The 2023 edition of People’s Republic of China (PRC) standard map has officially been released on August 28, 2023 and claims Indian areas of Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin along with Taiwan and South China Sea as Chinese territory. This is hypocrisy displayed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) officials as they claim to mutually bring “peace” to the Indo-China border disputes but end up violating the core principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity of India.
PRC has been actively putting in efforts to tighten its control over disputed border areas by various means like passing the new Border Law in 2022 which lists several responsibilities for civilians and military authorities to take steps to “safeguard national sovereignty”; and Beijing ‘s announcement of April 2023 where it mentioned agendas of ‘standardising’ the names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh. The CCP allegedly calls the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as “Zang Nan” or Southern Tibet, just as it calls Tibet as “Xi Zang”.
The PRC Ministry of Civilian Affairs put out the idea of renaming places in 2017 following the Doklam issue and then in 2021 following the Galwan Valley clash. Subsequently, the border dispute between India and PRC has remained a major bone of contention and the CCP keeps trying to pull up such tactics to feed its superficial ego that it owns parts of Indian territory. Quite recently PRC issued ‘stapled visas’ to three athletes from the Indian team of Wu Shu martial arts for the Summer World University games which was were held in Chengdu (PRC), to challenge India’s control and authority over some parts of Arunachal Pradesh. This latest event of PRC’s new map claiming Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin is a strategy of the CCP to underline its unilateral claim over Indian territories. The raison d’être for this is India’s G-20 presidency, under which it hosted a confidential meeting in Itanagar, the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, which was attended by several foreign delegates but at that time ignored by the Chinese side.
Owing to the upcoming G-20 summit in New Delhi, PRC’s delusional mind-set is once again acting up and thereby, it refuses to accept India’s complete sovereignty over parts of UT of Ladakh (Aksai Chin) and Arunachal Pradesh, which has always been an integral part of India and will continue to do so. As the Indian Ministry of External Affairs says “Invented names cannot alter the facts of the ground”, similarly such hollow campaigns wouldn’t rock India’s sovereignty over its territory even by one inch. We condemn PRC which chooses to build a superfluous image, that of a ‘peacemaker’ while engaging in petty politics to further its hegemonic desires which will not be accepted by India.
