Dalai Lama shows the right path

Dalai Lama shows the right path

March 22, 2011 12:24:58 PM

by Premen Addy

His Holiness combines a rare blend of goodness and greatness that confounds his Chinese adversaries. His decision to devolve power may prove to be a master stroke.

Revered by his people and by communities across the world, the Dalai Lama combines a rare blend of goodness and greatness leavened by shrewd wisdom and humour that confounds his Chinese adversaries. His decision to devolve power to the elected representatives of the Tibetan movement may turn out to be a master stroke. By institutionalising power and authority and separating their temporal aspects from the spiritual, he has lifted the Tibetan people and their cause to an exalted plane, one that will give them a unique niche in the comity of nations. China’s leaders have nothing to fall back on save ritual abuse of the man — their responses expose the vacuity of Chinese statecraft. The low cunning of Dickens’s Artful Dodger and his mentor Fagin comes readily to mind.

Beijing has proposed that future Dalai Lamas would be appointed through a procedure fashioned by the Manchu rulers of China: The names of the contenders to be written down and placed in a receptacle with the Emperor drawing the lot. Politics is thus reduced to a lottery, the 21st century embalmed in the mores of the 18th. Small wonder that the title of historian WF Jenner’s seminal work is entitled, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis. The country’s dead classicism, underpinned by more than two millennia of centralised authority, is the cross its modern rulers choose to bear. Jenner explains: “Non-Hans win approval to the extent that they allow themselves to be drawn into Han tradition. They could easily be assimilated on paper, even when they were not in reality, by the homogenising device of writing their names in Chinese characters and in a Chinese form. It is very difficult to imagine historical writing being published in China that saw Han Chinese expansionism as genocidal... History as it is written makes it very hard even to consider the possibility that significant numbers of the subjects of Chinese regimes have refused to think of themselves as Chinese or accept the legitimacy of any Chinese rule over them and their territory.”

Jonathan Spence, the Yale historian (The Search for Modern China) writes: “I understand a ‘modern’ nation to be one that is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies and new ideas. If it is used in this open sense, we should have no difficulty in seeing ‘modern’ as a concept that shifts with the times as human life unfolds, instead of relegating the sense of the ‘modern’ to our own contemporary world while consigning the past to the ‘traditional’ and the future to the ‘post-modern’. I like to think that there were modern countries — in the above sense — in 1600 or earlier, as at any moment thereafter. Yet at no time in that span, nor at the end of the 20th century, has China convincingly been one of them.” The mismatch of time past and time present surely guarantees a troubled time future.

Such is the canvas of the China-Tibet relationship, from which also arises the challenges that beset China-India ties. Manchu China’s determination to reimpose its defunct authority over Tibet, even in the declining years of the monarchy, is a lesson for our times. “There is a sort of tragic interest,” wrote Lord Bryce — the British Ambassador in Washington, DC, after reading a confidential report from the American traveller and Tibetologist, WW Rockhill, which was made available to him by President Theodore Roosevelt — “in observing how the Chinese Government, like a huge anaconda, has enwrapped the unfortunate Dalai Lama in its coils, tightening them upon him till complete submission has been extorted”. Tibetan defence, he said, had been weakened by the misconceived Younghusband expedition of 1904, hence “a strong, watchful, and tenacious neighbour which one day (could) become a formidable military power” would be ensconced on India’s northern borders. (Bryce to Grey, December 17, 1908).

Two years later, the Thirteenth Dalai fled Lhasa for the sanctuary of India, as columns of the Chinese Army, under Chao Erh-feng’s command, marched into the Tibetan capital. The country’s Buddhist monasteries were looted and priceless scrolls were used to line the boots of the invading troops. The Morning Post (February 28, 1910) in London warned: “...a great Empire, the future military strength of which no man can foresee, has suddenly appeared on the North-East Frontier of India. The problem of the North-West Frontier bids fair to be duplicated in the long run, and a double pressure placed on the defensive resources of the Indian Empire... The Strategic Line has been lost, and a heavy price may be exacted for the mistake. China. In a word, has come to the gates of India, and the fact has to be reckoned with.”

Following the collapse of Manchu monarchy, and on the eve of World War I, British, Chinese and Tibetan negotiators gathered in Simla to discuss Tibet’s status. The talks ended in the fudge of the Simla Convention (July 3, 1914). Nothing was settled in this exercise of British diplomatic casuistry; Tibet was kept warm for Mao Tse-Tung’s hordes half-a-century down the line.

This time the warning broadside came from Sardar Vallabbhai Patel (December 1950): “Chinese irredentism and Communist imperialism ... conceal racial, national and historical claims... While our western and north-western threats to security are still prominent as before, a new threat has developed from the north and north-east... India’s defence has to concentrate itself on two fronts simultaneously. Our defence measures have so far been based on the calculations of a superiority over Pakistan.”

India’s current war doctrine envisages the possibility of a two-front conflict with Pakistan and China: strategic planning having caught up with unfolding ground realities. The surgery of partition had left India in a weakened state in the 1950s; hopefully it’s a radically different situation today. There is full realisation that the Himalayas can offer no ironclad protection to India now than did the Maginot Line for France in 1940.

The flight of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to India in March 1959 and the sanctuary given him and his followers were taken as a grave affront by Beijing, where concepts such as ‘loss of face’ prevail. The self-perception that the Middle Kingdom is the sole and rightful great power in Asia will be difficult to dispel through sweet reason alone. Beijing will brook no rivals, least of all India, which it affects to despise. But a warmed tributary system from China’s primordial is unlikely to work to Beijing’s satisfaction, however crafty its stitching. We are dealing, after all, with fascism sinified.

source:dailypioneer