ERRONEOUS NEHRU-ERA MAP

An error in the Indian maps shows territory as large as Sikkim or Goa in Arunachal Pradesh as belonging to China. The error has yet to be corrected.
Extracts below from an article by Madhav Nalapat in ‘The Sunday Guardian’ of 23 August 2014 are self-explanatory:
“Prime Minister Manmohan Singh rejected an August 2013 request by senior officials in his government to correct a serious error, dating back over 50 years, in India’s official maps. In effect, this oversight in official maps mistakenly gave China control of two Arunachal Pradesh “fishtails”, a territory as large as Sikkim or Goa, and continuously inhabited by Indian citizens…
“…The two ‘fishtail’ formations in Arunachal Pradesh were omitted from maps prepared by the Survey of India during the 1960s, although the area has always been under the control of India. No public records exist as to why and how such a significant error was made. In 1962, recognising the fact that this territory was Indian, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army of China, who had occupied the fishtails during November 1962, withdrew after the unilateral ceasefire declared by Beijing that month.
“‘Since then and before, the area within the two fishtails has always been occupied by our troops, as well as by the Mishmi tribe, all of whom are citizens of India. Our claim on the territory is incontestable and our maps ought to have been updated to reflect this,’ a senior official stated.
“…Asked as to why official maps did not reflect the fact of the ‘fishtails’ being Indian territory, the reply was that ‘as the mistake took place during Nehru’s time, it was felt that correcting the maps formally would draw attention to this mistake on the part of the then Prime Minister and thereby tarnish his name’.
“A retired official claimed that ‘every government has protected Nehru’s reputation by refusing to make public facts dating from the 1940s that they saw as damaging to the image of Nehru’. He and a former colleague saw Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s 2013 refusal to formally change the map (a decision taken ‘after consultations with the political authority’) as part of the effort to protect the reputation of Jawaharlal Nehru by refusing to make public any details of his failures, including the decision to keep secret the Henderson-Brooks Report on the 1962 war, or to draw attention to Nehru’s failures even by the necessary step of rectifying them.
“Interestingly, the fact that maps showed the two ‘fishtails’ as being outside Indian territory was, according to a senior (and now retired) official, ‘brought to the attention of then Home Minister P. Chidambaram by the (then) Director-General of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) in 2010, along with reports of Chinese troops entering the area in 2011 and 2012, but the response was to do nothing’…”