Essay · Section A14 October 2026

A map can state a claim; only people can keep it.

On 2 October the Home Ministry fixed official names for 28 places in Ladakh on the Survey of India map: peaks, mountains, glaciers, passes, a lake, a river. Two of them, Gogra and Hot Spring, are friction points on the Line of Actual Control. On 13 October China’s foreign ministry said it had “never recognised” the Union Territory of Ladakh and called the names “illegal and invalid”. Hours later India’s Ministry of External Affairs replied that Ladakh “is an integral and inalienable part of India. No amount of denial by the Chinese side can change this established fact.” Two governments argued, in words, about words printed on a map. It is fair to ask what such words can do. Can a name hold a mountain? This essay argues that a map can state a claim but cannot keep it; that land is held, and a State made real, by presence and by people; and that maps matter most when they faithfully record that presence.

In 1933 the scholar Alfred Korzybski wrote a sentence that has outlived most of his work: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” A map is useful because it resembles the ground, not because the ground obeys it. A name gives no legal title; actual control and administration count for far more. India itself argues exactly this. Since 2017 China has issued several lists of “standardised” names for places along the frontier, and India has dismissed them as inventions. A name printed in Beijing does not change who lives in a valley, who runs its school or who patrols its pass. The same test applies to every map, including our own.

History shows how badly things go when lines are drawn in ink without regard to the people beneath them. In the summer of 1947 Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India, was given about five weeks to divide Punjab and Bengal. His line was published two days after independence. On paper it was precise; on the ground millions were uprooted and hundreds of thousands killed, and villages found their fields on one side and their wells on the other. The opposite lesson came in 2015. For nearly seven decades, tens of thousands of people had lived in enclaves: Indian pockets inside Bangladesh and Bangladeshi pockets inside India. The map gave them a country they could not reach, and so no schools, no ration cards and no police they could call. When the Land Boundary Agreement was finally carried out at midnight on 31 July 2015, through the Constitution’s 100th Amendment, 111 Indian and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves changed hands, and their residents were asked which country they wished to belong to. A map that had failed people for decades was mended by asking them.

If maps do not hold land, what does? Presence. The Galwan clash of June 2020 was not settled by atlases but by years of talks, patrols and disengagement in stages, the last at Depsang and Demchok in October 2024. What gives a frontier claim its weight is a village with a road, a school, electricity and a mobile signal, where families choose to stay because life there is possible. That is the logic of the Vibrant Villages Programme, which covers Ladakh. India’s official reply also described the names as made with the Union Territory administration and local stakeholders, which is the right instinct: a name that local people already use, on a place they already tend, carries a weight that a list issued from far away does not.

The same truth applies inside the country, and here the maps that matter are the State’s registers and surveys. A city plan can show every road and leave out the people who earn their living on its pavements. The urban livelihood mission, now lapsed with no successor, surveyed street vendors so that they could be given licences and loans; the Street Vendors Act of 2014 provides for a Town Vending Committee in every local authority for the same reason. Today’s society card notes that migrants, renters and vendors slip past household surveys, which is partly why urban poverty is easier to wind down than rural poverty. A citizen missing from the map is soon missing from the budget. Even a jail register is a kind of map. It records exactly where each undertrial is, yet in one Maharashtra programme free legal aid reached them, on average, 171 days after arrest. Being on the record is not the same as being reached. By contrast, the SVAMITVA scheme, which since 2020 has used drones to map village homes and give owners property cards, shows a map doing its proper work: recording what people already hold, so that they can borrow against it and defend it.

There is a serious counter-argument. Maps are not innocent drawings; they are instruments of power. Whoever draws the line shapes what students learn, what atlases print and what the world comes to assume. A State that stays silent while its neighbour renames its peaks lets a false story harden into fact; that is why India answered on the same day, and why repeated official use of a name does build a record. There is a second objection, and it is darker. “People keep the land” can be twisted into a licence to move settlers into disputed areas, using human beings as markers in a contest of claims. And a boundary is a legal question; it cannot be decided by whoever happens to live nearest.

Both objections are right, and both set limits rather than overturn the thesis. Maps do matter, as records and as stories, which is why India is right to name its places and right to reply. But the reply works best when it is brief and backed by facts on the ground, with the real argument kept inside the boundary talks rather than duelling press statements. And presence does not mean placing people like pins on a board. It means the State earning their loyalty by serving them: a border village holds because its families are better off there, not because they were sent. The test of a good map, at the frontier or in a city ward, is whether it describes people truthfully and helps the State reach them.

The Survey of India has been making maps since 1767. Lines have been drawn and redrawn across this subcontinent many times since then, and what has endured is not the ink but the people who lived, farmed and governed beneath it. The 28 new names will now appear in India’s atlases, and that is as it should be. But the claim they state will be kept by those who live beneath those peaks and by a State that reaches them with roads, schools and courts. A map can state a claim; only people can keep it. The task of government is to make sure that its maps, at the frontier and at home, are worthy of the people they describe.