> > <nikhil wrote and I respond> > > There are two and a half issues here.
1. I personally don't have the slightest doubt that Arunachal is part of India. But India wants Google (and indeed every other publisher in India) to say, in India, that POK / Azad Kashmir is part of India, even though they have elections / vote people to Pak Parliament, pay taxes to the Pakistani government - or whatever other standard was put up here. Against this, it's a two-faced stance that the Indian govt doesn't want Google or any other publisher to accede to the Chinese government's similar demands of how their geographical fantasies need to be depicted to the citizens of that country. While it insists that its own geographical fantasies about POK and Aksai Chin depicted in a particular way to its own citizens. This is nothing new - over the last 35 years we've all seen atlases and even magazines being banned in India till they had a rubber stamp across the offending pages that said the usual mush about "The borders depicted here are not the actual borders of India etc." I know the Chinese had their own propaganda in their country insisting that Taiwan be shown as part of China on all maps published there. 2. Those are just examples showing that lines on a political map aren't the objective truth. Lines on a contour map are. So the MP who debated me said in the same breath that all of Arunachal should be shown as belonging to India - even though the Chinese were as much as 20 kilometers deep into such claimed Indian territories even as he spoke. What does this mean? Should a publisher show, using satellite pictures, where the Chinese troops are ranged and where our jawans are, to indicate in its own professional judgement where the line of actual control might be? Should this change on a daily basis as per troop movements? Or should that be censored by the same governments as it is sensitive information? What actually should be shown? The lines of sovereignty claimed by each government? What when the lines overlap? Who decides what that the right line is? Surely the UN doesn't - their law doesn't apply in either geography. Each country will simply demand of a publisher in its territory that their version of geographic fantasy be put forth to their citizens as a condition to said publisher doing business locally. I'd think any publisher, Google, Yahoo and MSN included would do the pragmatic thing - just ask each respective government what they'd like depicted on the maps in their territories - and just do so. Which is what they do, in effect. This was less of an issue in earlier times as Indians didn't have easy access to Chinese maps, or vice versa. Today citizens in both countries can simply change a two-letter domain suffix and see how the same information is presented differently across the border. And of course we can choose to get all "sentimentally hurt" about it. Though all it does - and what I think the politicians really are protesting - is that their power to wage propaganda is being nullified by the net. If this MP feels impotent that his state is shown as part of China to the Chinese - I am sure his Chinese counterpart feels equally stupid with his stance as any of their citizens can easily see, online, that Arunachal is a part of India, or that Taiwan was never theirs. Just as all of us know that we don't really control POK or Aksai Chin in the slightest - no matter what our politicians and Members of Parliament might like us to believe. Eventually, simply opening up locked-down information will sort out the issues for everyone except perhaps politicians. 2.5 And as an aside, the Google Maps vs Google Earth issue is one of dynamic content vs fixed content. Google Maps being a web-based and server-based tool can be commanded rather trivially to show different content to visitors from different IPs. While it is much harder to do so on a download like Google Earth which will probably need to look the same to all viewers worldwide - much like a Nat Geo atlas. And in these cases, any publisher usually takes the simplest way out, trying to offend no parties, by claiming that certain territories are disputed. Nothing new about it- Antarctica is claimed by 17 countries, if you see things on a map. The Moon's been claimed by the US. But no borders are in place when you get down there physically. A political map is just that - political. My $0.02 Mahesh
