THE RESOLUTION OF THE RANN OF KUTCH BOUNDARY PROBLEM

Political geographers have long been concerned with international disputes resulting from ineffectively established boundaries. Some of these conflicts have led to the severing of diplomatic relations between states but have escaped general public notice. Others, more extreme in nature, have produced newspaper headlines, particularly if they resulted in armed clashes between the competing claimants. In modern terms most international boundaries are finite lines delimited by treaty, located on accompanying large scale maps and demarcated on the ground. Along these boundaries the effective sovereign ty of one state is separated from that of another state. Times are long past, in most parts of the world at least, where the sovereignty of one state is separated from that of another by a wide frontier in which its authority gradually diminishes as the state gives up its rights and obligations over the territory.' However, the tidal swamplands of the Rann of Kutch separating part of Pakistan and India was until 1969 just such a border zone-unsettled, and for the most part unused, into which Pakistanis and Indians intruded from time to time but over which neither state exercised exclusive control.