There has been no visible encroachment of land in Arunachal Pradesh by Chinese troops or civilians since 1962, a Bharatiya Janata Party team has found after a four-month tour covering all the villages and defence outposts along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).
The Arunachal Pradesh stretch of the LAC separating India from the Tibetan region controlled by China is 1,129 km. Beijing disputes the border, claiming some 90,000 sq. km of Arunachal Pradesh as its territory.
An 11-member team of the State BJP unit, led by its vice-president Tarh Tarak undertook the ‘Sarhad Yatra’ (border tour) from December 22 to April 24. Local BJP leaders joined each leg of the tour that began from the south-eastern Anjaw district and ended in the north-western Tawang district.
“During our border tour, we interacted with the personnel of the Army and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) along the LAC as well as the residents of the border villages. We came to know that the situation on the border is normal and peaceful,” Mr Tarak said.
“There is no visible encroachment of our State’s land by the members of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army who sometimes enter our territory by mistake during long-range patrols along the LAC. Our Indian soldiers always challenge them in such cases,” he said.
These “low-impact incursions” happen because the border between the two Asian countries is not clearly defined, he added.
Defence officials said such incursions, duly thwarted, were reported from the eastern and western parts of Arunachal Pradesh in recent times.
“We decided to go on this tour after Indian and Chinese troops clashed along the LAC at Yangtse in the Tawang sector on December 9, 2022. Our aim was to salute the armed forces guarding the border in harsh conditions and also to see things with our own eyes and know the ground reality,” Mr. Tarak said.
He said the tour acquainted the BJP team with the problems faced by the border residents and the soldiers guarding the strategic Eastern Himalayas apart from checking the status of implementation of various central and state government schemes.
Chinese maps show Arunachal Pradesh as part of China. Beijing refers to the State as ‘South Tibet’ and calls it ‘Zangnan’.
On April 2, the Chinese government released a list of “standardised” names of 11 places in Arunachal Pradesh in Chinese, Tibetan, and pinyin characters, acting in accordance with regulations on geographical names issued by its State Council.
New Delhi downplayed the “renaming” of these places. The reaction was similar when Beijing released two different sets of “standardised” names of places in Arunachal Pradesh in 2017 and 2021.
Prior to the December 9 incident, in which some soldiers of both countries sustained minor injuries, a stand-off was reported near Yangtse in October 2021.
