New Delhi: India has rejected China’s attempt to rename 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, saying the state has been and will always be “an integral and inalienable part of India”.
“Attempts to assign invented names will not alter this reality,” a Ministry of External Affairs statement said Tuesday.
China’s national daily “Global Times” reported Monday that China had “standardised” the names of 11 places in Zangan (or South Tibet), the name the Chinese government uses for Arunachal Pradesh.
These names are in Chinese characters, Tibetan and pinyin – the official romanisation system for Mandarin.
The names were released by the Chinese government on Sunday, which also gave the coordinates of these 11 places – two residential areas, five mountain peaks, two rivers and two other areas.
The report said: “This is the third batch of standardized geographical names in Zangnan issued by the civil affairs ministry. The first batch of the standardized names of six places in Zangnan was released in 2017, and the second batch of 15 places was issued in 2021.”
Among the 15 places given coordinates in 2021, eight were residential, four were mountains, two rivers and one mountain pass.
“The places have existed for hundreds of years” and it was “China’s sovereign right to give them standardized names”, Global Times had then quoted Lian Xiangmin, an expert with the China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing.
Also read: China releases names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh