Amid continuing border standoff, India has mocked China’s latest move to rename 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, saying Beijing’s attempts to “assign invented names” will not alter reality that the northeastern state is an “integral part of India”.
Rejecting China’s move, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said, “This is not the first time China has made such an attempt. We reject this outright. Arunachal Pradesh is, has been, and will always be an integral and inalienable part of India.”
“Attempts to assign invented names will not alter this reality,” Bagchi said in his statement on Tuesday.
According to Chinese media, president Xi Zinping’s government has changed the names of mountain peaks, rivers and residential areas. The new names and their subordinate administrative districts have also been listed by China’s civil affairs ministry.
According to China’s civil affairs ministry, the renaming is a part of the standardisation of geographical names in southern Tibet, which it claims as part of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China. However, the move is seen as a further deepening of mistrust between India and China at a time when the two countries are in the middle of their worst bilateral chill in decades.
The renaming in the past was also promptly rejected by India, with New Delhi reiterating that the northeastern state will always remain an integral and “inseparable” part of India.
It wasn’t immediately clear why China decided to issue new names now but given the state of ties, it is not surprising that Beijing made a move to irk the Narendra Modi government.
China and India have a long-standing border dispute, and relations between the two have been tense since a border clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020, which resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese soldiers. The two countries have since engaged in several rounds of military and diplomatic talks to defuse the tensions, but a complete resolution has yet to be reached.