500 rupees ($50) as a monthly salary and supplements his own income, as well as that of 22 other teaching priests in his seminary, through religious outsourcing.

“It is a pity that this practice of mutual support between the East and the West is declining,” Father Bosco said.

More from GlobalPost:

India’s unfriendly skies

The Ugly Indian

The Mormons in India

– Sonya Fatah writes for the GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. –

Their voices rang out, echoing in the nearby passageway. “Count your many blessings,” they sang. “Name them one by one. Count your many blessings. See what God hath done.” And so, the women, some 25 of them, members of the Sisters Committee at one of the six churches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in New Delhi, closed their Sunday post-service meeting.

“Let us all work together so we can have a temple here,” urged the chair of the meeting, eliciting head nods and verbal assents all round.

There are almost 7,500 Mormons in India, according to the LDS Church, one of the most organized religious bodies in the world. Like all religious groups keen on increasing their numbers, the church is now looking eastward, toward India to share Joseph Smith’s message.

On numbers alone, conversion in India hasn’t happened as quickly as in Latin America, but that isn’t holding back the missionary fervor of those who have already embraced the church’s teachings. Ever since elders from the Quorum of the Twelve, while visiting Bangalore in 1992, announced a “prophecy” that New Delhi would have a temple, serious efforts are underway to get there.

Anuradha Yadav, 24, is one new Mormon who is dedicated to seeing a temple in New Delhi. Born into a traditional Hindu family of the Yadav caste, Anuradha recalls questioning her faith early on, when she was 14 years old.

“I kept asking questions, and I started visiting churches. In all I visited 30 churches.” One year of church shopping later, Anuradha was even more confused. Then in 2006 she bumped into two young elders on the street who shared the Book of Mormon with her.

She read it cover to cover and felt renewed. “I knelt down and prayed. That was such a wonderful moment. I felt as if somebody had just made me calm,” she said, tearing up at the memory.

Two of the women in the front row at the Sister’s Committee meeting were from Anuradha’s family: her mother, Saraswati, and her sister-in-law, Hema. Dressed traditionally in a blue sari, her hair tied up in a neat bun with a bindi on her forehead, Saraswati came to the church after she saw a miraculous change in her daughter.

“The church changed Anuradha and taught her so much patience and kindness. I was attracted to Christianity myself as a child because I had a Christian friend and I always wanted to go to church with her but my father never let me.”

Most of the people gathered here were either recent converts or those interested in joining the church. Of the five elders in the room, two were young Americans on the 18-month mission that is part of every young Mormon’s coming of age in the church.

Elder Dyck, 20, from Sacramento, Calif., had just completed the first year of his mission. “We speak a lot to people on the road as we’re walking around our delegated areas. It’s hard here to attract people,” he admitted, “but the positives really outweigh the negatives.”

To Indian converts, one of Mormonism’s greatest attractions is the existence of the living prophet. “We have a living prophet who is leading and guiding us right now,” an Indian elder told the Bible Study group.

Like Elder Dyck, Anuradha, also went on a conversion mission to Andhra Pradesh in the country’s south, where Mormons have had the most success in attracting Indians. “My father was not happy that I was going away for 18 months but I went anyway.” Once dismissive of idol worship and reincarnation, Anuradha employed patience and understanding in reaching out to others instead of mocking her birth religion.

Over the course of that mission, Anuradha converted 30 people. Outside her mission, she’s converted at least 10 other people, including her mother, two brothers, a sister, a sister-in-law and three close friends. For her, as for many of those who attend church at the several New Delhi missions, Mormonism is a no-brainer.

“I learned how to be a good daughter, a good sister, to respect everyone and be kind to everyone,” Anuradha said. “I really know that this is the true gospel of Jesus Christ and my life really has changed.”

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– Jason Overdorf writes for the GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. –

The instant that the fasten seat belts light went out aboard Cathay Pacific’s inaugural Delhi-Bangkok flight this summer, a chorus of metallic dongs erupted like a romper roomful of Ritalin-deprived 5-year-olds turned loose on an arsenal of xylophones.

The passengers were attacking their call buttons.

In seconds, flight attendants were up and running. By the time they began dishing out the special meals, tempers were beginning to fray.

“Whiskey!” demanded an old man with a white beard when the young Chinese flight attendant tried to put a meal in front of him.

“Sir, we are not serving drinks now,” the flight attendant replied politely. (Dong! Dong-dong! Do-Dong, dongdong!)

In the next row, another man, younger but no less eloquent, reached up to press his call button, and the flustered attendant caved and uncapped the Scotch.

“Arre, such a small peg she’s given you,” the old man’s companion protested.

Dong!

Once the world loved to hate the Ugly American — fat, loud-mouthed and blissfully superior in his utter cultural ignorance. But since the economic crisis put the kibosh on American and European travel budgets, there’s a new kid in town. India’s rampaging outbound travel market has thrown a much-needed lifeline to the tourism industry in Southeast Asia, Europe and farther afield.

For those schlepping bags and serving drinks, though, the Ugly Indian can be so demanding that the lifeline sometimes looks like it has a noose at the end of it.

“It’s a cultural thing,” said Pankaj Gupta, part-owner of Outbound Travels, a New Delhi-based travel agency. “In India, we have servants to do everything in everybody’s houses mostly, so people are just sort of used to getting stuff delivered to them.”

Culture conflict has already resulted in several public relations debacles. In May, for instance, a group of Indian passengers caused a minor sensation in the local press when they leveled allegations of racism against Air France — saying that when their flight was delayed for 28 hours in Paris other passengers were transported to hotels, but the Indians were made to wait in the lounge. (The distinction was not made based on race, but on possession of a valid Schengen visa, the airline maintains).

In a similar incident in 2006, 12 Indian passengers accused Northwest Airlines of racism when they were offloaded and detained in Amsterdam for what flight attendants called “suspicious behavior.”

“Imagine arresting 12 guys just because they were changing seats and talking on their cellphones when the plane was taking off,” wrote Indian humorist Jug Suraiya in his Times of India column. “Everyone does that in India all the time, and no one gets arrested.”

But just as the American tourist’s penchant for plaid never stopped France from chasing his dollars, the Indian tourist’s insatiable thirst for Scotch hasn’t made his rupees any less attractive. Tourism boards from a laundry list of countries have flooded Indian cities with delegations — or simply set up shop here. Airlines and hotels abroad have wooed Indian travel companies with bargain basement rates, and pulled out all stops to compete — throwing open their kitchens to traveling Indian chefs, topping up their in-flight entertainment libraries with Bollywood movies, and fighting tooth and nail for the right to host stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan for the Indian International Film Awards.

The reason is simple. Despite the downturn, India’s travel market is still growing. According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, more than 800,000 Indians are expected to visit Singapore this year, more than 669,000 Indians are expected to visit the U.S. and more than 625,000 are expected to visit Malaysia. Moreover, PATA expects the number of Indian visitors to Singapore, Malaysia and the U.S. to continue to grow rapidly through 2011.

“Since the economic crisis began, there has been a reduction in travel, but the reduction in travel by Indians has been very low compared to any other country,” said Gupta. “Indians are still traveling a lot. Maybe some people have downgraded, by say, instead of going to the U.S. traveling closer to home, but they’re still traveling abroad.”

Many of these Indian travelers, of course, are erudite, suave, charming, or simply humble and polite — it’s just that nobody remembers them. For every passenger aboard Cathay’s Delhi-Bangkok run with his finger on the call button, there were three or four who were fast asleep, mummified in blankets, or peacefully guffawing at the mindless in-flight movies.

Most problems result from simple misunderstandings, explained Thomas Thottathil, spokesman for Cox & Kings, one of India’s largest tour companies. “We sensitize our customers, our tour guides, and we also explain to our suppliers overseas — the hotels or whatever — that Indian travelers have their own needs, their own particular habits.” Because of that effort, Thottathil said his firm has not faced anything more serious than the occasional complaint that a hotel didn’t provide dinner after 9:30 p.m.

Thottathil may well be onto something. A quick lesson about Indians’ love of thrift, for instance, might ease international tensions in the air. What’s the multicultural secret to a tranquil flight, you ask?

Five dollar whiskeys.

More from GlobalPost:

India’s unfriendly skies

Can you outsource God?

The Mormons in India

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has taken a step towards unshackling the poorest of entrepreneurs — the street vendors.

In a letter to chief ministers, this week, Singh called for a “new deal” for urban street vendors and implementation of the National Policy on Urban Street Vendors, 2009 — which would enable vendors to ply their trade without harassment.

These include hawkers, sidewalk traders or even the people selling clothes or utensils at the weekly market.

For them, the landmark economic reforms of 1991 carry little meaning.
 
The Centre for Civil Society, citing an example of persistent ‘license raj’, says that only 75,000 of half a million cycle-rickshaws plying in Delhi are licensed.
 
The rest pay an estimated 80 million rupees a month in bribes.

Like rickshaw-pullers, street vendors also have to cough up money to the police, fearing eviction or confiscation of wares.

It was estimated that they pay 400 million rupees yearly in bribes in the national capital alone.
 
People paying these bribes have an average daily income of Rs. 70 for men and Rs. 40 for women as estimated by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. They borrow from money lenders at rates up to 110 percent.
  
In Sodan Singh and Others versus New Delhi Municipal Council in 1989, the Supreme Court had ruled : “The right to carry on trade or business mentioned in Article 19 (1) g of the constitution, on street pavements, if properly regulated, cannot be denied on the ground that the streets are meant exclusively for passing or re-passing and no other use.”
 
The revised National Policy on Urban Street Vendors, 2009  by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation recognizes the “need for regulation of street vending by way of designated ‘Restricted-free Vending’, ‘Restricted Vending’ and ‘No Vending’ zones based on certain objective principles.”
 
It lays down that there should not be any cut off date or limit imposed on the number of vendors who should be permitted to sell their goods.
 
The policy aims to “eschew imposing numerical limits on access to public spaces by discretionary licenses, and instead moving to nominal fee-based regulation of access.”
 
A model bill on regulation of street vending has been drafted but it is for the states to enact the laws. 
That is where the prime minister’s letter comes in.
 
As part of its campaign for street vendor rights, civil society group Manushi set up in 2005 a temple dedicated to what it describes as a secular goddess “Swachha Narayani”.
 
The goddess holds a broom to symbolize strength from unity and cleanliness, a clock to signify changing times, a coin to communicate right to livelihood and also a weighing balance, video-camera and pen.
 
So is the goddess ready to smile on vendors and small entrepreneurs?

[ Photos: A hawker sells computer and electronic spare parts on a pavement in Kolkata while another hawker in Mumbai prepares a cosmetic for men as a customer looks into a mirror. ]

Sri Lanka’s bloody 25-year conflict with the Tamil Tigers ended in May but commentators reflecting on the country’s first post-war elections last weekend expressed little optimism about a peaceful future for the Indian Ocean island.

The ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance swept to victory in Sinhalese-dominated Uva province and scraped a win in Jaffna, while the Tamil National Alliance — political allies of the defeated rebels — won control of Vavuniya. Both Jaffna and Vavuniya are just outside the shadow state which the Tigers controlled for decades.

“The victory in Jaffna, the heartland of the country’s ethnic minority Tamils and birthplace of militancy, will give the government a chance to claim it as an endorsement of its handling of ethnic relations, postwar rehabilitation and a rejection of separatism,” Krishan Francis of the Associated Press wrote in the Washington Post.

But the results do not fully reflect public opinion in these war-battered regions, with more than 77 percent of the Jaffna voters staying away and only half of the Vavuniya voters casting ballots.

The London-based Financial Times pointed out that it was hard to know what really happened in the elections - foreign journalists were banned from the north, just as all journalists were during the final stages of the war.

“But the real purpose of the poll seems to have been to test the popularity of President Mahinda Rajapaksa before he calls an early general election to secure a second six-year term, in the afterglow of military victory,” the Financial Times wrote in an editorial.

The newspaper added that the notion of devolution to deal with Tamil grievances had been taken off the table and the government no longer wishes to discuss minority rights, only individual rights within the new national identity it intends to forge.

US and British officials fear this may involve the forced dispersal of Tamils across the island so they can no longer cluster, said the broadsheet.

“Put simply, while the conflict has ended, Sri Lanka is careering back to where it was when the conflict began. Its precarious identity as a mix of ethnic and linguistic, cultural and religious influences is in danger of being swept away by a triumphalist wave of Sinhalese chauvinism,” the FT said.

ELECTIONS HELD TOO SOON

According to the Christian Science Monitor some analysts believe the elections were held too soon after the end of the war for people to vote and for democracy to be truly tested.

“Certainly, normalcy in the battle-scarred north is a long way off: Nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians are being forcibly held by the government in camps near Jaffna and Vavuniya,” wrote Mian Ridge. “Both towns are still surrounded by government checkpoints, and are largely inaccessible to non-residents. Even residents can’t leave without permission.”

Ridge added that foreign - and many Sri Lankan - journalists were not allowed to cover the elections and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said that the decision to bar the media “dashes any hope of a transparent election.”

Sudha Ramachandran from the Asia Times said the Jaffna and Vavuniya elections were seen as an important indicator of the mood among the Tamil people in the north.

“Some have interpreted the ruling party’s strong showing in Jaffna as a sign that the Tamils are endorsing Rajapakse’s approach to the conflict in Sri Lanka,” said Ramachandran. But she pointed out that this interpretation amounts to little given the poor voter turnout, especially in Jaffna.

Charles Haviland from the BBC added that poor turnout was not just down to apathy amongst Tamils, but because much of the area is depopulated with about 300,000 Tamils detained in nearby government camps after the war, and others either dead or displaced to other parts of the island.

[Nita Bhalla covers South Asia for AlertNet. She is based in New Delhi.]

[Photo - A boy cycles past a soldier on a street in Batticaloa, eastern Sri Lanka May 10, 2008. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi]

The toll in India from the H1N1 pandemic rose this week, but a look at the screaming TV headlines and graphic visuals in newspapers would suggest a country under siege from something akin to the bubonic plague.

Dramatic headlines and graphic visuals in the media; reporters looking alarmed behind their masks; commuters with handkerchiefs and scarves around their mouths; and long lines of people outside screening centres, imagining the worst.

Even as the health minister and state officials appealed for calm and warned against hoarding masks and flu drug Tamiflu, the red splashes of breaking news and the tone verging on hysteria were unabated.

The World Health Organisation estimates the H1N1 swine flu could affect 2 billion people globally, and experts consider the pandemic to be moderate.

That hasn’t stopped the breathless media coverage, selling of masks and sanitisers at several times the usual price and panicky schools shutting down.

In fact, new U.S. guidelines discourage early closure of schools because the benefits of closing schools are outweighed by social costs such as unsupervised children and missed education.

Some newspapers did play down the hysteria: The Hindustan Times daily said many deaths could be attributed to late diagnosis and other complications, and reminded readers that 16 people died of malaria in Mumbai in the last two days alone. During the monsoon, gastroenteritis is a bigger threat than swine flu.

So how about some perspective and some calm?

[Join the Great Debate on whether India is ready to tackle swine flu ; for slideshow click here]

Lost in the clamour over our cricketers defying WADA over the “whereabouts” rule in drug testing, was a tiny news item in the Hindustan Times daily last week about women boxers washing dishes and serving tea to visitors at the National Institute of Sports.

Sports Minister MS Gill, when questioned about it in India’s upper house, said the practice was “a normal courtesy extended to distinguished guests”.

There was no clarity on what made a guest distinguished or whether this was a courtesy that only women were called on to extend.

The boxing federation, which has enough on its plate already, then sent out a press release, papers said, saying: “Haven’t we all grown up seeing our mothers, sisters and ladies of the house looking after the guests, right from our childhood. Are they doing demeaning jobs?”

Clearly not in Gill’s mind.

Isn’t it bad enough that every sport besides cricket gets the short end of the stick in India? Do we need to further humiliate our sportspersons — our sportswomen — in this fashion?

Would you imagine the uproar if budding bowlers at the Chennai academy were made to wash the cars of distinguished guests as a normal courtesy?

Harbhajan Singh and Murali Kartik were apparently disciplined some time back because they complained about the quality of the food at the cricket academy.

The contrast could not be more stark: while our superstar cricketers throw tantrums over food and their considerable weight over rules, our other sportspersons have no voice, and our sportswomen, in particular, who fight against conventional notions of what a woman must be, are reminded they haven’t come very far at all.

Most unsporting, isn’t it?

When Matt Stewart’s agent submitted his debut novel to publishing houses, he didn’t quite get the response he wanted.

“Many of them loved it, but none were willing to buy what they viewed as a ‘risky’ novel — vivid language, elements of fantasy and farce, raunchy humor,” the San Francisco resident wrote on his website.

But Stewart didn’t lose heart. On July 14, he started posting “The French Revolution” on Twitter.

The novel, about a San Francisco family forging its place in history, is one of the few full-length works of fiction to be released one tweet at a time.

Micro-blogging service Twitter and its now famous 140-character tweet limit is being put to uses more profound than just describing what you had for breakfast.

Like tweeting a novel.

Stewart says it will take him approximately 3,700 tweets to transmit all of the 480,000 characters in his novel.

“I can get instant feedback from readers, and we can discuss the intricacies of the characters and plot twists as they develop,” he says.

Stewart is not the only one writing Twiction (or Twitter fiction). There’s Jim McCormick who tweeted a novel written by his late wife, Nick Belardes’ ‘Small Places‘ and even a Twitter novel in French.

And tech writer Rakesh Raman’s humanoid protagonist Robojit is leading a mission to the Sand Planet - at the rate of 10 tweets a day.

There are also some who tell the entire story in a single tweet.

Geoff Meeker, for instance, writes Twisters, or short stories written in 140 characters or less. So do William Brazill and Arjun Basu.

If you need help, there are even web pages offering tips on writing a novel on Twitter.

And if you are suffering from writer’s block, you could always turn to literary classics for inspiration.

Videogame designer Ian Bogost and friend Ian McCarthy came up with idea of recreating a chapter from James Joyce’s 1922 novel “Ulysses” on Twitter.

And Chindu Sreedharan, who teaches journalism at Bournemouth University, is retelling the Hindu epic Mahabharata on Twitter.

Of course, Twiction is not perfect.

This month, a reader of the Mahabharata Twitter narrative alerted the author after reading a tweet that seemed out of place.

“I accidentally posted something meant for another Twitter account — and since it had some reference to ‘beach’ and ‘bikini-clad’, I had some answering to do,” Sreedharan said.

But the big question is — will Twiction remain some sort of social media experiment? Will it ever have literary merit?

China and India are sitting down for another round of talks this week on their unsettled border, a nearly 50-year festering row that in recent months seems to have gotten worse.

China’s Vice Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo and India’s National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan are unlikely to announce any agreement on the 3,500 km border, even a small one, but their talks this week may well signal how they intend to move forward on a relationship marked by a  deep, deep “trust deficit”, as former Indian intelligence chief B. Raman puts it.

While the entire Himalayan border is disputed, including the Aksai Chin area, it is the row over large parts of India’s Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern stretch of the mountains that has strained ties in recent months.

The Chinese, says Raman,  are demanding that at least the Tawang tract of Arunachal Pradesh, if not the whole of it, should be transferred to it.  They are apparently adamant that if that doesn’t happen, there won’t be any border settlement, he says.

India’s position is that there can’t be a transfer of populated areas in any border settlement. Tawang is a populated area, its citizens are Indians, New Delhi says.

So firmly have the Chinese dug their heels in, that they refused to endorse an Asian Development Bank  irrigation project in Arunachal Pradesh in June on grounds that it was its territory. Last month, India’s Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna confirmed to parliament in a question-answer session media reports about the Chinese objection to the project which appeared to have stung India.

So where do they go from here ? India’s decision to deploy additional troops along the border in Arunachal Pradesh and beef up its air defences in the region have deepened the sense of unease, more so by making a public announcement of the military moves.  It might be concerned about Chinese buildup in the area and of growing border violations, but to talk openly of the Chinese threat and moves to counter it hardly inspires confidence.

There is a history to this: in the months leading up to the 1962 war between the two countries, India, according to some people at least, took fairly strident positions in public against China, only to be humiliated in the brief conflict.

There are some signs of a calmer, more measured stance in New Delhi and Beijing ahead of this week’s meeting in the Indian capital. There was no need to “demonise” China as a potential threat, India’s top level cabinet committee on security headed by the prime minister concluded last weekend at a preparatory meeting, acording to a report in the Indian Express. But New Delhi will be watching China closely, it said.

Beijing for its part said the two countries must exercise the “greatest political wisdom” to arrive at border settlement. The People’s Daily quoted China’s ambassador to India Zhang Yan as saying: notwithstanding the “twists and turns” in ties, the two countries had the same responsibilities of developing their economies and improving people’s lives.

Bilateral trade, as the People’s Daily in a separate article notes, has flourished despite the strained political relationship. “China has become one of India’s largest trade partners, and India is now one of the most vital investment and overseas project contracting markets for China,” it says.

So is trade going to be the glue holding the world’s two most populous nations together?

(Photographs of India’s Manmohan Singh and China’s Wen Jiabao and Nathu-La on the border between India and China)