Why Does China Keep Renaming Places In Arunachal Pradesh?

Next month it will be four years since the current round of India-China standoff in Eastern Ladakh began. As talks at the military and diplomatic levels continue, India has repeatedly said bilateral ties cannot be normalised till the situation at the border is normal.

India’s relationship with China is significant and we need to “urgently address the prolonged situation on our borders so that the abnormality in our bilateral interactions can be put behind us”, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an interview to Newsweek earlier this week. Stable and peaceful relations between India and China are important for not just our two countries but the entire region and world, he told the American magazine.

It’s not just the northern frontier that is problematic. China has been poking India when it comes to the eastern border and claims Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet. It disregards the McMahon line, the border demarcating India from Tibet during the British era. Last week, Beijing renamed 30 places, nearly two-thirds of them being geographic features such as mountains and rivers, in Arunachal Pradesh.

This was the fourth instance in the last seven years that China has done something like this, the first one being in 2017 in the aftermath of the standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in Bhutan’s Doklam plateau, which lasted over two months.

In 2021, during the peak of the crisis in Eastern Ladakh, the Chinese renamed 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh. A similar exercise followed last year, after India successfully hosted the G20 summit, in which Beijing rechristened 11 places in Arunachal.

And each time an Indian leader visits the state, China lodges a protest. It did so when Prime Minister Modi visited last month but India dismissed those objections.

Why do the Chinese indulge in such activities? China scholars argue that it’s a means of reasserting so-called ownership claims over Arunachal. And in case of future negotiations with India over settlement of the boundary issue, it can cite these exercises as justification for its demand. Another possible reason could be to use its claims over Arunachal Pradesh to swap it for retaining vast swathes (about 38,000 square km) of Aksai Chin, which it occupied after the 1962 war with India.

Each time China asserts its claims over Arunachal Pradesh, India forcefully objects. This time too, the Ministry of External Affairs said Arunachal Pradesh was, is and will remain part of India. “If today I change the name of your house, will it become mine,” asked External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.