A mountain pass has no army, no missiles and no vote at the United Nations. Yet last week, Beijing treated a list of 28 Himalayan place names as an affront serious enough to deny the legal existence of an Indian Union Territory. China’s foreign affairs ministry said it has never recognised the “so-called Union Territory of Ladakh”, called it unilaterally and illegally established, and declared India’s publication of standard names illegal and void. A government that is secure in its claim does not need to shout at a map.
The trigger was modest. On 2 October, India’s home ministry announced that 28 locations in Ladakh had been identified by standard names on the Survey of India map, after consultation with the local administration. The list includes Gogra and Hot Springs, which became major friction points during the military standoff in 2020.
In response to China’s position, the external affairs ministry stated that Ladakh is an integral and inalienable part of India and that no Chinese denial can alter that. The matter should have ended there. It will not, because the dispute is not about the names. It is about who gets to write the history of the frontier, and how long India can afford to treat that question as a technicality.
A strategy, not a spat
China‘s language has been consistent for seven years. It has refused to accept Ladakh’s status since the reorganisation of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019, and said at the time that the move placed Chinese territory under Indian administration. The rhetoric has been backed by action. India has lodged a “solemn protest” over China’s creation of two new counties in Hotan Prefecture, parts of which lie within Ladakh. China has also issued successive lists of names for places in Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls “Zangnan”, defending them under its domestic rules on geographical names.
Put together, these steps form a method. Rename the place, administer it on paper, and wait for repetition to turn a claim into a habit. The word “illegal” completes the sequence. It recasts India’s long-standing administration as a violation, and it does so at no cost, since nothing has to move on the ground. India’s answer, naming 27 locations in Arunachal Pradesh in August and 28 in Ladakh in October this year, is the right instinct. These places matter for Indian patrolling along the Line of Actual Control. A frontier that is named, mapped, and administered by Delhi’s own hand is harder to erase.
But matching China‘s cartography is only half a response. The other half is understanding why Beijing believes the strategy works.
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The voice India keeps muting
On 14 October, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile said what Indian officials rarely speak aloud. It called China’s refusal to recognise Ladakh as a Union Territory baseless, and argued that the unresolved Tibet issue remains central to India-China border tensions. Speaker Dolma Tsering tied the two theatres together: China’s renaming of places inside Tibet and its construction of villages along border areas, she said, are developments India should take seriously. She added that territorial claims cannot rest on assertions of ownership alone and must be supported by historical evidence. MP Gonpo Dhondup went further, calling Beijing’s claims over Ladakh and Arunachal baseless and urging India to repeal its One China Policy.
It would be a mistake for Indian officialdom to treat these statements as the pleadings of a community with its own agenda. The Tibetan argument is also a strategic argument, and a strong one. For centuries, Tibet lay between the subcontinent and the Chinese heartland. That space is gone, and the militarised frontier India now manages is the direct result. Tibetans have been the first to see that the tools China uses on Ladakh today—from renaming to settlement to administrative redesignation—are the same ones it used in Tibet decades ago. They are describing a method they have lived through. India would be foolish not to study it.
There is a historical case too, and it deserves a hearing even though Beijing rejects it. In 2014, then-Sikyong Lobsang Sangay noted that at the 1914 Simla Convention, China and British India accepted that Tibet could enter into treaties, and that a sovereign Tibet ceded territory to British India through the McMahon Line. If that reading holds, the boundary India defends is an India-Tibet boundary, and China’s claim to override it rests on the very assertion that Tibetans dispute. Successive Chinese governments have never recognised the McMahon Line. The legal question is contested, and honest commentary must say so. But a contested question is exactly where a country should be leaning in, not backing away.
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What India should actually do
The Tibetan MP’s call to scrap the One China Policy is rhetorically powerful, but the policy’s meaning in practice is already narrower than many assume. One Indian commentator notes that the “One China” label properly belongs to Taiwan, not Tibet, and that India recognised Tibet as part of China only on the condition of full autonomy, which Beijing has not honoured. Another observes that India has not repeated the line that the Tibet Autonomous Region is part of China since 2010. The policy is already drifting. The question is whether that drift is a conscious strategy or an accident.
I argue it should be a conscious strategy in three parts. First, India should stop treating Tibet as a taboo in its own diplomacy. Officials should say plainly, and regularly, that the border dispute cannot be fully understood without Tibet’s history. Second, India should give Tibetan institutions on its soil the same respect it gives any other community that has sheltered here for six decades, including serious attention when they speak on matters of national security. Third, it should heed Tsering’s warning that trade and business engagement must not take precedence over border security, and that the two have to be addressed together. A relationship in which Indian markets stay open while Chinese counties are drawn across Ladakh is not a balanced one.
These measures aren’t risk-free. Beijing has branded the Tibetan government in exile a separatist political organisation and reacts sharply to any perceived shift on Tibet. A careless move would cost India the diplomatic calm it has rebuilt since the disengagement that began in 2022. But risk runs in both directions. A country that never contests the narrative will eventually find the narrative decided without it.
China has chosen to argue about names. India should take that argument seriously and widen it to history, law, and the people who have been living with Beijing’s methods the longest. The 28 names on the Survey of India map are a beginning. The real answer to China’s “illegal” charge is a frontier that India can explain, document, and defend, with the full weight of its own history behind it.
Abhigya Langeh is the Head of Chinese and Tibetan Studies at the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, HQ IDS, Ministry of Defence. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)