In the winter of 1940, when the British Raj still appeared eternal, Sir Olaf Caroe, then Foreign Secretary of India, wrote a memorandum on what he called the “Mongolian Fringe.” The phrase sounds quaint today, but the strategic logic was clear: India’s eastern security did not depend on direct dominance. It rested on a layered frontier beyond formal borders—protectorates and buffer states, monasteries and mountain tribes—shaped through indirect rule, subsidies, political influence, and security guarantees. This was no different from the Raj’s strategy in the northwest towards territories beyond the Indus.
For Caroe, frontiers were not fixed lines but zones of influence with varying degrees of control. Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim formed the inner shield. Tibet, under the “shadowy suzerainty” of China, along with Burma and Siam, constituted the outer zone. The Raj’s primacy rested on flexible sovereignty, loose administrative arrangements, and sophisticated political management.
The central question today is not simply how China got here, but how India must respond
That world was already beginning to unravel before independence. London’s larger China policy often conflicted with the Raj’s frontier imperatives. Imperial Japan’s advance across Asia shattered Britain’s aura of invincibility in the East. Although wartime mobilisation and American support briefly restored British power, post-war exhaustion and rising Asian nationalism ensured London’s retreat rather than renewal.
Independent India then turned inward economically while embracing hopeful visions of Asian solidarity. But strategic shocks followed in quick succession. China occupied Tibet in 1950. Pakistan was drawn into the Anglo-American alliance. The Soviet Union expanded its regional footprint, culminating in Afghanistan by 1979. Meanwhile, India’s smaller neighbours, with growing nationalist identities, increasingly sought external partnerships with China, the United States, and others to widen their strategic autonomy from India.
As China rose into a great power, its economic, political, and military presence across India’s periphery expanded dramatically. What Caroe once imagined as India’s protective fringe has steadily become an arc of Chinese influence. The central question today, however, is not simply how China got here, but how India must respond.
Critics argue that Delhi’s instinct has become increasingly defensive. Instead of leveraging geography that favours India, regional integration, and sustained political engagement, Delhi is turning towards insulation. The old grammar of buffers is giving way to the language of bunkers. Border fencing is expanding. Trade is constrained by India’s non-tariff barriers. Delhi’s fortress mentality is deepening. Transborder connectivity projects are moving too slowly.
The buffers of the Raj were never only about military security. They were instruments of transborder influence—economic, political, and strategic—designed to create durable and mutually beneficial relationships with smaller neighbours. India’s eastern challenge today is not merely to resist Chinese encirclement. It is to recover the political imagination and economic diplomacy to tend and cultivate the liminal spaces to the east.