Arunachal Pradesh Statehood Day Today: An expansionist China and India's response
Arunachal Pradesh keep prospering for years to come," he said. Arunachal Pradesh attained full statehood on February 20, 1987, with the Fifty-Third Amendment of the Indian Constitution, 1986, becoming the 25th state of the Indian Union. Since then, February 20 has been celebrated as Statehood Day of the Himalayan state.
This year is the 38th Statehood Day of Arunachal Pradesh. The strategically significant northeastern state shares borders with Bhutan to the west, Tibet to the north, and Myanmar to the south. It also shares borders with China and is home to the Line of Actual Control (LAC), arguably one of the heavily contested borders.
India shares an un-demarcated 3488 km border with China. The border is divided into three sectors, the eastern sector along the states of Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim, the western sector in Ladakh and the middle sector along Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. However, Beijing only considers the LAC to be around 2,000 km.
The ill-defined border along these sectors has caused many disputes over the years between the two countries. In 1962, India and China were involved in an all-out war predominantly fought in Aksai Chin, a region which is in the western end of the Himalayas with Arunachal Pradesh in the east. Since then, China has been laying claim to around 90,000 sq km of territory in Arunachal Pradesh.
The border region has seen many stand-offs, the latest in Tawang in September 2022. On December 13, 2022, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament that the Indian Army had resisted an attempt by China to change the status quo in the Yangtse area of the Tawang sector along LAC in Arunachal Pradesh and pushed back People’s Liberation Army soldiers engaged in the incursion attempt. Both
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