India says it has lodged a “strong protest” with China over a new map that claims its territory.
JEE News reported that the map showed the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and the disputed Aksai Chen Plateau as Chinese territory.
It was released by China’s Ministry of Natural Resources on Monday.
“We reject these claims as they have no basis,” India’s External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arndam Bagchi said.
He added that such moves by China “only complicate the resolution of the border question”.
Beijing has not yet officially reacted.
India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar also termed China’s claim as “baseless”.
Speaking to JEE News on Tuesday, he said, “China has in the past also released maps that claim to belong to areas that do not belong to China, that belong to other countries. This is their old habit,” he told JEE News on Tuesday.
India’s protest comes days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in South Africa. An Indian official later said the two countries had agreed to “speed up efforts to de-escalate and de-escalate tensions” along the disputed border.
India has often reacted angrily to China’s attempts to claim its territory.
A source of tension between the neighbors is a disputed 3,440 km (2,100 mi) long de facto border along the Himalayas – known as the Line of Actual Control, or LAC – which is poorly demarcated. The presence of rivers, lakes and ice caps means that the line can change from place to place.
Soldiers from the two sides come face-to-face at several points, which can lead to tensions – most recently in December when Indian and Chinese troops clashed on the border in the town of Tawang.
China says it claims all of Arunachal Pradesh as its territory and calls it “South Tibet” – a claim India strongly rejects. India claims the Aksaichen Plateau in the Himalayas, which is controlled by China.
In April, Delhi reacted strongly to China’s efforts to change the names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh, saying the state would always remain “an integral and inalienable part of India”.
Relations between India and China have soured since 2020, when their troops were involved in a deadly clash in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley – the first deadly clash between the two sides since 1975.
