Rev. Danny Fisher

This morning, my friend Erick sent me two good pieces relating to the situation in Tibet that I would be worth sharing here.

First, M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service, looks at the scene in Dharamsala and offers his take on politics and the relationships between India, China, the U.S., and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. Here’s the heart of it:

There is much excitement in the air in Dharamsala as the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is expected in this Himalayan hamlet on Tuesday. It seems she is not having a stopover in Iraq and Afghanistan but is heading straight for Dharamsala. Pelosi took the initiative of arranging a Congressional medal for the Dalai Lama a few months ago, which China robustly protested. Beijing warned the George W Bush administration that such unfriendly acts could cast shadows on US-China relations.

The Dalai Lama insisted at the press conference that Pelosi’s trip was long scheduled. He described her as an old friend. But her visit nonetheless comes at an awkward time for India. Delhi has adopted an attitude of “see no evil, hear no evil”. But it remains to be seen whether the Chinese are impressed.

Actually, a delicate three-way diplomatic tango is likely commencing–involving the US and China, with India providing the turf–which can only turn out to be messy for India. There is an old African saying that when elephants clash, the grass gets crushed. China would see a pattern insofar as steadily through recent months, sections of the Indian corporate media, which have been traditionally known to serve as mouthpieces of American regional policy, have been on overdrive stirring up dust in India-China relations.

Influential voices in the Indian strategic community have also jumped into the fray, including former diplomats who served at the highest level in the Indian foreign policy establishment and are close to the ruling Congress party. Their plea is that Tibet is at the core of India’s intractable border dispute with China. They claim China is displaying the iron in its soul by pressing its claims in the border dispute. According to them, China is deliberately “provoking” India because it is in no mood to settle the border dispute with Delhi until Beijing has “subdued” Tibet on its terms. They see the odds as heavily favoring China in its current shadow boxing with India, whereas, Tibet is Delhi’s only leverage.

At the same time, there has been a pro-US shift in Indian foreign-policy orientations in general in recent years. The present government has worked hard to harmonize its regional policies with the US policy almost across the board. It has left virtually no stone unturned–be it over Kosovo, the Palestinian problem or Afghanistan.

From this perspective, the strong Indian reaction to the Lhasa violence assumes significance. First, it is not clear whether an Indian reaction was warranted on an issue which is patently China’s internal matter. The question is of diplomatic propriety– and not the rights and wrongs of what took place in Lhasa. Second, Delhi cannot adopt double standards. Delhi is not going to be amused if any world capital makes it a point to begin pronouncing on incidents of violence that rock India from time to time. Delhi used to show irritation whenever Pakistan took note of Hindu-Muslim violence in India.

The Indian Foreign Ministry expressed its “distress” over the “unsettled situation and violence” in Lhasa. It called on “all those involved” (meaning, Tibetan agitators as well as Chinese authorities) to “improve the situation and remove causes of such trouble in Tibet”.

Without doubt, Delhi has chosen to be prescriptive on an internal matter of China. But it can boomerang, even if it pleases Washington in the present instance. Ironically, news just trickled in that the 60-member Organization of Islamic Conference (O.I.C.) passed a resolution by consensus at its summit meeting in Dakar, Senegal, on Friday expressing “concern about the long-lingering, oldest unresolved dispute of Kashmir” and underscoring the organization’s support of the Kashmiri people’s right of self-determination.

The Indian Foreign Ministry promptly dismissed the OIC statement, saying, “The O.I.C. has no locus standi [standing] in matters concerning India’s internal affairs, including Jammu and Kashmir, which is an integral part of India. We [Indian government] strongly reject all such comments,” the Indian Foreign Ministry pointed out.

Of course, Delhi did the right thing. No government in Delhi will countenance a dilution of India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Equally, the central issue is whether the Dharamsala folks have a future. Indian strategists are exceedingly foolish to pretend Delhi holds a “Tibet card”. A visit to Dharamsala will at once bring them face-to-face with the sobering reality that the Tibetan community here faces disarray once the 73-year-old Dalai Lama departs from the scene. He dominates the landscape with his sheer physical presence.

While hundreds of Tibetan demonstrators marched in the town center on Sunday, local Indians went on with their daily lives. The Indians and the Tibetan Buddhists live in water-tight compartments in Dharamsala. Even after 49 years, they hardly intermix. The Indians complain that the relatively more affluent Tibetan “refugees” are disdainful. This is especially so among second-generation Tibetans who otherwise feel comfortable with the Western nationals who throng to this exotic town in the Himalayas for a variety of reasons.

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The second article, from the Associated Press, concerns what was happening for monastics in Tibet leading up to last week’s protests.

For more than a decade, China has launched accelerating waves of campaigns to force the Buddhist clergy, who once ran Tibet, and ordinary Tibetans to distance themselves from the Dalai Lama. Monks were ordered to renounce their exiled spiritual leader, while lay people were dissuaded from praying for him.

In recent months, these patriotic education campaigns took a nastier turn, Tibet specialists said, with harsher rhetoric aimed at the Dalai Lama and tighter enforcement of bans on worship by students and government officials.

“This was a pressure cooker in which the Chinese for some reason … decided to turn up the pressure in a very major way,” said Robbie Barnett of Columbia University. “This was waiting to happen.”

[...]

Beijing relaxed [its ban on religious practice] after the end of the Cultural Revolution, allowing a Buddhist revival in the 1980s. Anti-Chinese protests with monks in the forefront ensued, ultimately ending with China imposing martial law in 1989.

New guidelines meant to bring the Buddhist clergy to heel in 1994 severely curbed the teaching of certain doctrines and texts at the core of Tibet’s unique form of Buddhism. Limits on the number of monks a monastery could house were reimposed, forcing many monks out. Monks and nuns were prohibited from traveling to India, where many of Tibet’s most cultivated Buddhist masters went with the Dalai Lama in 1959.

The restrictions are a topic of enormous sensitivity with Chinese officials, who revile the Dalai Lama and insist Tibetan Buddhism is intact.

The monks tell a different story. Interviewed at the sacred Jokhang Temple and other holy places of worship by journalists in recent years, they say they resent Chinese demands to attend political instruction classes or act as tour guides, draining away time needed for religious study.

The restrictions particularly rankle because it makes Tibetans feel like second-class citizens within Tibet.

“These monks are literate people, they read,” said Tsering Shakya, an expert on modern Tibet at the University of British Columbia. “To subject them to this intense education and campaign program in the monasteries has led … to all this pent-up anger to come out.”