In his memoir, The Making of a Frontier, about the five years he spent on the fringes of Jammu and Kashmir in the late 19th century, British officer Col. Algernon Durand observed that “the man on the Frontier sees but his own square on the chess-board, and can know but little of the whole game in which he is a pawn.” When and if we next see clashes on the frontiers of Ladakh, it will be vital to keep this perspective in mind. Not all squares on a chess board are worth fighting over.
