Although the Modi government this month rejected China’s recent renaming of 23 places in Arunachal Pradesh with utter disdain, the move exposes the cartographic and cultural expansionist mentality of the Xi Jinping regime. This suggests that Beijing is always prioritizing its territorial claims while talking about increasing economic cooperation with India as part of its win-win game with New Delhi. India’s current trade deficit is more than $150 billion with China, and this includes trade with the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.
Since 2017, after the Doklam standoff, the Chinese have renamed as many as 82 cities and geographical areas in Arunachal Pradesh, with the last batch of 23 names released on April 10, 2026. While the Ministry of External Affairs has maintained that such an action does not change the reality on the ground, the move is clearly part of pressure tactics by China, which ludicrously claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of southern Tibet. It is another matter, China occupied Tibet itself by brute force in 1950, after which the Nehru government admitted this claim in a Himalayan blunder.
While many retired and serving bureaucrats are promoting the idea that India should strengthen economic ties with China, the same want the Modi government to do a reality check on India’s relationship with the US. But they have no response to China’s repeated territorial claims to Indian territory, cultural and military expansion over the years for fear of upsetting the communist regime in Beijing. This group does not just survey all the diplomatic and military indiscretions committed by China or even Russia over the years, highlighting every misdemeanor on the part of US administrations. The ever-strengthening China-Pakistan military-civilian axis is ignored, but the US-Pakistan axis is openly called a betrayal of India, revealing the unbalanced thinking of retired Indian baboos-turned-experts. It is another matter that the children of all these bureaucrats study and work in the West, especially the United States, and not in China or even Russia.
Although China-mongers within India want closer ties with communist China, the fact is that no military pacification has taken place in eastern Ladakh and the PLA is very active in the Chumbi Valley and is trying to expand alongside the Amucho River, a tributary of the Teesta River in the Siliguri Corridor, at the expense of passive Bhutan. China is supplying Pakistan with Yuan-class submarines, frigates and surveillance ships to address the maritime asymmetry with India and helping Rawalpindi develop a 3,000 km surface-to-surface missile to cover the entire India. One should not forget that almost no one provided military assistance to India when the PLA launched aggression in eastern Ladakh in May 2020.
Given the fact that today Pakistan is allied with both the US and China, India will have to endure an attack on two fronts as China is in no mood to give up the 1959 line in eastern Ladakh, as well as its claims in Arunachal Pradesh. The Indian answer lies in better preparedness based on actual intelligence about what is happening inside communist China and how President Xi Jinping is moving China to the global pole position. India must stick to its position that peace and tranquility on the border is the first step towards stable relations and not better trade with Beijing.
