It was also revealed in 2010 that the Chinese authorities had begun a practice of issuing visas to Indian citizens from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate piece of paper to be stapled to their passports rather than on their Indian passports directly, in order to signal that China does not consider residents of that state to be legitimate citizens of India. (This policy has also led to the anomaly that India and China cite different figures for the length of their disputed border, since China refuses to count the 1600 kilometres between Kashmir and Tibet as part of its dispute with India!) The matter was only resolved after Prime Minister Singh took it up with the Chinese premier during his visit to India in December 2010 and after India had suspended defence ties with China upon China’s refusal to grant a visa to India’s northern army commander on the grounds that he was operating in a disputed state.
Related developments are no less disquieting. With China having established four new airbases in Tibet and three in its southern provinces bordering India, the Indian Air Force is reportedly augmenting its own presence near the Chinese border by deploying two squadrons of Sukhoi-30MKI fighters. Are the two countries bracing for war? What on earth is going on?
Fears of imminent major hostilities are clearly overblown. China, flush from the huge public relations success of the Olympics, and rejoicing in a huge trade imbalance in its favour with India, is hardly likely to initiate a clash, and India has no desire whatsoever to provoke its northern neighbour. But it’s clear that China’s troubles over Tibet, which first erupted in 2008 and have again arisen in 2011–12 with a seemingly interminable chain of self-immolations, have brought with them unwelcome reminders to Beijing of India’s hospitality to the Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile.
Ironically, during the mass protests in Tibet in 2008, one country that was conspicuous both by its centrality to the drama and by its reticence over it was India. On the question of Tibet, India, the land of asylum for the Dalai Lama and the angry young hotheads of the Tibetan Youth Congress, finds itself on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it is a democracy, one that has a long tradition of allowing peaceful protests, including against foreign countries when their leaders come visiting. It provided refuge to the Dalai Lama when he fled the Chinese occupation of his homeland in 1959, granted asylum (and eventually Indian citizenship) to over 110,000 Tibetan refugees, and permitted them to set up a government-in-exile (albeit one that New Delhi does not recognize) in the picturesque Himalayan hill town of Dharamsala.
On the other hand, it has assiduously been cultivating better relations with China. Though their bitter border dispute remains unresolved, and China has been a vital ally and military supplier to India’s enemies across the border in Pakistan, the two countries have been warming to each other in recent years. So New Delhi has attempted to draw a distinction between its humanitarian obligations as a country of asylum and its political responsibilities as a friend of China. The Dalai Lama and his followers are given a respected place but told not to conduct ‘political activities’ on Indian soil. When young Tibetan radicals undertook a march to Lhasa from Indian soil, the Indian police stopped them well before they got to the Tibetan border, and detained a hundred Tibetans. When some Tibetan demonstrators outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi attacked the premises, the Indian government stepped up its level of protection for the Chinese diplomats. The former Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee — who was noticeably less forthcoming on Tibet than his American counterpart during a press conference in the middle of the Tibet crisis with then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in Washington — publicly warned the Dalai Lama against doing anything that could have a ‘negative impact on Indo-Sino relations’.
The Dalai Lama’s curious position has complicated India’s dance on the diplomatic tightrope with China. He is simultaneously the most visible spiritual leader of a worldwide community of believers, a role that India honours, and till 2011 the political head of a government-in-exile, a role that India permits but has rejected in its own dealings with him. As a Buddhist he preaches non-attachment, self-realization, inner actualization and non-violence; as a Tibetan he is looked up to by a people fiercely attached to their homeland, most seeking its independence from China, many determined to fight for it. He has been a refugee for nearly five decades, but is the most recognized worldwide symbol of a country he has not seen in half a century. His message of peace, love and reconciliation has found adherents among Hollywood movie stars and ponytailed hippies, Irish rock musicians and Indian politicians; but he has made no headway at all with the regime that rules his homeland, and has been unable to prevent Tibet’s inexorable transformation into one more Chinese province. His sermons fill football stadiums and he has won a Nobel Prize, but political leaders around the world shrink from meeting him openly, for fear of causing costly offence to the Chinese.
Indian officials are acutely conscious that, on this subject, the Chinese are easily offended. An interesting instance came when India facilitated the highly publicized visit by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 2009, but almost simultaneously cancelled a scheduled meeting between him and the vice-president of India, Mohammed Hamid Ansari. When China summoned the Indian ambassador in Beijing to the foreign ministry at 2 a.m. for a dressing-down over the Tibetan protests in New Delhi, India meekly acquiesced in the insult. Though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has publicly declared the Dalai Lama to be the ‘personification of non-violence’, India has let it be known that it does not support his political objectives. Tibet, New Delhi says, is an integral part of China, and India lends no support to those who would challenge that status.
The position is not without its detractors within the country. The Opposition BJP (which led the previous government in New Delhi) has criticized the current government for not ‘expressing concern over the use of force by the Chinese government’ and instead ‘adopting a policy of appeasement towards China with scant regard to the country’s national honour and foreign policy independence’. Privately, however, few observers believe the BJP would have conducted itself differently had it been in office.
For the stark truth is that India has no choice in the matter. It cannot undermine its own democratic principles and abridge the freedom of speech of Tibetans on its soil. Nor can it afford to alienate its largest trading partner, a neighbour well on the way to global superpower status, which is known to be extremely prickly over any presumed slights to its sovereignty over Tibet. India will continue to dance delicately on its Tibetan tightrope.
But the dangers are real. The fact that Tawang, the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama and a major monastery of Tibetan Buddhism, lies in Arunachal Pradesh deprives Beijing of a vital asset in its attempts to assert total control over Tibet. Beijing must hope that the passing of the current Dalai Lama will permit it to identify and indoctrinate a young successor, rather as it has done with the Panchen Lama. But the Dalai Lama has announced that the next Dalai Lama may not be born in Chinese-controlled Tibetan lands; the suggestion is that he could easily emanate either from the Tibetan diaspora or from traditional areas of Tibetan residence now in India, notably the Tawang tract. Reminding New Delhi of China’s claims is therefore all the more urgent for Beijing: China would like to take control of Tawang before it is too late.
India, of course, has no intention of obliging Beijing. Tibet has also exposed the limitations of China’s claims to constituting an alternative global pole of attraction to that of the United States. China is not the natural leader of the South; its development experience and economic clout are so exceptional that it is difficult for other developing countries to see themselves in the same mirror. More important on Tibet, China’s position, while ostensibly anchored in a principle that other southern governments tend to uphold (that of sovereignty and non-interference), is also infused with a strong dash of national chauvinism that leaves even its allies cold. It is perfectly understandable for Chinese to be proud of China and to demonstrate that pride by jingoistic behaviour in the streets of Beijing, but why should such passions inspire anyone who is not Chinese? By contrast, the spiritual teaching and Gandhian pacifism of the Dalai Lama finds a far more universal appeal, especially in democracies like India and Buddhist nations like Sri Lanka and Thailand. Their governments may be reluctant to offend China, but their hearts are, in many cases, with the Tibetans rather than their sovereign overlords in Beijing.