Page 2 of 3 Dalai Lama at apex of Sino-Indian tensions
By Peter Lee
Although the Pakistan security establishment retains its loyalty and
appreciation of China as a genuine ally, it is enmeshed in a bloody,
distracting struggle with the Taliban while its civilian leadership finds
itself desperately reliant on US arms, aid, and diplomatic good offices.
The Obama administration has also provided signal assistance to India in
dealing with another nettlesome ally of Beijing on its border: Myanmar.
Myanmar has been courted by India for years, even as persistent US advocacy of
democracy in Myanmar and the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi pushed the junta deeper
into Beijing's embrace. Now, the United States has adopted a policy of
engagement
marked this week by the visit of US Undersecretary of State Kurt Campbell -
whose primary objective appears to be to help India wean Myanmar away from
China.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that India now finds - with its western and
eastern headaches reduced if not eliminated - that it has the leisure to
involve itself in a border spat with China on the matter of Beijing's claim on
a remote ethnic-Tibetan enclave in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and,
specifically, the little town of Tawang, the town that the Dalai Lama - to
considerable Chinese tooth-gnashing and with the full-throated support of the
Indian government - arrived in on Sunday for a five-day visit.
Although Western observers tend to dismiss the Sino-Indian border dispute as a
matter of juvenile posturing by two aspiring superpowers who ought to know
better, there is a deadly serious element to the dispute over these remote
areas - the destabilizing and, to Beijing, profoundly threatening problem of
the hostile Tibetan diaspora on the People's Republic of China's (PRC) borders
with India, Nepal and Bhutan.
Beijing's top Indian affairs boffin, Ma Jiali, has identified the border
dispute, not economic competition or maritime security, as the central problem
of Sino-Indian relations.
As demonstrated by the unrest in 2008 throughout the vast ethnic-Tibetan areas
of China and South Asia, the PRC has been unable to get a grip on its Tibetan
problem, despite 60 years of assiduously working the military, security,
political, economic and diplomatic levers at its disposal.
Over the past four decades, China has profited in its clumsy grappling with the
Tibetan issue from forbearance by the international community, especially its
neighbor to the south, India.
Despite hosting the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, since his
flight from Lhasa in 1959, the Indian government has refused to allow the
Tibetan diaspora to engage in activities that directly attack PRC rule in the
Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan.
China has exploited the Dalai Lama's commitment to a "Middle Way" of negotiated
autonomy, to entangle the Tibetan government-in-exile in endless, fruitless and
seemingly insincere negotiations.
However, it appears that generational changes within the Tibetan movement, the
evolving geopolitical and economic stature of India, and Washington's
willingness to partner with New Delhi are converging to introduce elements of
instability and dangerous unpredictability into China's relationship with
India.
To forestall Chinese interference in the selection process, the Dalai Lama has
indicated that his successor may be found outside of China, and may even be
selected before his death.
Whoever succeeds the Dalai Lama, and however he is chosen, increased militancy
by proponents of Tibetan independence within the diaspora is virtually assured.
Explicit independence activists like the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) have
historically respected the desires of the Dalai Lama and moderated their
activities. They are unlikely to show the same deference to the young man who
is rumored to be the Dalai Lama's preferred successor, Ugyen Thinley Dorjee,
the 17th Karmapa.
The Karmapa, a charismatic 22-year-old who escaped Tibet dramatically in 1999,
may serve his people well as as telegenic, intelligent and pious face of
Tibetan Buddhism to the West, but he is unlikely to command authority within
the movement. He comes from the competing Black Hat sect and has been locked
into an embarrassing struggle with a powerful leader within his own sect who
has recognized a competing Karmapa. He has been locked out of the sect's
monastery and denied access to his customary regalia. Instead, he resides at
Dharamsala in India with the Dalai Lama and is seen as little more than his
protege.
In the context of the South Asian status quo, in which all nations subscribe to
the "One China" policy, as well as discourage Tibetan political activity and
monitor and suppress Tibetan militancy with various degrees of enthusiasm, the
loss of the Dalai Lama's moderating influence and an uptick in rhetoric and
violence by angry Tibetan emigres would not concern Beijing overmuch.
What concerns the PRC is the possibility that India, flush with economic
development and US backing, would be willing to confront China and roll back
its influence in South Asia by choosing to play "the Tibet card" with the help
of Tibetan militants operating from havens located in the cross-border
territories of India and its allies.
The Christian Science Monitor in "Rivals China, India in escalating war of
words" [5], sought out Chinese and Indian pundits in the context of the Dalai
Lama's visit this week to Tawang:
The fierce People's Daily editorial
was "a message showing Beijing's intention", says Han. "They don't want the
Indian side to do anything to play the Tibet card."
New Delhi, however, "has no bargaining leverage with China except the Dalai
Lama", says Dr Pant. "He is the last thing they can use against China ..."
The Times of India, in the article "India and the Tibet card" [6] provided some
additional background information by recounting the result of China's continual
fishing in the troubled waters of India's increasingly disgruntled and
independent-minded satellite state on the Tibet border, Nepal:
India
has also played the Tibet card, at least twice in recent times. Kondapalli [of
Jawaharlal Nehru University] points out that "in 1987 and 2003, when China
began supplying arms to the Royal Nepalese Army, India did play the Tibet card.
In 2003, foreign secretary Shyam Sharan went to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai
Lama. It was a message to China: Don't interfere in our backyard."
The desire to display and deter on their contested border in the area of Tibet
has led both China and India to develop and militarize the remote communities
there even beyond the expected investments of two burgeoning regional powers
that wish to secure and integrate their most remote territories.
The Sino-Indian border has never been fixed by mutual agreement between the two
nations. In the 1950s, China proposed a swap in which China would keep a
desolate stretch in western India called the Aksai Chin, claimed by India, over
which the Chinese had constructed a strategic road linking Xinjiang and Tibet.
In return, China would recognize Indian control of a piece of land in what was
then known as India's North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) nestled against the
Myanmar border and China.
Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, miscalculating China's willingness to
go to war, refused the deal and instead sent troops into Aksai Chin to expel
the Chinese.
Disagreement escalated into a full-scale war in 1962. China's People's
Liberation Army (PLA) administered a thorough drubbing to the unprepared Indian
army, expelling Indian units from Aksai Chin, and occupying contested areas in
the NEFA.
The Chinese leadership, wary of becoming embroiled in a prolonged war with
India on top of problems with the Soviet Union, the US and Kuomintang leader
Chiang Kai-shek, fatefully decided to withdraw unilaterally from the territory
it had taken in NEFA, instead of continuing military operations and occupation
to bargain the border dispute towards a final conclusion.
Today, the swap - actually, the acknowledgement of de facto control of
territories each side already occupies - is still on the table. The PRC has the
(virtually) uninhabited Aksai Chin tightly in its grasp, while India has
reorganized the NEFA and created the state of Arunachal Pradesh on the land
China claimed.
There's one wrinkle. For several years, China has indicated that it would
surrender its claims over all of Arunachal Pradesh except Tawang - the same
Tawang that the Dalai Lama visited on November 8. That is the same Tawang that
the Dalai Lama - in 2008, in a statement that possibly reflected frustration at
serving as a punching bag for duplicitous Chinese negotiators and aggrieved
Tibetan militants in the aftermath of the bloody unrest inside China - stepped
into the political arena and identified not as "Tibetan" (as he had done
previously in an acknowledgment of its cultural character while sidestepping
the political issue of whose territory it should belong to) but as "part of
India".
To be fair to the Chinese, Tawang is indisputably Tibetan.
In a twist that probably accounts for Tawang's existence as a Chinese
negotiating point, in 1947, the Tibetan government asked for only one
modification to the border arrangements that the British had made (and China
has consistently refused to recognize): it explicitly asked that India
acknowledge Tibetan authority in Tawang. That is a persuasive indication that
the district - which protrudes into the president-day Tibetan Autonomous Region
like an inconveniently extended thumb - falls outside what India might construe
as its natural Himalayan boundary.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that the Chinese are serious about
recovering Tawang. Tawang is the site of the Tawang Monastery, known as Galden
Namgyal Lhatse, founded in the 17th century. It calls itself the "second-oldest
Buddhist monastery in the world after Lhasa", hosted the Dalai Lama when he
fled the Chinese occupation in 1959, and the Tibetan spiritual leader has
visited it four times since then. The Dalai Lama has chosen at least one of
Tawang's abbots and provides financial support to the monastery, which provides
political as well as religious leadership for a community of 20,000 Monpa
tribespeople of Tibetan extraction.
Turning Tawang over to the tender mercies of the PRC in the face of the horror,
outrage and resistance of a large, powerful Buddhist monastery, an aggrieved
population, the global Tibetan community, and a large swath of Indian and world
opinion would appear to be a political impossibility for New Delhi and utter
folly for Beijing.
Given Beijing's current anxieties over the future direction of the Tibetan
independence movement and India's increased assertiveness, it will probably
persist in its claim to Tawang simply to have a convenient casus belli at
hand if and when it wants to escalate tensions in a relatively controlled
manner and lay claim to the Indian government's attention.
In an indication to Chinese, Tibetan and world opinion that the contested
border is not a place where China can provoke India at little diplomatic and
military cost, the Indian government announced in June the stationing of a
squadron of nuclear-capable Sukhoi 30 MKI fighters within striking distance of
Arunachal Pradesh, and has mooted raising another two divisions of mountain
troops to serve there.
To emphasize the state's status as an integrated and inalienable part of India,
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a campaign visit to Arunachal Pradesh
in October 2008 during the run-up to the parliamentary elections. The Chinese
retaliated with an unsuccessful attempt to block an Asian Development Bank loan
to India that included flood control in the state.
The Tawang situation benefits from the fact that each side has occupied and
fortified its positions for decades and not too much can happen there that can
surprise and threaten. More importantly, as India's ability to project power
into its border areas improves, the situation has benefited from the discrete
restraint of the Congress Party's Manmohan and Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao.
Manmohan characterized the Dalai Lama's trip as a response to a local
invitation extended to the Dalai Lama that he wasn't involved in, an absurdity
considering the close attention New Delhi pays to every issue surrounding the
Tibetans.
In an apparent attempt to diffuse or redirect tensions as the date of the trip
approached, the Chinese government cannily noted Manmohan's bland statement,
and decided to construe and condemn the trip as the Dalai Lama's affront to
Sino-Indian ties instead of an insult to Beijing by New Delhi.
For India's part, in order to lower the temperature for the Dalai Lama's visit
to Tawang - which had already received in-depth coverage in the New York Times,
Time magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and a host of other media outlets,
its Foreign Ministry canceled visas for foreign journalists looking to cover
the trip.
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