President Murmu on a Sukhoi

President Droupadi Murmu on Friday created history when she took her maiden sortie on a Sukhoi 30 MKI fighter aircraft from the Tezpur Indian Air Force base. Though she is not the first President to have taken such a sortie – Pratibha Patel was the first to fly in the frontline fighter aircraft in 2009 –, Droupadi Murmu’s selection of the Northeastern region to do so has also definitely sent strong signals to India’s northern neighbour in terms of defence preparedness. The President, who also happens to be the Supreme Commander of the Indian armed forces, took off from Tezpur and flew for about half an hour over the Brahmaputra Valley, flanked by the Eastern Himalayas to the north. She flew at a height of about 2,000 metres above sea level and deserves praise for having done so at a speed of about 800 kilometres per hour. Importantly, President Murmu’s choice of Tezpur, not very far from the McMahon Line in Arunachal Pradesh, which demarcates the India-China boundary, came at a time when China intensified its brazen effort to emphasise its claim over Arunachal Pradesh. It was only about a week ago that China renamed eleven places in Arunachal Pradesh to lay claim to what it calls Zangnan, or the southern part of Tibet. The list reportedly includes two land areas, two residential areas, five mountain peaks, and two rivers. This, incidentally, is the third such list released by Beijing since 2017, when it announced a list of six places. The second list of 15 places was released in 2021. China, which had betrayed India’s now-forgotten Panchsheel philosophy and launched a massive invasion on then-NEFA in the winter of 1962, has been laying claim to as much as 90,000 sq km in the eastern sector of the India-China boundary, covering the whole of Arunachal Pradesh. While the people of Arunachal Pradesh have always rejected such claims and asserted that they are inseparable from India, the official stand of New Delhi has been that Arunachal Pradesh has always been and will always be an integral part of India and that assigning invented names to places in Arunachal Pradesh does not alter this fact. That China is up to some mischief can be guessed from the fact that its renaming of some places in Arunachal Pradesh comes at a time when the Chinese defence and foreign ministers are coming to India for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation defence and foreign ministers meeting in May.