evidence: China itself highlights Tibet as the core issue with India by laying claim to Indian territories on the basis of purported Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links, rather than any professed Han Chinese connection. Indeed, ever since China gobbled up the historical buffer with India, Tibet has remained the core issue. [...] This new formulation ran counter to India’s position since 2010 — a stance that came with the promise of repairing the damage from India’s past blunders over Tibet, including by prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi. Nehru in 1954ceded India’s British-inherited extraterritorial rights in Tibet and accepted the sprawling region’s annexation without any quid pro quo. Under the terms of this accord, India withdrew its "military escorts" from Tibet, and handed over to China the postal, telegraph and telephone services it operated there. [...] Vajpayee’s blunder opened the way for China to claim Arunachal Pradesh as "South Tibet," a term it coined in 2006 to legitimize its attempt at rolling annexation. Had Vajpayee not caved in, China would not have been emboldened to ingeniously invent the term "South Tibet" for Arunachal Pradesh, which is three times the size of Taiwan and twice as large as Switzerland. And since 2010, Beijing has also questioned India’s sovereignty over the state of Jammu and Kashmir, one-fifth of which is under Chinese occupation.