(TibetanReview.net, Jun07’24) —India is all set to not only refute China’s renaming in recent years of a total of 30-odd places in its northeastern border state of Arunachal Pradesh by claiming they are parts of its territory but also to make counter-claims by giving its own name to a number of places currently in occupied Tibet, reported thediplomat.com Jun 6.
The lists have been researched by Indian military sources and the list of placenames in Chinese ruled Tibet is expected to be released soon after a new government takes power in Delhi next week, the report said.
“Prime Minister Modi has sought to win these polls on the strength of his strongman image. It is natural he will authorize the renaming of Tibetan places to live up to that image,” former Intelligence Bureau officer Benu Ghosh, who has followed China and the border issue with India for decades, was quoted as saying.
This list will be made public through media as part of a global campaign to offer a strong counter-narrative to Chinese claims on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state and other parts of the disputed border, the report cited sources as saying.
Unnamed military officials have been cited as saying the new names are backed by extensive historical research.
“As and when that [the renaming campaign] happens, it will be tantamount to India reopening the Tibetan question,” Ghosh has said.
“India has accepted Tibet as part of China since it was forcibly occupied by Beijing, but now [the] Modi government seems prepared to change course to deflate the Chinese cartographical and nomenclature aggression.”
To push its claim on the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls “Zangnan” (southern Tibet) on the basis of its claim over Tibet, China in Mar 2024 renamed 30 places in it along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Released by the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs, which is responsible for the establishment and naming of administrative divisions, this was described as the fourth list of “standardized” geographical names in Zangnan.
The list included 11 residential areas, 12 mountains, four rivers, one lake, one mountain pass, and a piece of land. They were given in Chinese characters, Tibetan, and pinyin, the Roman alphabet version of Mandarin Chinese.
Beijing released the first list of its so-called standardized names of six places in Arunachal Pradesh in 2017, followed by a second list of 15 places in 2021, and a third one with names for 11 places in 2023. The fourth list contains almost as many new place names as the previous three combined, the report noted.
India rejected China’s move on each occasion, calling the state integral part of the country and making it clear that assigning “invented” names does not alter this reality.