NEW DELHI/BEIJING (Reuters) -India said on Tuesday it rejected attempts by China to rename places in its eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
“Arunachal Pradesh is, has been and will always be an integral and inalienable part of India,” foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said on Twitter.
Bagchi was responding to media reports that said China had renamed several places in Arunachal Pradesh.
China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on Sunday standardised the names of 11 places including the names of five mountains in southern Tibet, which shares a disputed border with India.
In recent years, Indian and Chinese troops have clashed along parts of their long border in the Himalayas. In December last year, the troops had minor scuffles in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh, also claimed by Beijing.
The poorly demarcated 3,800-km (2,360-mile) frontier between the nuclear-armed countries had stayed largely peaceful after a war in 1962, before clashes in 2020 sent relations nosediving.
(Reporting by Tanvi Mehta and Ryan Woo; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Tom Hogue)
