India Needs to Support Tibetan Rights
By Rohan Rajesh
When clashes broke out between Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas earlier this summer, Tenzin Nyima, a commander of a hitherto unknown Indian paramilitary unit with Tibetan soldiers known as the Special Frontier Forces, was excited. He told his brother, “we are finally fighting our enemy.” A few hours later, during an Indian army initiative to capture strategic high points on the border with China, Nyima was killed by a land mine. His death brought attention to the oft-ignored Tibetan exile community in India.
For most of its history, Tibet has been an independent country. The only time Tibet was controlled by Beijing was during the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the Qing dynasty. Between 1912 and 1950, Tibet was a de-facto independent country. Tibetan culture is also quite distinct from Han Chinese culture: Tibetans largely practice Tibetan Buddhism (which was introduced by the Indian Buddhist master Padmasambhava) and believe that the Dalai Lama is their spiritual leader. Ties between Tibet and India go back millennia, and the similarities between Indian and Tibetan culture are profound. As Dhundup Gyalpo, a civil servant in Dharamshala, put it, “The depth of Tibetan affinity with the Indian people appears even greater when it is juxtaposed against the sheer lack of it between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples — apart of course from a handful of culinary dishes.”
In 1959, Tibetans launched a failed rebellion to overthrow the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Dalai Lama fled to India, and the Indian government reluctantly allowed him to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamshala, India. Many Tibetans have since fled to India, forming the Tibetan exile community. India’s harboring of the Dalai Lama and border issues led to the 1962 Sino-Indian War. India lost the war, but the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China did not change. Since 1959, the CCP has committed grave human rights violations in Tibet to prevent any dissent. It has also sought to stamp out Tibet’s indigenous culture and subsume the region into the Han majority. China views Tibet as strategically vital because, through Tibet, China controls the flow of critical rivers in Southeast Asia and Northeast India. Tibet is also home to an abundance of natural resources and precious metals. Because China’s culture is foreign from that of Tibet, and China exploits Tibetan resources, China’s control over Tibet is essentially imperialism.
Tibet has recently gained international focus due to a recent report by the Jamestown Foundation, which revealed that China has been building huge concentration camps for Tibetans similar to the ones it has already built for Uighurs in Xinjiang. The CCP’s endeavor in Xinjiang meets the UN’s definition of genocide, and the same could happen in Tibet. Incredibly, the CCP has the audacity to try to curry favor amongst the world’s Buddhist community on the basis that China has the largest Buddhist population of any country despite the fact that the CCP’s human rights record and philosophy run counter to every belief in Buddhism.
The Indian government, however, has historically not helped the Tibetan cause as much as Western governments. Beyond letting the Dalai Lama establish a government-in-exile in Dharamshala, the Indian government has largely been obsequious to the CCP’s sensitivities concerning Tibet. India has a great history of supporting anti-colonial movements and is the land of the Buddha but refuses to associate itself with Tibet’s struggle for and recognized Tibet asghtspart of China in 2003. Tibetans in India find it difficult to obtain sought-after government jobs except in the military. Essentially, the Indian government allows Tibetans to die for India but not work in India. In 2018, India’s government issued a directive that prevented Indian bureaucrats from joining events organized by the government-in-exile to mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment in India.
Luckily, things seem to be changing. The recent clashes left 20 Indian soldiers (and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers) dead. Indians are furious with China for breaking the status-quo, and some have talked about playing the “Tibet card.” Although no Indian government official attended Nyima’s funeral, in an unprecedented move, the National General Secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Ram Madhav (a close aide of PM Modi) paid respects by laying a wreath on his coffin at a ceremony that awarded him full military honors. The coffin was draped with the flags of India and Free Tibet. The crowd chanted, “Long live Mother India” and “Long live the Tibetan nation.” Madhav later referred to Nyima as a “martyr” in a tweet.
While these are steps in the right direction, if India actually wants to help Tibetans and put pressure on China, it needs to do much more. China has proved that it does not care about the status quo and is willing to do anything to crush criticism of the CCP in China and abroad. India should not continue appeasing China because China has returned that appeasement with the blood of Indian and Tibetan soldiers. India (and other Western countries) should pressure China on its human rights record and bring up the cause of Tibet at every international forum. India also needs to give more rights and access to resources to Tibetan refugees. Finally, India should not idly stand by and let China claim one of India’s greatest gifts to the world; India should reclaim its role as the center of the dhamma and advocate the most basic Buddhist principles: human rights, freedom of thought, inclusiveness, and the ending of suffering.