India said on Tuesday it had lodged a strong protest with China over a new map claiming territory from India, the most troubling in the strained relationship between the two Asian giants.
The protest in New Delhi followed reports in Indian media that Beijing had released an official “standard map” showing the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin plateau as its official territory.
China claims that Arunachal Pradesh, which lies in the eastern Himalayas, is part of southern Tibet and in April released a map renaming 11 areas in the state as part of “Zangnan”, which is South Tibet in Chinese.
Aksai Chin is a disputed plateau in the western Himalayas, claimed by India but controlled by China.
We have today lodged a strong protest through diplomatic channels to the Chinese side over the so-called ‘standard map’ of 2023 that China claims over Indian territory,” said an Indian foreign ministry spokesman.
“We reject the claim as it has no basis. The steps taken by China only make it more difficult to resolve the border issue,” he added.
Earlier on Tuesday, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar rejected China’s territorial claims.
“Unreasonably claiming Indian territory does not make it Chinese territory,” Jaishankar told news channel NDTV.
The protests in New Delhi come days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg last week and raised concerns about the impasse on the contested Himalayan border.
Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbors fell apart after soldiers from both sides clashed in the Himalayas in June 2020, resulting in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers.
Although the situation on the nearly 3,000 km border has calmed down, clashes have continued in some areas with tens of thousands of troops massing on both sides of the border in the western Himalayas.
