India threatens fines, jail for maps showing Kashmir in Pakistan
After fighting several bloody wars, India and Pakistan have opened up a new front in the battle for Kashmir; it could be termed “the cartography conflict”.
India, it seems, fired the first shot when the Ministry of Home Affairs released a draft bill this month called the Geospatial Information Bill.
The bill, if passed, would make it mandatory to get Indian government permission before acquiring, publishing or distributing any geospatial information about India. It would cover everything from the maps used by Uber taxi drivers to Google maps.
It would make it an offence to publish any maps deemed to be incorrect — for example, to show the parts of Kashmir currently administered by Pakistan to be outside of India.
Offenders would face $20 million fines and seven-year jail terms.
Pakistan has returned fire by complaining to the UN.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry expressed “serious concern” about the bill, claiming India was violating international law. The ministry said the official map of India depicts the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir as part of India, which is “factually incorrect and legally untenable”.
India rejected the accusation, saying Pakistan had “no locus standi” because the bill was an “internal legislative matter”.
“The government firmly rejects Pakistan’s repeated and increasing attempts to impose on the international community matters that India has always been open to address bilaterally with Pakistan,” said Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Vikas Swarup.
A spokesman for India’s ruling BJP party Nalin Kohli told
The Australian it considers “every inch of Jammu and Kashmir” to be a part of India. He said Pakistan had enough problems without meddling in Indian affairs.
Last year the Indian government took the news channel Al Jazeera off air for nearly a week, accusing it of showing maps that misrepresented the disputed border region of Kashmir.
Al Jazeera English hit back, accusing New Delhi’s government of “censorship”. Samina Yasmeen, a South Asia expert from the University of Western Australia, said India was taking a more aggressive approach to border disputes, just as China was doing with islands in the South China Sea.
“This is in the nature of states that go through that transition from being relatively insignificant internationally to being very significant,” she said.
“And what you end up doing is using your power, as a very strong emerging country, to really dictate how the world needs to look at certain issues.”
She said it did nothing to resolve the conflict.
“I don’t want to accuse India of imperialism, but I think it’s problematic,” she said. “As a smart, global power, India would be advised not to come up with these ideas because they don’t serve India’s interest as a global power and they definitely undermine the possibility of improving relations at the regional level.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...n/news-story/4ef06b3e73d7788bba94f0d8709e82ab
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