'Inventing' names in Arunachal doesn’t alter facts: India to China

India has taken a strong objection to China renaming some places in Arunachal Pradesh saying that the state has “always been” and will “always be” an integral part of India. New Delhi said that assigning “invented” names does not alter this fact.

India’s reaction follows Beijing on Thursday announcing Chinese names for 15 more places in Arunachal Pradesh, which the neighbouring country claims as South Tibet.

“…This is not the first time China has attempted such a renaming of places in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. China had also sought to assign such names in April 2017,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said.

The Chinese move came just days before Beijing’s new border law, initially passed earlier this year and titled the ‘Land Border Law of the People’s Republic of China’, is to come into effect on 1 January 2022.

The law, which aims to strengthen border control, directly concerns countries that share a land border with China, and has potential implications for India’s ongoing tensions with it along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

India meanwhile sees China’s new Land Borders Law, approved in October and set to come into force on January 1, as a hardening of Beijing’s position.

Several stretches of the lengthy frontier are disputed and relations have soured dramatically between India and China since 20 Indian soldiers were martyred in a brawl in June 2020 on one section between Ladakh and Tibet.

According to a report in state-run daily Global Times on Thursday, China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs announced that it had “standardised” in Chinese characters and Tibetan and Roman alphabets the names of 15 places in what it refers to as ‘Zangnan’, the ‘southern part of Xizang’, as it calls the Tibet Autonomous Region.