ABSTRACT
It was just as well that there was no powerful political school in India to press the claim that the Hindu Kush should become the frontier of India. The men who thought on these lines were chiefly to be found in the senior ranks of the Indian Army and their thinking was based naturally enough on considerations of strategy not politics. Even Henry Rawlinson recognised that such a frontier would lead to endless Anglo-Russian recriminations, although his own solution would simply have substituted the Amu Dar’ya for the Hindu Kush. From the earliest stages the general tendency was towards keeping Britain and Russia as far apart as possible in Central Asia, and that tendency crystallised ultimately at the point where agreed borders actually achieved this result, but that is looking a long way ahead; only if Britain and Russia had come to blows in Central Asia would the Hindu Kush have become a dominating influence in British military strategy.
