Tourists trek up to the border, and Indian and Chinese troops pose near each other for photographs. A giant sign on the Indian side provides basic Chinese greetings to call across to the Chinese soldiers on the other side.India is predicting a tourist boom for the reopened border as well as trade. It will provide a direct route between the former Himalayan kingdoms of Tibet and Sikkim – lesser known, but every bit as exotic. It will also allow tourists to travel directly from Buddhist Tibet to the great Buddhist shrines in Bihar, in India.Already, the newly completed trade zone has been outfitted with tourist infrastructure, including the world’s highest cash point, a cyber-caf?nd long distance telephone lines.”The reopening of border trade will help end economic isolation in this area and play a key role in boosting market economy there,” Hao Peng, the vice chairman of Tibet, said.The Indian government is equally pleased.

“The resumption of border trade is a great historic event, not only for enlarging trade, but also for greater relations between the two great countries,” said Christy Fernandez, additional secretary of the Indian Department of Commerce.But the route is not without its political implications. Tibet and Sikkim may both be exotic, but both were also formerly independent kingdoms. The reopening of the border has raised fears that Tibet’s current desire for more autonomy might be crushed by the loftier ambitions of two of Asia’s superpowers.In Sikkim, too, there are concerns. Sikkim was an independent princely state with treaty agreements with British colonial India, and, unlike with most other princely states, that arrangement continued after Indian independence, until 1975, after a widespread rural revolt against the landowning monasteries and a referendum in favour, when India took control of Sikkim.But there is growing discontent among the native Sikkimese Bhutia-Lepcha community, who, like the Tibetans, are concerned at the influx of “mainlanders” into their lands. Today they account for just 21 per cent of the population of Sikkim.”Our main concern is being outnumbered in our own homeland,” a local politician, Tseten Tashi Bhutia, toldThe Indian Express.

“How long can we tolerate this? How long before AK-47s are taken up.”China has long castigated India for the claim that the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim was an independent country “annexed” by India in 1975. That message will probably change now, as will India’s tough line on Tibet, no doubt, even though Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has lived in exile in Dharamsala in India since 1959.Geographically, it certainly makes sense for Tibet to have use of the pass. Tibet currently has to import and export goods via the port of Tianjin, which is in the north-east of the country.Chinese Communist troops entered Tibet in 1950. In matters Tibetan, Beijing sees itself as a liberating force which freed the locals of the backward yoke of a theocracy, bringing prosperity and doing much to open up the famously secretive region to modern ways.

Beijing points to marvels of engineering, such as the Qinghai-Tibet railway, the world’s highest, which was completed in October and is due to start operation on 1 July. While some critics say it will help swamp Lhasa with the dominant Han Chinese ethnic group, the government in Beijing sees it as a major opportunity for Tibet.Tibet, which last year had a foreign trade volume of £109m, will benefit from resumed border trade, Hao Peng said.”If only 10 per cent of Sino-Indian trade goes through the pass it means at least more than one billion US dollars a year,” he said.Qiangba Puncog , the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government, pointed to economic growth of more than 12 per cent last year in Tibet, above the Chinese average, as a sign of how well the region was doing.For India, the reopening of the road is first and foremost an opening into China’s lucrative market. But the geography also neatly presents a way to improve the economy in eastern India, much of which has been left behind as the economic powerhouses of Bombay to the west and Bangalore to the south forge ahead.Calcutta is at last beginning to show signs of emerging from its poverty, but the reopened border could present it with an opportunity for regeneration as a commercial port. And outside Calcutta, eastern India remains desperately underdeveloped. While gleaming new office buildings go up in Bangalore, in rural West Bengal people still starve to death. It is in the east that the India’s Maoists have seized control of huge areas of land, riding on discontent and poverty.But, as ever in India, the entire project may yet be held up by slow infrastructure. With the proposed reopening just weeks away, The Indian Express reported this week that the Indian authorities had only just brought the road to the same level as on the Chinese side, and the Border Roads Organisation had admitted that it could not widen the single-lane road to two lanes until 2010..

The European steel giant Arcelor has cancelled tomorrow’s shareholder meeting as it continues talks with its unsoliticated suitor Mittal Steel. The shareholders had been due to vote on a €6.5bn (£4.4bn) buy-back that is widely seen as part of a poison pill against the €26bn bid from Mittal.
In a statement last night Arcelor said: “In light of the current discussions between the management of Arcelor and Mittal Steel, and in order not to impair any solution for the future of Arcelor, the board of directors has resolved to withdraw the convening of the extraordinary general meeting.”Arcelor’s board is still due to meet tomorrow, and the company said it intended to press ahead with the buy-back, which would see it repurchase almost one-quarter of its shares, after Mittal’s offer closes on 5 July. Arcelor’s shareholders are also set to meet on 30 June to vote on a rival merger deal with the Russian steel group Severstal, owned by Alexey Mordashov.The delay to tomorrow’s vote fuelled speculation last night that Arcelor’s board could finally be prepared to back a bid from Mittal. It has rejected offers from Mittal, the world’s largest steel maker, for the past five months, but entered talks with the company last week at the request of shareholders.Shareholders, including the Italian financier Romain Zaleski, who acquired a 7 per cent stake last month, had threatened to vote down the buy-back.A number of investors in Arcelor have also voiced concerns about the deal with Severstal, which would give the Russian magnate a 38 per cent stake after the buy-back, without having to table a bid for the whole company..