When they did appear, the reason for delay was stamped in dark ink over the printed map of India which was the cause for the delay. "The boundaries of India as shown in this map are incorrect" the letters said, or words to that effect. Occasionally the offending parts were blacked out. Foreign printed atlases, much more long-lived than magazines, were particularly prone to this.
Memories of these delays and defacements must have been abruptly raised for many by the news that the draft Geospatial Information Regulation (GIR) Bill proposes to penalise "wrong depiction" of the map of India with fines of up to Rs 100 crore and/or seven years in jail. And this was no longer in an era where such maps came from outside the country and could be intercepted by stamp-wielding authorities.
The Bill is specifically designed to deal with the rapid growth of digital imagery which has placed such geospatial information within anyone's reach - and that means anyone could be implicated by the penalty.
The most alarmed are international digital giants like Google and Apple, or those who use maps as essential parts of their services, such as Uber.
But anyone who has a website on which a map could feature, or reads and forwards an article from a foreign website that features such a map could potentially be accused of the crime. It seemed part of a disquieting expansion of official surveillance that everything from Aadhaar cards to the war on terrorism has promised. The government has tried to address some of these fears.
Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju told ET that "the law should not have any kind of negative atmosphere for business growth".
He also emphasised that this was just a draft, and the final version would address all concerns. But past experiences have made Indians wary of governments (of all kinds) who prefer to keep regressive laws in place always as potential sources of control.
The iroblem of India's boundaries is deep rooted, going back to the Radcliffe Award that spelt out the lines of Partition, and perhaps even further back. One of the bitter ironies of Partition is that it tore up the map of the Indian subcontinent only just as it was being formally defined for the first time. In 1936, The Times of India (ToI) noted that the Survey of India had started working on a truly modern map of the country in 1905 with the aim of completing it in 25 years. But World War-I had delayed matters "with the result that we are, perhaps, yet some 15 years behind the programme."
This meant that the maps that Radcliffe used had many blank spaces, which even post-Independence India took surprisingly long to fill.
Ron E Hassner, the Berkeley-based scholar of international conflicts, notes in his essay "The Path to Intractability: Time and the Entrenchment of Territorial Disputes" that even in 1969, on Survey of India maps "the location of the Yangi Dawan pass in the Aksai Chin is accompanied by a question mark, an unusual feature in mapmaking."
India's boundaries then were always something of a matter of faith, right from the start, and as with most matters of faith, the simplest way to enforce them was to insist on firm belief. In 1956, for example, ToI reported on how Sri Prakasa, who had been India's first High Commissioner to Pakistan, and was the then Governor of Madras, had spoken of "our sacred duty to accept the new map of India". India's freedom wholly depended on national unity, he said.
Faith is enforced by challenges. Sri Prakasa's remarks came in the context of the rising Dravidian movement which at that stage called for not just states based on languages, but even an Independent Tamil Nadu. Just a year later, the Dravida Kazhagam under EV Ramasami Naicker (Periyar) would launch a campaign to burn the Indian map, though not the Tamil areas, which suggests that some scissor work was involved before the matches were struck.
The main challenge came from Pakistan. In 1955, there were reports of an Indian stall at a trade fair in Pakistan being targeted for displaying a map of India that showed Jammu & Kashmir as part of India. A ToI reader with philatelic interests wrote in 1960 complaining about Pakistan issuing "a set of four stamps showing the 'correct positions' of Jammu, Kashmir, Junagadh and Manavadar."
By 1962 this kind of mapmaking had reached the point where Prime Minister Nehru could say in Parliament in exasperation that "the Pakistani authorities live in some kind of fantasy land..." What Nehru didn't mention was that at times India might have done the same.
Two years prior to that ToI reported how Bhutan's government had politely, but firmly, requested that India "correct its maps to show the Indo-Bhutanese frontier as an international boundary and not a provincial boundary as is at present."
India was hardly the only country dealing with boundary problems at that time. Hassner's essay notes that 14 out of 21interstate wars since WW-II were caused by boundary disputes and that as of 1995 there were 60 ongoing ones. But he argues that there is a curiously illogical way these tend to progress. Disputes involving territories with really substantial assets are often swiftly resolved, for example, France returning the Saarland to Germany, or Kuwait and Saudi Arabia sorting out differences over 2,500 square miles of lands with potentially large oil assets.
By contrast, Hassner notes, the really lasting disputes seem to "last longer than the material benefits attached to the territory seem to merit." And while a basic hope in negotiations is that time softens stances and makes solutions easier, here "parties to these disputes seem increasingly reluctant to compromise, or even negotiate, over disputed territories as these disputes mature." Out of the 160 cases his study considered, nearly 50% were resolved in 20 years, but only 6% more were resolved 20 years after, and 5% ended 75 years after starting.
The Indian government's obsession with its boundaries certainly seems to bear this out. From a relatively relaxed approach at first, it rapidly became more rigid from the 1960s onwards. Part of this, of course, had to do with the shock of the India-China war of 1962 when the extent of the Chinese occupation of Aksai Chin became clear, but Hassner points out that maps played a role in this.
In 1960, the two sides met to clarify the border - and this might have been the stage at which a war-averting compromise could have been worked out, with China gaining Aksai Chin, which it needed for strategic purposes, while ceding the North-East, in which it had little interest. Chinese premier Chou En-Lai might have suggested as much, but Nehru, bound by a belief in boundaries, refused. And then the war ended up pretty much with what had been suggested, as the victorious Chinese contemptuously withdrew from the North-East but kept Aksai Chin.
This is the classic problem with faith-based beliefs — when reality intervenes you don't get rational, but double down on the faith. Nehru's government could have saved India of much future hassles if it had admitted the losses of 1962 and proceeded to consolidate what it still had. Instead it insisted on sticking to the Radcliffe awarded map, and all our cartographic confusions have continued since then.
It is fair to note that the government wasn't the only irrational party. Opposition politicians perhaps played an even greater role, by making boundary loss a matter of national pride, forcing the government to defend the map. This is a game repeated even as governments change - in 2002, for example, it was the Congress attacking Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government for publishing an ad on Independence Day which showed a map of India without the Lakshwadweep and Andaman & Nicobar islands. A fairly obvious bit of sloppy art direction suddenly became a matter of national security!
Sankaran Krishna, in his essay 'Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India' points to the Elections of 1989 as the time when the Congress (I) campaigned on the image of the map of India, claiming it was now at risk. The consequence is that "as the physical map of India gains ubiquity as an iconic representation of the body politic, it becomes the terrain for competing efforts to define, and possess, the self." Krishna notes how opposing parties then came out with their own maps, with Hindu fundamentalists developing the narrative, and image, of Akhand Bharat.
But party politics aren't the only force here. Hassner notes that one of the most disconcerting factors in boundary disputes is how private parties get involved as well, leading to grassroots campaigns that, by unnerving or empowering politicians, entrench the disputes even further. For every MP who uses some random magazine depiction of the Indian map to gain attention, there have been regular citizens who have done the same, often in hitherto unexplored areas of outrage.
In 1992, for example, one Mr Ajay Bafna was flying on a Swiss Airlines flight from Zurich to Bombay when he noticed that the video screen - just one large one for the whole cabin at that time - was showing J&K as part of Pakistan. The airline was using an international map with the de facto boundary, but Bafna immediately protested to the pilot at this 'insult to my country' and took a photograph as proof to substantiate his outrage.
Today such airline maps show only geographic and not political features. Cartographic fixes like that emerged over time. International news magazines learned how to crop the Indian map just below J&K, a solution that worked most of the time thanks to the state's outlying position. India's economic development has helped here - part of the problem earlier was that global organisations could not be bothered to print separate maps for the small Indian market, but now that has changed. When National Geographic started printing an Indian edition it became easy to ensure that only the official Indian maps were used.
The GIR Bill could be seen as the logical end for this fundamentally illogical process. The government of India is not unwilling to work on territory resolution issues, as recent land swaps on the Bangladesh border shows, but when it comes to a place as emotionally loaded and visually prominent as Kashmir, then the line is firmly drawn - and it is no less firm despite being essentially a fantasy.
And why not? Hassner's essay does document territorial adjustments that have happened at a relatively late stage, but this has involved land swaps or monetary compensation or just one party deciding that the whole thing was not worth the time and bother. There is no land to be swapped for J&K's disputed areas (if China had remained in Arunachal that might be another matter, though one wonders what Rijiju, who is from that state, might feel).
There is no one to make monetary compensation or any really viable figure that would do. So when reality is of no help, faith might as well step in, and we will continue to believe in the truth of India's map - and just hope that such beliefs don't come back to bite us, through the penal provisions in the GIR Bill.