‘Invented names’: India hits out at Beijing for ‘renaming’ 15 places in Arunachal
Hindustan TimesNEW DELHI: India on Thursday dismissed China’s move to rename 15 locations in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is claimed by Beijing, and said such actions will not alter the region’s status as an integral part of the country. China has announced Chinese characters, Tibetan and Roman alphabet names for 15 more places in India’s Arunachal Pradesh New Delhi’s sharp rebuttal after China’s ministry of civil affairs issued a statement that said it has “standardised” the names of 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh for use in Chinese maps. External affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi referred to China’s move of renaming the places in Arunachal Pradesh in its own language and said: “We have seen such reports. Assigning invented names to places in Arunachal Pradesh does not alter this fact.” China claims 90,000 sq km in Arunachal Pradesh as southern Tibet, but such claims have always been rejected by the Indian side. Zhang Yongpan, a research fellow at the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told state-run Global Times daily that the renaming of places in Arunachal Pradesh and the adoption of China’s first national law for protection and exploitation of land border areas are “important moves made by the country to safeguard national sovereignty, better maintain national security and manage border-related matters at the legal level amid regional tensions, including frictions with India”.