Pema Khandu, the chief of India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, has said that the territory he governs doesn’t share any “direct border” with China – only with Tibet.
The remarks by Khandu were made during an interview to Indian news website Rediff.com and published on Monday.
His remarks contrast New Delhi’s official policy, which recognises Beijing’s One China Policy and considers the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) part of China. Khandu is from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The Indian politician’s statement comes in the wake of the US Department of Defence (DOD) claiming in a report this month that China has built a village inside Arunachal Pradesh.
“Despite the ongoing diplomatic and military dialogues to reduce border tensions, the PRC has continued taking incremental and tactical actions to press its claims at the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Sometime in 2020, the PRC built a large 100-home civilian village inside disputed territory between the PRC's Tibet Autonomous Region and India's Arunachal Pradesh state in the eastern sector of the LAC," the report by the Pentagon says.
The claim about a new Chinese village made by the Pentagon has been confirmed by the Indian Foreign Ministry, which has described the new construction as illegal.
“China has undertaken construction activities in the past several years along the border areas including in the areas that it has illegally occupied over the decades. India has neither accepted such illegal occupation of our territory nor has it accepted the unjustified Chinese claims,” Indian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said during an official briefing last week.
India’s Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat contradicted the Indian Foreign Ministry’s stand after he claimed that the new Chinese village is “well within their side of the LAC (Line of Actual Control)."
“They [China] have not transgressed anywhere on our perception of the LAC," Rawat said last week, just a few hours after the Indian foreign ministry admitted to the presence of the Chinese village inside Indian-administered territory.
Both India and China have been upgrading their infrastructure and massing thousands of troops as well as advanced weapon systems on the disputed and un-demarcated border since the eruption of the Ladakh border standoff in May last year.
India accuses China of trying to “unilaterally” alter the status quo at the Ladakh border as the reason behind the faceoff, while Beijing blames New Delhi’s infrastructural upgrades at the border.
The military faceoff between the two armies there remains unresolved, despite the two sides holding 13 rounds of military-commander level talks last year.