Boundary Lines of the World: Durand, McMahon, Radcliffe

The correct answer is B, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Durand Line was agreed in 1893 between British India and the Amir of Afghanistan and is named after Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the Government of India who negotiated it; after 1947 it became the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Option A, India and Pakistan, are separated by the Radcliffe Line of 1947 and, in Jammu and Kashmir, by the Line of Control. Option C, India and China, are divided in the eastern sector by the McMahon Line of 1914 and elsewhere hold positions along the Line of Actual Control. Option D, Afghanistan and Iran, share a border that carries no such famous name. India itself has a short border of about 106 kilometres with Afghanistan along Ladakh, which is its shortest land frontier.

The correct answer is C, 1947. The Radcliffe Line was the award of the boundary commissions for Punjab and Bengal, headed by the British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, and it was published in August 1947 at the time of Partition. Its eastern stretch divided Bengal, so after 1971 the same line became the boundary between India and Bangladesh. Option A, 1893, is the year of the Durand Line between British India and Afghanistan. Option B, 1914, is the year of the Simla Convention at which Sir Henry McMahon drew the McMahon Line. Option D, 1972, is the year of the Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan, under which the Cease Fire Line of 1949 was renamed the Line of Control. Keeping these four years in order, 1893, 1914, 1947 and 1972, answers most questions in this chapter.

The correct answer is A, the Simla Convention of 1914. The Simla Convention brought together representatives of British India, Tibet and China, and the line drawn there by Sir Henry McMahon runs along the crest of the eastern Himalaya; India treats it as the boundary with China in the eastern sector, while China rejects it and claims Arunachal Pradesh. Option B, the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, ended the First World War and dealt with European boundaries, not with the Himalaya. Option C, the Karachi Agreement of 1949, fixed the Cease Fire Line in Jammu and Kashmir after the first India and Pakistan war. Option D, the Panchsheel Agreement of 1954, set out the five principles of peaceful coexistence between India and China but drew no boundary at all, which makes it the most tempting wrong option.

The correct answer is B, North Korea and South Korea. The Korean peninsula was divided along the 38th parallel of north latitude after the Second World War, and although the armistice line of 1953 does not follow the parallel exactly, the Demilitarized Zone runs close to it and the parallel remains the name used for the division. Option A, the two Vietnams, were divided along the 17th parallel until unification, and swapping these two numbers is the commonest mistake in the chapter. Option C, the United States and Canada, are divided over a long stretch by the 49th parallel, the straight line that makes the border look drawn with a ruler. Option D, Germany and Poland, are divided by the Oder and Neisse Line, which follows two rivers and is therefore a natural rather than a geometrical boundary.

The correct answer is B, the United States and Canada. A long stretch of the border between the United States and Canada, from the Lake of the Woods to the Strait of Georgia, follows the 49th parallel of north latitude, which is why that part of the frontier appears as a perfectly straight line on any map; a boundary drawn in this way is called a geometrical boundary. Option A, the United States and Mexico, are divided in part by the Rio Grande, a river boundary, not by a parallel. Option C, Russia and China, share a long border that follows the Amur and Ussuri rivers in the east. Option D, France and Spain, are divided by the crest of the Pyrenees, a mountain boundary. The parallels worth memorising together are the 17th for Vietnam, the 38th for Korea and the 49th for North America.

The correct answer is B, France. The Maginot Line was a chain of concrete forts and obstacles built by France along its eastern frontier between the two world wars, facing Germany, and named after the French minister of war Andre Maginot. Option A, Germany, built the answering fortification on its own side, the Siegfried Line, so the pair must be learned together and in the right order. Option C, Finland, built the Mannerheim Line across the Karelian Isthmus to hold back the Soviet Union in the Winter War. Option D, Poland, is associated with the Curzon Line proposed after the First World War and with the Oder and Neisse Line fixed after the Second. The trap in this question is to assume that a line is named after the country it defends against rather than the country or minister that built it.

The correct answer is A, Germany and Poland. The Oder and Neisse Line follows the courses of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse rivers and was settled as the western boundary of Poland after the Second World War, which moved Poland's frontier a long way west. Option B, Poland and Russia, is associated with the Curzon Line, proposed by the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon after the First World War. Option C, Finland and Russia, is associated with the Mannerheim Line, the Finnish defensive works of the Winter War. Option D, Germany and France, is the frontier guarded by the Maginot Line on the French side and the Siegfried Line on the German side. A quick way to hold these is by the century of settlement: Curzon and Mannerheim belong to the earlier conflicts, the Oder and Neisse to the settlement of 1945.

The correct answer is C, Bangladesh. India's land border with Bangladesh is about 4,096 kilometres long, the longest it has with any neighbour, and it touches five states: West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. Option A, China, comes second at about 3,488 kilometres, touching Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Option B, Pakistan, is third at about 3,323 kilometres, touching Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Option D, Nepal, follows at about 1,751 kilometres, touching Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim. Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan come next in that order, Afghanistan being the shortest at about 106 kilometres. The order Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan is worth memorising as a single sequence, because papers often ask for the second or the third longest rather than the longest.

The correct answer is B, the Simla Agreement of 1972. After the war of 1971 India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement, which provided that the line resulting from the ceasefire of December 1971 would be respected by both sides, and from then on that line was called the Line of Control. Option A, the Tashkent Declaration of 1966, ended the war of 1965 and provided for a withdrawal to the earlier positions, but it did not rename the line. Option C, the Lahore Declaration of 1999, dealt mainly with nuclear confidence-building measures. Option D, the Karachi Agreement of 1949, is where the line was first fixed, under the name Cease Fire Line, after the first war over Kashmir. Note separately that beyond the point NJ 9842 the two armies face each other along the Actual Ground Position Line in the Siachen region.

The correct answer is A, Finland and Russia. The Mannerheim Line was built by Finland across the Karelian Isthmus and is named after Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim; it was the main Finnish defensive position against the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939 and 1940. Option B, Germany and Poland, is the frontier of the Oder and Neisse Line settled in 1945. Option C, Poland and Russia, is associated with the Curzon Line proposed after the First World War and later broadly followed in the post-war settlement. Option D, France and Germany, is the frontier of the Maginot and Siegfried lines. The four fortified lines of twentieth-century Europe worth tabulating are therefore Maginot for France, Siegfried for Germany, Mannerheim for Finland and the Hindenburg position of the First World War for the German army in northern France.