Indian views on Tibet: On history’s plateau
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by Inder Malhotra
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Friday, 30 May 2008, 10:30 a.m.
Despite China’s earlier assurance
to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there no longer seems any
possibility of Beijing entering into negotiations any time soon with
the Dalai Lama for a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue that, as
recent rioting and violent protests show, remains a tinderbox.
Beijing’s brutal suppression of the protests may have doused the
situation but it does not necessarily solve even China’s immediate
problem of ensuring the smooth conduct of the Olympics, on which it has
invested not just $3 billion but also its entire prestige as a
superpower in waiting, leave alone the long-term goal of ensuring peace
in the discontented minority province.
It is therefore both astonishing and shocking that Beijing
should have denounced, indeed maligned, the Dalai Lama in most
intemperate language. It continues to accuse him of being the
“mastermind” of the violent upheaval while the reality is that his
adherence to non-violence is sincere and unshakeable. He went so far as
to declare that he would resign if the agitation “spun out of control”.
Not for nothing did Prime Minister Manmohan Singh call him the
“embodiment of peace”.
Repeatedly and unambiguously the Dalai Lama has stated that he
wants “genuine autonomy” for Tibet, not independence. But Chinese
leaders go on calling him a separatist. One of them has even described
him as a “wolf in a monk’s clothing”.
Obviously, it is not mere arrogance of power that is motivating
Beijing. It has good reasons to believe that its power – military,
economic and soft – is having its effect. The Dalai Lama’s angry
followers in India, still planning a march to the China border, have
apparently been encouraged by the Speaker of the US House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi’s meeting with the Dalai Lama and her
appeal to the “world conscience” over Tibet. But what is all this
worth, when President George W. Bush’s spokesperson reaffirms that he
would attend the Olympics at Beijing? In any case, the economic and
political stakes of the United States and the West in China are too
complex to allow for the kind of boycott that was enforced at the time
of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. Moreover, many – not in China alone – are asking whether
China’s action in Tibet is different from that of the US in Iraq.
All things considered, this country’s reaction to the
developments in Tibet has been unexceptionable. Like most other
countries, it expressed its “distress” and – as it has done in the case
of other chronic and painful conflicts such as the one in Palestine –
appealed to both sides to solve the problem through peaceful dialogue.
Come to think of it, the statement of US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice is mild by comparison. Yet the UPA government has drawn criticism
– especially from the principal opposition party, the BJP, as well as
others – that in relation to China’s “unacceptable repression ” in
Tibet it has been “weak-kneed” and “chicken hearted”. Even before the
eruption in Lhasa, the government here was being charged with being
“slurred” and “stilted” in replying to China’s aggressively asserted
claims on Arunachal Pradesh, particularly the Tawang tract. This is a
result partly of the inflamed polarisation of the Indian polity and
partly of the complexity and delicacy of the country’s Tibet policy,
right from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, that has often been under
fire, not always without reason.
Historically, Tibet had only a tributary relationship with the
Chinese empire that never directly ruled it. On the other hand, not a
single country had ever recognised Tibet to be sovereign. Ironically,
it was Britain, then ruling India, which pushed Tibet into the Chinese
orbit out of fear of Russia’s imperial designs. After the Younghusband
Expedition to Lhasa (1904), British India on the one hand and Tibet and
China on the other signed the Shimla Convention of 1914 that delineated
the MacMahon Line.
After Indian independence and the Chinese Revolution, which
were roughly simultaneous, things were bound to change – and change
they did. India’s initial reaction to the march of the People’s
Liberation Army into Lhasa was sharp. China responded even more
acrimoniously and refused to countenance any “interference” in its
internal affairs. No country in the world contested China’s claim. The
British who had started the whole thing were the first to wash their
hands of Tibet. They were worrying about Hong Kong! In the
circumstances, India accepted the inevitable but insisted that Tibet’s
autonomy be protected. The Chinese readily concurred and even signed an
agreement with the young Dalai Lama in 1953, which they cynically
reneged on.
In accepting the Chinese assurance on Tibetan autonomy, Nehru
rejected the advice of Sardar Patel and Rajagopalachari (then Union
minister without portfolio) for a “clean break” with China, and ignored
a “vague hint” by the American ambassador, Loy Henderson, that the
State Department would be “glad to help, if asked”. Those who continue
to curse Nehru for “not resisting” the Chinese occupation of Tibet are
talking nonsense. India did not have the power to do so, and was itself
under heavy pressure at the UN over Kashmir where an uneasy cease-fire
was in its early stages.
Nehru’s cardinal mistake, of course, was the 1954 agreement on
the Tibet region of China, accepting Chinese sovereignty over
“autonomous Tibet” without any quid pro quo in terms of Chinese
acceptance of this country’s “long-settled”, “long-established” border.
This story of Nehru falling between the two stools of trusting and
distrusting China and the Chinese successfully fooling the Indian side
is much too complex and convoluted. In this, the role of then Indian
ambassador to China, K.M. Panikkar, was not just disastrous but
diabolical.
Almost all countries have accepted Tibet to be part of China.
Under the circumstances, everyone has to walk a tightrope balancing
one’s support to the cause of Tibetan autonomy and one’s relationship
with China.
The Tibetan uprising of 1959, the Dalai Lama’s flight and the
grant of asylum to him in this country inevitably worsened India-China
relations. The brief but brutal 1962 war followed. The rest, as they
say, is history.
(This article appeared in Indian Express on 24 March 2008. The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. The views expressed in this column are those of the writer, not necessarily those of the Central Tibetan Administration) |