(TibetanReview.net, Jul13’25) – A day after Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Mr Pema Khandu said India does not share any historical boundary with China, BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Sujeet Kumar has doubled down on the issue on Jul 11, saying India should stop referring to India-Tibet border as India-China border.
This is not new. In Jul 2024 too, the lone Rajya Sabha MP from Sikkim, Dorjee Tshering Lepcha, said the same thing on the floor of the upper house, which also followed a similar remark by Khandu.
“We don’t have any borders with China. They’ve occupied Tibet and it’s today an occupied territory,” the timesofindia.com Jul 12 quoted Kumar as saying, referring to China’s invasion and illegal annexation of Tibet in the second half of the last century.
Kumar has called for the Indian Parliament to have more debates on the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the ongoing cultural genocide taking place there.
Kumar is a co-convener of the All Party Indian Parliamentary Forum for Tibet (APIPFT), which was first founded in 1970. He is also presently engaged in a campaign to canvass fellow-MP’s to support a call for honouring the Dalai Lama with the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian hour.
* * *
Pema Khandu’s reiteration of his remark about India’s historical border being with Tibet, not China, came amid his condemnation of Beijing’s recent spurt of propaganda airing of its plans to appoint its own reincarnation of the current Dalai Lama when the time comes. He also criticized China’s building of a super dam in Tibet, just across his state, calling it a potential water bomb.
The Dalai Lama said Jul 2 that only his Gaden Phodrang Trust will have the sole mandate to search for his reincarnation when the time comes, and no one else, to which Khandu expressed resolute support.
When the PTI news agency suggested that Arunachal Pradesh shares a 1,200-km border with China, Khandu interjected to say, “Let me correct you here. We share a border with Tibet and not China.”
“Officially, yes, Tibet is under China now. That can’t be ruled out… but originally we shared a border with Tibet,” he had told the PTI in Delhi on his way back from the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday celebrations Jul 6 in Dharamshala.
“In Arunachal Pradesh, we share three international boundaries – with Bhutan approximately 150km, with Tibet… and on the eastern side, with Myanmar approximately 550km.”
Following Kumar’s remark, Lepcha has reaffirmed the need for India to recognise Tibet, urging the Centre on Jul 12 to call the approximately 1,200-kilometre international boundary of Sikkim as the “Indo-Tibet border” instead of the “Indo-China border.”
Lepcha has made his remark while visiting Sikkim’s Tibet-border village of Machong.
“I raised an issue in the Parliament during the Budget Session that this is the Tibet border, not the China Border. The central government should direct the central agencies, like Army, BRO (Border Roads Organization operating under the Ministry of Defence), that they must call it the Indo-Tibet Border, not the Indo-China border,” the ANI news service quoted Lepcha as telling mediapersons.