Word: bhutan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Initialed Map. Under the British raj, London played what Lord Curzon called "the great game." Its object was to protect India's northern borders from Russia by fostering semi-independent buffer states like Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim. In those palmy colonial days, Tibet was militarily insignificant, and China, which claims overlordship of Tibet, was usually too weak to exercise...
...east. No boundary in this area is clearly delineated, but the southern border of Tibet, as fixed by the McMahon line, runs more or less along the peaks of the Himalayas. The hill country south of the Himalayan range comprises (from west to east) Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan, and the NEFA. There has been considerable competition between China and India to dominate the first three of these areas--Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Though Indian influence was originally very strong in all of them, the Indians have of late been losing ground to the Chinese. In the extreme east, where India...
...neighbor policy only encouraged the Chinese to look southward with greater interest. "Tibet is the palm of the hand, and the Chinese have it," says one Indian. "Now they want the five fingers without which the palm is useless." The five fingers (see color map) are Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the North East Frontier Agency. To the Chinese, all five stick out like sore thumbs...
...BHUTAN (pop. 700,000) is an autonomous Indian kingdom whose foreign affairs are administered by India. Red China chooses to ignore this arrangement, has offered economic aid to the Bhutanese directly. Primitive and virtually roadless, Bhutan was first opened up to the outside world in 1959; the country has only two doctors and about 20 pharmacists. India has sent a small military training mission into Bhutan to modernize its ragtag 10,000-man army...
Imperialist Product. Red China's first attempt to bite off an Indian finger came after its subjugation of Tibet, when it repudiated the so-called McMahon Line, the border arranged between British India and Tibet in 1914, and named after the head British negotiator. Running across N.E.F.A. from Bhutan to Burma, the line set the border at the watershed at the crest of the highest mountains. But the Red Chinese declared the McMahon Line an "illegal, null and void" product of "British imperialism," claimed that the actual border ran along the southern foot of the mountains...