By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI – India and China vaulted over decades of mutual suspicion and hostility through their historic joint declarations signed in Beijing recently, but may have in the process sealed the cause of Tibetan independence forever.
Predictably, the loudest protests have come from the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), which is influential among the 100,000-strong expatriate population that followed the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama when he fled China in 1959. He runs a government-in-exile in the Himalayan town of Dharamsala, India.
“The Indian prime minister [Atal Bihari Vajpayee] has chosen to obliterate Tibet through perfidious strategy,” Kalsang Phuntsok Godrukpa, leader of the TYC, told Inter Press Service, referring to accords signed by Vajpayee with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
Tibetan associations from across India have issued statements condemning what they call a sellout in return for doubtful gains, such as reopening the ancient trade route over Nathu La pass, which connects the Indian state of Sikkim with what is now recognized by India as the “Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China”.
According to Godrukpa, Beijing has succeeded in getting New Delhi to accept China’s sovereignty over Tibet by holding out the prospect of Chinese recognition for Sikkim’s merger with the Indian union – and a final settlement on the border issue between India and China. The border issue and India’s grant of asylum to the Dalai Lama led to the brief but bloody war between Asia’s giants in 1962.
Relations between the two have remained strained ever since. For instance, India has said that India’s tests of nuclear weapons in 1998 were meant to counter China rather than traditional rival Pakistan. A spokesman in Beijing clarified during Vajpayee’s visit to China that opening the trade route did not amount to recognition of Sikkim as Indian territory. “The issue cannot be solved overnight,” the spokesman said.
India’s Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha has since expressed confidence that Chinese recognition for Sikkim as an Indian state was but “a matter of time”. More importantly, the two countries have agreed to appoint special representatives at the highest political levels to tackle the thorny border issue that covers parts of the Ladakh region in Kashmir and Arunchal Pradesh, India’s northeastern state which falls east of Bhutan.
Independent analysts like Brahma Chellaney at the prestigious Center for Policy Research (CPR) support Godrukpa’s view that India conceded too much on the Tibet issue in return for the opening of the border trade through Sikkim, which in any case is to Beijing’s strategic advantage. “India first handed China a card by building up Sikkim as a major issue and then meekly settled for no formal recognition,” Chellaney writes in a published analysis of Vajpayee’s visit.
The success of Vajpayee’s trip is now being questioned by the ultra-nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It provides ideology and muscle to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has reserved opinion on the recognition of Tibet as a part of China. India’s army, which maintains a highly visible presence in Sikkim, is also said to be unhappy with the opening up of Nathu La.
Nevertheless, Vajpayee has gained support for his policies from the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile, which views the issue as a reflection of hard realities. Samdhong Rinpoche, who is styled as “prime minister” of the Tibetan government-in-exile, said that cordial relations between India and China would have a positive impact on the whole world. “Tibet is sometimes a key issue to achieve a sustainable co-relationship between India and China,” he was quoted as saying in Dharamsala.
Rinpoche (incarnation) said that India’s recognition of Tibet as an autonomous region of China is an extension of policy extending from British colonial times and need not surprise anyone. But then, the Dalai Lama’s government has always been careful not to make statements that might embarrass its Indian hosts.
In recent months the Dalai Lama has indicated a desire to visit his former domains and is believed to have sent emissaries to Beijing to explore the grounds for a possible return. This is dependent entirely on an understanding between India and China that has, so far, been missing.
Over the past half a century, Beijing has condemned the Dalai Lama as a traitor. Last year, however, it allowed a team of his emissaries to visit China for negotiations, raising hopes for rapprochement under the new Chinese leadership headed by President Hu Jintao. Teams of Indian journalists have in recent times been invited to visit Beijing and take tours of Lhasa to see for themselves the realities on the ground there.
A sign of growing confidence between the neighbors is the announcement that the two countries’ navies would be holding their first ever joint-exercises later this year. “This is just a humble beginning and officers of the two countries are finalizing the details and hopefully the exercises will lead to greater cooperation in the future,” said Vice Admiral John D’Silva.
According to Mira Sinha Bhattacharjea at the New Delhi-based Institute of Chinese Studies, both India and China have viewed each other as having hegemonistic designs in the Asian region – the Tibet and Sikkim cases being prime examples. Bhattacharjea sees significance in the fact that not only has Nathu La been opened up for trade under the joint declarations, but that the town of Changgu in Sikkim and Reginggang in Tibet have been identified as trading centers.
“In today’s world of aggressive economic globalization, the imperative of neighborhood and regional cooperation is battering away at hard national borders. It is only in South Asia that borders have remained closed to trade and tourism while territorial disputes have remained unresolved,” she said.
Bhattacharjea was referring to the long-standing dispute between India and Pakistan over the territory of Kashmir, which has all but completely stopped economic activity between the South Asian neighbors that share a common history and culture. “In contrast, China has over the last decade settled territorial disputes with all of its five new Central Asian neighbors and also with Vietnam, Laos and Mongolia. Now it has close relations, border trade and even strategic understanding with all its peripheral states except India,” she pointed out.
(Inter Press Service)
