Jun 04, 2023
Jun 04, 2023
China has always been noted for its paranoia over the Dalai Lama’s exile in India but this paranoid stance came into prominent focus recently last month over two issues. The first was over the Global Buddhist Congregation organized by India in New Delhi and the second event unusual in terms of diplomatic protocol of the Chinese Consul General in Kolkatta writing a letter to the West Bengal Government demanded that West Bengal Governor and Chief Minister should not attend an event in which the Dalai Lama would be participating. China’s paranoia impels it to adopt imperialist postures against India as if India was a vassal state of China.
Fortunately for India this time around the Indian Government seems to have felt that enough was enough and that it has to stand firm against China’s preposterous demands. India refused to cancel the Global Buddhist Congregation and so piqued, China called off the scheduled 15th Round of Special Envoys Dialogue on Border Dispute.
On the second issue, the Governor of West Bengal, Shri M.K. Narayanan who had earlier been the National Security Adviser in New Delhi contemptuously ignored China’s demand and went ahead to attend the event which was graced by the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama’s presence in exile in India is a living reminder to the global community that China continues in illegal and forcible occupation of the Hermit Kingdom of Tibet. This is a matter of deep annoyance to China which would like the world to believe that Tibet is fully integrated in China and the residents in Tibet are happy to be part of China.
The Dalai Lama’s presence in India in exile also facilitates the existence of a number of Tibetan organizations working towards “Free Tibet” and in their worldwide movements able to achieve sustained focus on China’s ethnic and cultural genocide inflicted on the Tibetan Nation. This nails China’s false propaganda on China’s development of Tibet.
The Dalai Lama has been able to make sure that the movements for liberation of Tibet from Chinese enslavement remains peaceful. But for his spiritual and moral guidance the younger elements of the Tibetan Diaspora all over the world would have indulged in an armed struggle for liberation of their beloved Homeland from Chinese colonialism.
The Dalai Lama in a visionary step has handed over political control of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile to a relatively young and intelligent Tibetan who is Harvard educated and articulate and persuasive. China therefore no longer can claim that the Dalai Lama is indulging in political activities.
China’s paranoid postures over the Dalai Lama’s presence in exile in India and over the Tibet issue is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, China is also paranoid over the likelihood of the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama may be found outside the confines of what I have always ben describing as “China Occupied Tibet”. This carries multiple political implications for China’s continued colonial rule over Tibet.
I sincerely hope that the new trend visible in India’s recent postures of standing upto China on the Dalai Lama and China Occupied Tibet issues is maintained as an irreversible policy.
03-Dec-2011
More by : Dr. Subhash Kapila
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Your slogan 'standing up to China' of course says nothing about reversing the current absorption of Tibet into China, which has been accomplished under the age-old rationale of a 'civilising power', such as justified all imperialist powers from Greece and Rome to Britain, Spain and France, et al, their invasion and occupation of 'uncivilised' lands. Modern America and Australia both have, albeit decimated in number, native populations; and it seems ridiculous to suggest these latter patriarchal societies, driven to drink and a dysfunctional identity crisis, should, like the native Tibetans, drive out an alien Western civilisation. Of course, these days things happen so much quicker, and while Lhasa in Tibet has already been modernised beyond recognition, attracting the migrant Chinese, who are more culturally 'with it', it is also in rural Tibet where the majority of Tibetans still eke out a living in what is subsistence farming that the surging Chinese economy is increasingly taking over with modern agricultural methods, ostensibly for the good of Tibetans, but biased towards fellow Chinese because better qualified. All this leaves only a sentimental external argument for the rights of culturally indigenous Tibetans, for the extirpation of the 'civilising force' of China, an argument which runs counter to the civilising force in human history - until the Tibetans themselves, like the Indians and the Africans before them, identify with the 'civilising force', become westernised; indeed many have, but unlike the latter, have virtually no hope of driving out the teeming numbers of Chinese in their midst. However, it was only a pre-arranged separate state of Pakistan, both East and West, overlooked by the British colonial power, that made partition from India at all possible, whose distinction was a religious one, the conflict between Muslim and Hindu. It remains to be seen if Tibet too can be 'arranged' to be separate, whose cultural religious identity is Tibetan Buddhism. But what nation, except the United Nations, can hope to lord it over China to that effect? India's 'standing up' to China is a consequence of physical proximity and a concern for its own borders: unfortunately, the other nations don't seem to be contextually motivated to the same extent, let alone 'arranging' for an independent Tibet. But hope is a wonderful thing, and explains the current 'government in exile' by the Dalai Lama. It also explains why even though with its overwhelming presence in Tibet, its modernisation program in full swing, China still can be seen to display those symptoms of paranoia you refer to. Like Macbeth and Banquo's ghost rising despite all rationalisation by the former to the contrary. |