Is that a Chinese spy in disguise, sneaking into Indian territory? Or is it actually a snow leopard? Should I shoot, or should I jot down the “sighting” in my notebook?

Believe it or not, these are questions flitting through the minds of soldiers guarding our eastern frontiers in their newly acquired avatars as conservationists.

Early this month, Manmohan Singh, the first prime minister since 1996 to visit Arunachal Pradesh, was in the vicinity of the McMohan Line, the border with China that intermittently rattles the T-graph of Sino-Indian relations. The latest tremor was felt as recently as Friday, when India reacted sharply to China’s “objection” to Singh’s visit.

During his “familiarization trip” to an army base, Singh commended the soldiers on their commitment and courage in carrying out their “dual role” — in guarding the frontier and combating insurgency.

The prime minister is probably unaware that the security personnel are now multitasking with elan, playing more than two roles. The troops along the border with China and Myanmar have recently been appointed official botanists and zoologists. Keeping one eye on enemy infiltration, the other scours the terrain for the likes of red panda, musk deer, satyr tragopan, black pheasant and other rare and endangered species. The threatened plants include rhododendron and “different types of forests.”

A week before the prime minister’s visit, WWF-India conducted orientation workshops for army officials at Tenga and Tawang in Arunachal, distributing over 200 copies of field notebooks with pictures of flora and fauna hitherto unexplored. For the next three months Indian soldiers will carry the notebooks and contribute their bit towards documentation and conservation in remote areas accessible only to the army. Should they inadvertently “trespass” into the adjoining country and get caught with these “incriminating documents”, India will need to take recourse to preventive diplomacy of a novel kind.

Line of vision

What if a soldier, mesmerized by that rarest of rare specimen, oversteps the undemarcated border unwittingly? Will that raise the spectre of war? After all, the Chinese ambassador to India, Sun Yuxi, said in 2006 that the whole of Arunachal belongs to China. There have been sundry “reminders” to that effect till two days ago.

Singh’s “development package” for Arunachal cannot but be put in the context of border management. Almost Rs 5,500 crore of the Rs 10,000 crore worth of projects the prime minister unveiled was for a trans-Arunachal highway. Besides being a boon for residents of a state where roads are a luxury, would the highway not facilitate movement of troops and war machinery to the border area? And maybe experts to help armymen identify rare plants and animals?

The WWF venture may be laudable given the global concern for conservation. But soldiers already have their hands full. The troops, constituting the bulk of the Mountain Brigade, not only patrol the borders along isolated heights, they also have to be ready for any eventuality (battling the vagaries of temperatures like minus 20 degrees Celsius), sometimes in waist-deep snow at an altitude of over 15,500 feet.

Indeed it is a blessing that the WWF did not include the Indo-Bangladesh border in its soldier-as-researcher project. If the western Arunachal Landscape was selected for its diversity of undocumented flora and fauna, the Indo-Myanmar sector is no less fascinating. But it is the 4,095-km-long Indo-Bangladesh border that is the most animated in terms of life, wild or otherwise. A soldier mulling over a notebook entry could probably wonder: “Is that an orangutan? Are those yaks or bison?” No, just cattle smugglers or infiltrators in one’s constant line of vision.