The Tunnel7 interface is defined so that the route will be removed from the routing table if Tunnel7 goes down.
If the route had been entered this way:
ip route 10.231.0.0 255.255.192.0 217.146.139.26
The router could potentially use another interface to get to the next hop address (217.146.139.26), if the directly connected interface went down (which in this case would be Tunnel7).
This is actually very important if you have multiple paths that can reach a next hop address (they don't have to be directly connected).
So, let's say your device is directly connected to the internet, the Tunnel7 interface is defined in the static route so that the router would not try to send the traffic for 10.231.0.0 over the internet connection if the tunnel went down.
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