Tibet is not only India’s largest geographical neighbor but also its most significant in terms of the environment. Many major Indian rivers like the Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlej originate in Tibet. Though we have been brought up to believe that the Himalayas are an impenetrable barrier, they are in fact quite porous and the ethno-cultural traits of the people who inhabit the crest of India amply reflect the influence of Tibet in India. This to and fro movement of people continues even today despite the deployment of the world’s two largest standing armies in a bid to define borders. India’s influence on Tibet too has not been insignificant.
Despite a historical political identity entwined with China, Tibet has traditionally looked towards India for economic and spiritual sustenance. Tibet has also had a long history of struggle with China and this Dalai Lama is not the first one to seek refuge in India. The British had an active policy to create a buffer against China in the form of an independent Tibet. Not only that, the British also sought to open Tibet to the world and to its influence. When the Tibetans proved recalcitrant the British sent in a military expedition led by Col. Francis Younghusband to do just this. The Chinese Amban in Lhasa watched the Younghusband expedition’s exertions in Tibet passively and one immediate consequence of this was an assertion of Tibet’s independence.
Almost immediately after their civil war triumph in 1949, the Chinese Communists reasserted control over Tibet, which had by then enjoyed over four decades of relative independence. For over fifty-six years since India has tried to head off the Tibet problem by accepting its annexation into the Peoples Republic of China. In these fifty-six years the Chinese Communists initially tried to solve the Tibet problem by attempting to wipe out Tibetan nationalism and Buddhism with Mao’s Communism. It didn’t succeed. This policy has now been replaced by creeping “Hanization” and massive doses of economic development. These too have worked only partially for the Chinese, but they seemed to do better with this than with the Maoist iron hand. Though Tibet is now relatively passive, it still remains a dry tinderbox and the Chinese dread the likelihood of any spark that may set off a fire.
For India too the policy has worked partially. Nearly 150,000 Tibetan refugees now live in India, and India has willy-nilly become the fulcrum of a worldwide struggle by the Tibetans to regain their nation. In short the Tibet issue, though dormant now, is still very much alive and whether India likes it or not, it is being played out in its front yard.
The stature of the Dalai Lama.
Central to this sustained struggle has been the ever-increasing international stature of the Dalai Lama who has become the symbol of many ideals and images. The mix of new age spiritualism, ethics, ecological values and politics has won for the Dalai Lama many influential and wealthy western adherents to Tibetan Buddhism and supporters of Tibet’s cause. Macleodganj today is a magnet that draws large numbers of young westerners seeking a new meaning to and purpose in life. True the Dalai Lama has become many things to many people but what should be relevant to us is that he has emerged as a man of great stature and influence. Presidents and Prime Ministers now vie to receive him and the pictures that get transmitted world over electronically reminds the world that there is still a Tibetan nation still yearning to be free and peacefully struggling for it. This is a powerful image.
Stalin did not live to see his wry question about the number of divisions with the Pope answered. But one must wonder what he would have had to say if he witnessed the Polish priest who became the Pope catalyzing the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, which in turn unraveled the Warsaw Pact and Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe? The Chinese have a better sense of history and hence rightly worry about the broad wake the peripatetic Dalai Lama leaves behind as he reiterates his message all over the world. India too must worry about this.
Tibetans believe the Dalai Lama to be a living God. But he is also human and must die like all humans. He is now in his seventy-second year and time is certainly not on his side. As long as he is alive he keeps the embers of Tibetan nationalism from conflagrating with the blanket of the new age Buddhism that he has woven. When this Dalai Lama is gone, the embers might just combust. In which case, the Chinese might just demand that it is for India to hose it down. The Chinese will naturally not see Tibetans as freedom fighters but as miscreants propped up by the inimical West and their Indian lackeys. As General Musharaff once famously said one man’s freedom fighter may be another man’s terrorist. But just as we demand that Pakistan must dismantle the terrorist camps in POK, China too might well demand that India close down the Tibetan movement in India. Or else there are so many places where the Chinese can resume the game they once played in the Naga Hills. A good part of Central India seems “ripe for revolution” and the Chinese may be sorely tempted to resurrect Maoism in another country.
Post Dalai Lama scenario.
We can be certain that it is the present Dalai Lama’s stature that keeps the lid on Tibetan militancy. After him the political power of the next Dalai Lama will almost certainly be challenged. Many of the younger Tibetans in exile will not accept the legitimacy and leadership of another incarnation. The incarnation will in any case take many years to grow into mature adulthood and till then some manner of bureaucratic regency will actually be in charge. This regency will not have the moral and spiritual stature of the present Dalai Lama. That will have to be earned and only time can tell if the next incarnation chosen by the regency will fit the bill. The chosen leadership of the exiles will not go unchallenged. The Chinese will almost certainly try to foist their own incarnation and will try to legitimize it with all the power available to them. It is unlikely that they will succeed, but it will certainly obfuscate the situation and preclude any future compromise on the issue of the spiritual leadership of the Tibetan Buddhists.
While the spiritual leadership may be contested, it is almost inevitable that a new generation of Tibetan exiles will stake a claim for the temporal leadership of the Tibetan nationalist movement. If this is contested by the regency around the India based incarnation, then we will almost certainly see a competition for the hearts and minds of young Tibetans and this will inevitably lead to more assertive postures as the factions jockey for power. Such internal struggles often result in greater militancy. On the other hand we may see a duality of leadership emerging among the Tibetan exiles, a spiritual leadership that tends to the soul and a militant leadership that leads the struggle for attainment of political goals. The possibility of this must however be deemed a bit remote as the recrudescence of Tibetan Buddhism/Nationalism is facilitated by the steady flow of money from the West and from Asian countries like Taiwan and Thailand. Without this money the political leadership is likely to fail to assert control and the lama theocracy thus might be able once again to combine spiritual and temporal leadership, as is now. In all likelihood the struggle for supremacy might leave both sides debilitated and the Chinese will be able to exploit this to their advantage. The splintering of the exile leadership into two or even more factions would be a desirable objective for the Chinese.
Even the religious leadership could very well be splintered. The Dalai Lama recently went public with a stinging attack on the followers of the Shugden spirit indicating that it has indeed become a major challenge. The Karmapa is also here in India after a somewhat mysterious flight from Tibet. Then we will inevitably have a second Dalai Lama in China. Even among the exiles the leadership could very well be splintered between the sects with the Gelugpa supremacy being challenged. Already we see some signs of this with the major monasteries of the Tibetan sects asserting themselves with lavishly laid out monasteries with their own hierarchies and reincarnates. Some reincarnates are now even western born! With so much of western influence, content and dependence it is not inconceivable that the Tibetan sects may well go the way of the Hare Krishna and Rajneesh sects which finally lapsed into the hands of dubious characters with wide-ranging interests including narcotics trafficking. The Chinese will do well to encourage the sundry ambitions of some of the more worldly-wise monks.
Some possible consequences for India.
This will not be without consequences for India. People who have closer ethno-linguistic links to Tibet than to the plains populate the entire Himalayan region from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh. Geographically much of Ladakh is an extension of the Tibetan Changthang and the main language spoken is a Tibetan dialect. The Tawang tract in the other end was, till it was annexed by India in the early 1950’s, under the temporal control of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa. The Bhotia’s of Sikkim are also a Tibetan race speaking a Tibetan dialect. The term Tibet derives from Tho Bhot, the original denotation for Tibetans. It is not difficult to see the relationship between Tho Bhot and Bhotia. The Dalai Lama has so far shown great restraint by not overtly interfering with the functioning of the numerous monasteries, but a future religious leadership might not be so restrained, particularly when there is so much easy western money involved. In a nation where sub-national separatist movements are constantly erupting, the possibility of this being stoked in the Himalayan region should not be excluded.
We must not forget that the border dispute with China is in reality a border dispute with Tibet. It is another matter that if Tibet was independent, and hence weak, it would have been unable to assert its claims in the manner the Chinese did. But the point here is that the Tibetan government in exile has never publicly stated its position on the border question. Like the Chinese Communists, the Taiwan regime has also insisted that the border demarcation was an unequal agreement foisted upon China by Imperial Britain. It would seem that all the parties concerned see this as an unfinished business. Most of the monasteries in India’s Himalayan region, new and old, are now under the influence of Tibetan Buddhists, currently unified under the Dalai Lama. India’s somewhat tepid attempts to exert influence have been vigorously contested by various Tibetan factions as we see in the case of the Rumtek monastery in Sikkim. Quite clearly India is in need of an active policy for the Himalayan region, which will bring a secular and nationalist leadership to the fore. So far we seem to only be interacting with and hence recognizing the religious hierarchy. This policy should equally apply to the Tibetan exiles in India.
Instead we seem to have a policy that willy-nilly recognizes the Dalai Lama as the head of all Buddhists. The Buddhism that prevails in Tibet is a local evolution that combines many erstwhile Tibetan beliefs and practises with the Buddhism that went from India. To that extent it is a strain of Buddhism that is unique to Tibet. To treat the Dalai Lama as the head of a Buddhist church is akin to treating the Pope as the religious head of the Christian world, which as we know comprises of many sects and traditions. This is what India seems to be doing, quite clearly without any application of mind. This is fraught with serious consequences for though India has several million indigenous Buddhists; we seem to have anointed the Tibetan Dalai Lama as the only Buddhist leader we recognise. This is giving him a status well beyond his laity.
The present situation.
The Chinese are very clear about what they think about the Dalai Lama. They mince no words and describe variously him as a duplicitous, treacherous and fraudulent troublemaker who is more of a political leader and less of a religious preceptor. They also darkly hint from time to time that the Dalai Lama is the sharp end of a deep wedge sought to be driven into China to disrupt its historical unity. They also unequivocally dismiss all claims of an independent Tibetan existence for over a thousand year’s atleast. They describe the Dalai Lama espousing the yearnings of a suppressed Tibetan people as the yearnings of a power hungry feudal wishing to re-establish a primitive and medieval system once again over a long tyrannized people. The Chinese believe that the majority of the Tibetan people are happy and thriving after their liberation by the Communist Party. They may well be right, but history tells us that it is always a determined minority that empires have to worry about.
We also need to recognize the new political realities brought about by the end of the Cold War and the rapid expansion of China’s economy. The demise of the Soviet Union has also seen the final demise of Communism, as we knew it. In China after the second coming of Deng Xiaoping it seems that socialism gave way to a dynamic Asiatic capitalism where a strong and even authoritarian state enshrines individual wealth seeking and profit making private enterprises as laudable national goals. China is today vigorously engaging the world in pursuit of markets for its factories and raw materials and energy for its economy. We have seen this coalescence of the macro-economic goals of the state and the micro-economic goals of national enterprises vigorously pursuing global market shares and profits elsewhere in Asia before. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore being the more notable instances. A new and economically dominant China is rapidly emerging and the Chinese people are beginning to enjoy superior standards of living. This has caught the imagination of the world. Will Tibetans be immune to the charms of a more materialistic world and a far higher standard of living? Doctrinaire Communism might have found it difficult to compete with Buddhism, but freewheeling Capitalism and the material prosperity it brings with it might just be able to consign Tibetan Buddhism to the dustbins of history, as it did to Chinese Communism. We know what happened in the West where Religion and Nationalism are no longer driving forces.
The new post-Communist China thus reserves the highest premium to “internal harmony” while it is embarked on the rapid transformation of its economy within the window of opportunity its current demographics offers. Three decades from now, China will be an aging nation and hence it feels that it must make the best of the present opportunity. This is the dominant mood among China’s leaders and they would be extremely loathe to let the ambitions of a relatively small number of Tibetans distract them from the goals they have set for China. China can contemplate two or more systems within one nation, as is now the case with Hongkong and on offer to Taiwan. This is essentially a common economic system with a fairly generous allocation of administrative power, as we see in the case of Hongkong. What system can the Chinese offer the Tibetans? The Dalai Lama is increasingly speaking about a Buddhist way of life in Tibet within China. How can China agree to this when it essentially undermines the political authority of the center?
Ofcourse there is good reason to believe that the Dalai Lama is not entirely serious about this and just keeps offering it knowing very well that the Chinese will not and cannot accept it. The Chinese are greatly averse to even the relatively mild mannered public protests of the kind the Tibetans have been staging in various world capitals. We must not forget the searing image of the self-immolating Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Tri Quang, and the impact it had on young minds in the USA. A self-immolation took place in New Delhi a few years ago, but things have materially changed since then. But what happens when this happens in a western capital or even in New Delhi in front of western media at a time when it is believed that the USA is pulling all stops to recruit India as a frontline state against a rising China?
Not long ago a small group of Tibetan youths attempted to enter the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi. When this happens again, we can be sure that it will be a more major effort and in a post Dalai Lama era may not even be peaceful. What then? Will it leave the improving Sino-Indian relations untouched? The Chinese will expect strong action against the Tibetan exiles and if we do just that we might have to factor the impact it may have on civil society in India and abroad. We must also remember that the majority of young Tibetans are India born and thus entitled to the rights of free speech and expression, political organization and activity given to all Indian citizens. In the recent days there has been some indication that the Tibetan nationalist movement has begun attracting some young Indians, particularly those concerned about the ecology.
In the recent years Sino-Indian trade has burgeoned to make China India’s leading export market for manufactured goods. Last year the bilateral trade exceeded US$ 40 billion. Political ties between the two countries have also improved considerably, and there are high expectations of a mutually satisfactory resolution of the border issue. The Chinese have also conducted themselves with much reticence with reference to Nepal. The Chinese seem to realize that the demographic window of opportunity that gave them a youthful population is going to shut in a couple of decades and that they have to make the best use of it. The goal of Harmonious Society adopted by the recently concluded National Congress is in consonance with this. But this does not mean that will compromise on the core issue of Tibet being an integral part of China.
The contours of the emerging geo-political scenario of this century are becoming apparent. The USA and China are generally expected to be the two great powers as we advance towards the midpoint of the century. There is much discussion about a new containment policy by the USA and many suspect that India is envisaged as a centerpiece of this strategy. This is something China will like to avoid and so antagonizing India will not be desirable from its perspective. On the other hand there are many in India who would like just this to happen. This then raises the possibility of Tibet becoming a possible rallying point for this. As India enters a period when a great economic expansion is most possible, it would be unwise for it to get involved in an expensive international rivalry. This will require very adroit management of our domestic politics and keeping it insulated from outside pressures.
To conclude India’s national interests require:
1. That the Tibetan movement in India does not cause a rupture between India and China.
2. That India must not lower its guard in the Himalayan region and must assiduously develop a secular nationalist leadership among the peoples of the region, as in Sikkim.
3. That India’s military presence in the Himalayan region is not reduced.
4. That India not allow the Dalai Lama to assume the leadership of all Buddhists in India.
5. That the Tibetans born in India are gradually integrated into mainstream Indian society.
6. That the Chinese are made to realize that Tibetan aspirations must be met, if not fully then substantially.
7. That the Chinese realize that India has legitimate concerns and interests in Tibet and that they must be sensitive to these.
8. That the Chinese realize that given India’s open society it is not possible for India to put a clamp of Tibetan political activity in India.
9. That the Chinese are made to realize that for India to curb Tibetan political activity in India would require altering the nature of Indian society and that the Indian people will not accept any curbs on any legitimate political activity in India.
10. That India plays a more active role in encouraging a dialogue between China and Tibetan leaders.
Mohan Guruswamy
Centre for Policy Alternatives
Email: mohanguru@gmail.com
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