NEW DELHI: India’s foreign ministry on Tuesday said China was making “absurd claims” over Arunachal Pradesh, adding that the northeastern state, which shares a border with China, would always be an “integral and inalienable part of India”.
China claims that Arunachal Pradesh is part of southern Tibet. New Delhi rejects this claim, saying that Arunachal Pradesh has always been part of India.
“Repeating baseless arguments in this regard does not lend any validity to such claims,” Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesman for India’s foreign ministry, said on Tuesday.
He was responding to comments last week by Lt. Col. Zhang Xiaogang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the road tunnel in Arunachal Pradesh on March 9.
Zhang said in a statement that India should “stop taking any steps that complicate the border issue and seriously maintain peace and stability in the border areas”, adding that the opening of the tunnel “contradicts the efforts of both sides to ease the border situation “. “.
The nuclear-armed neighbors share a 3,000-km (1,860-mile) border, much of it ill-defined. At least 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers have been killed in 2020 in clashes along their border in the western Himalayas.
The militaries of both countries have fortified positions and deployed additional troops and equipment along the border since these clashes. The two sides fought a border war in 1962.