India protests as China renames Himalayan mountains

Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Arindam Bagchi on Tuesday said New Delhi rejected "outright" the renaming of places in its Arunachal Pradesh state.

The comments came in response to media reports that China had renamed several places in Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing also claims.

"This is not the first time China has made such an attempt," Bagchi wrote on Twitter.

"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."

Beijing announces changes

The comments came in response to a statement by the Chinese Civil Affairs Ministry on Sunday that gave new official names to geographical features in the territory. China insists that Indian-administered Arunachal Pradesh is part of Tibet, and calls it Zangnan.

The places included "two residential areas, five mountain peaks, two rivers, and two other areas," according to the state-affiliated Global Times newspaper.

That statement, the third batch of so-called "standardized geographical names," gave precise coordinates to the places mentioned.

The first six names were released in 2017, followed by a further 15 in 2021. The latest set of names was written both in standard Chinese characters and Tibetan, as well as in the Romanized phonetic pinyin system.

A spokeswoman at the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the name changes were "completely within the scope of China's sovereignty."

"The southern Tibet region is Chinese territory," Mao Ning told a regular media briefing in Beijing on Tuesday.

Decades of dispute

China and India lay opposing claims over swaths of territory along their 3,500-kilometer (2,100-mile) border, known as the Line of Actual Control.

The line separates Chinese and Indian-held territories from Ladakh in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east.

The frontier was never formally demarcated, with India's former British colonial rulers seeing no real need to do so in such a remote region. After India became independent and China annexed Tibet, Beijing and New Delhi could not agree on a common boundary.

The regional giants fought a war along parts of the border in 1962 and Chinese troops briefly occupied parts of Arunachal Pradesh.

Since then, there have been smaller-scale clashes in mountainous regions along the Line of Actual Control, straining relations between the nuclear-armed powers.

December saw minor scuffles in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh.

Edited by: Elizabeth Schumacher