Sudarshan Bhutani served as a young officer in the Indian Embassy in Beijing in the years covered in this elegantly written short study of some 215 pages, not including the appendices. It lucidly summarizes the essentials of the India-China border dispute as seen from an Indian perspective, offering a kind of ‘everyman’s guide’ to an issue that must figure as a problem to be resolved, as the two countries move forward in a relationship that has gradually moved beyond that dispute’s legacy of bitterness. The author is scholarly in his tempered comment, and has marshalled a wealth of information from published sources.
January 2005, volume 29, No 1