New Delhi, July 05: The most startling tourist distraction in China is a map of India. Seeing is disbelieving. India gets a serious haircut, and it must be doubly disturbing to find the great locks of Lord Shiva shorn off the head of India. The Chinese have excised the Himalayas from India and either made it completely theirs or handed it over to independent or disputed states that become a buffer in Asia’s most powerful neighbourhood. Start from northwest and head northeast. Jammu and Kashmir has been allotted an indeterminate status, except of course for that part on the eastern edge of the old kingdom that was gifted to Chou en Lai by Field Marshal Ayub Khan in 1963 and now lies firmly embedded inside China. India is permitted to sneeze through a couple of passes in Himachal and Uttaranchal before Nepal sprawls independently midway. Sikkim, east of Nepal, is still shown as a sovereign state adjoining sovereign Bhutan. To the east of Bhutan begins the sweep that takes you into Arunachal Pradesh, the whole of which is shown as part of China, with Chinese names for its small cities and landmarks. The Chinese case for the wholesale absorption of Arunachal rests partly on some vague ethnic compatibility, although they do not extend this suggestion into calling Northeast Indians of Han descent. They use a political yardstick to measure this map. Tawang paid a tribute to the Chinese emperors, so ipso facto it is part of China. By this logic, Afghanistan should be included in the map of India, since the province paid tribute to the Mughal emperors for hundreds of years, at about the same time that Tawang was purchasing peace with the Ming dynasty. The People’s Republic of China loses its republican sheen when it comes to territory, and turns imperial even if it cannot always get imperious. This distinction between China and the People’s Republic of China tends to escape general observation, but it glittered in the intellectual landscape of Brajesh Mishra, national security adviser and principal secretary to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who led the negotiations that resulted in the first joint declaration between India and China in Beijing this week as well as the memorandum of understanding by which China informally recognised Sikkim as part of India. We only reiterated our assurance, first given in 1954 and repeated by Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, that we accepted Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. We did not say that Tibet was part of China. This may seem semantic, but the Dalai Lama has always argued that Tibet was never part of China and therefore cannot be claimed by the successor state of People’s Republic of China.