New Delhi: For the third time in six years, China has announced Chinese names for geographical features in Arunachal Pradesh, reiterating its claim to the entire Indian state.China’s ministry of civil affairs on Sunday released the “standardised” names for 11 places in “Zangnam”, which is Chinese nomenclature for the northeastern state. The announcement was made after getting approval from the State Council, as per the official statement.The ministry of external affairs rejected the move “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,” said MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi on Tuesday.The areas that were named included two residential areas, five mountain peaks and two rivers. The document included their coordinates, category of place names and subordinate administrative districts.This is the third batch of names in Chinese characters, Tibetan and pinyin announced by China.The first batch of six names was released in November 2017, just a few days after the visit of Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama to Arunachal.The second one was released in December 2021, just two days before China’s new land border law came into effect.After the second batch, India had also said that Arunachal Pradesh “has always been, and will always be an integral part of India”. “Assigning invented names to places in Arunachal Pradesh does not alter this fact,” MEA statedAlso read: When It Comes to Renaming Places in Tawang, China Is Not AloneIndia and China have still not completely resolved their military stand-off in eastern Ladakh, which began in May 2020. But it is not clear whether the timing of the third batch of renaming has anything to do with that border issue.Last month, India took G20 delegates for a side event related to science and technology to Arunachal’s state capital, Itanagar for a day. The one-day meeting was an extension of the actual event held in Dibrugarh, Assam. However, there was no representation from China.A Chinese scholar quoted by The Global Times claimed that ‘Zangnam’ had been “China’s territories since ancient times”. As per Zhang Yongpan, a research fellow of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China’s move to standardise names in ‘Zangnam’ “completely falls within China’s sovereignty and it is also in accordance with the regulation on the administration of geographical names”.The naming of disputed territories with new nomenclature had been a long-held tactic of the Chinese government. In April 2020, China released a list of names for 80 geographical features in the South China Sea, including 25 islands. Earlier in 1983, China had listed 287 features in the oil-rich disputed region.
