China’s Dalai Lama plan aimed to blunt India, West’s Tibet strategy

China’s white paper on Tibet comes at an interesting time and is meant to blunt India and the West’s diplomatic advantage, writes senior journalist Sanjib Kr Baruah.

New Delhi: In an interesting development replete with significance for the strategies over Tibet—both for China, India and the West—China has taken recourse to history to claim rights to appoint the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

On Friday, China's State Council Information Office brought out a white paper ‘Tibet Since 1951: Liberation, Development and Prosperity' which said that the Chinese Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) officially established the titles of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni and their political and religious status in Tibet.

Read:|'China should have no role in succession process of Dalai Lama'

“From then on, it became an established convention that the central government conferred the titles of Dalai Lama and Panchen Erdeni. The Qing government began to station Grand Ministers Resident in Tibet to supervise and jointly manage local military and political affairs on behalf of the central authorities; in total it appointed more than 100 such ministers,” the paper said.

It added that the Qing government promulgated ‘the 29-Article Ordinance’ for ‘better governance of Tibet’ which stipulated that the “reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and other grand Living Buddhas had to follow the procedure of ‘drawing lots from the golden urn’, and the selected candidate would be subject to approval by the central government of China.”

This position by Beijing that the Dalai Lama’s successor is to be chosen by picking lots from a golden urn in Lhasa and must be approved by the Chinese government has already been rebuffed by the current Dalai Lama.

On March 9, 2021, in vigorous underlining of the Joe Biden administration position on Tibet, State Department spokesperson Ned Price had said: “We believe that the Chinese government should have no role in the succession process of the Dalai Lama.” Price added that China’s effort to decide a successor was “an outrageous abuse of religious freedom.”

India’s stand is aligned with that of the US.

Read:|CGTC-India demands Bharat Ratna for Dalai Lama

Recently Penpa Tsering, just elected as the head of the executive branch of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), had also reiterated that choosing the next Dalai Lama is the prerogative of the current Dalai Lama who is based in India and that Beijing can have no say in the matter.

What China may be attempting through the white paper which is a part of state policy is to undermine the diplomatic leverage that India, the US, and the West employ to hit out at China.

If China appoints another Dalai Lama, there is a possibility that the credibility of the present institution of the Dalai Lama will erode and Tibetan Buddhism may see divisions that will be built on the extant fault lines.

Indicating India’s involvement in supporting the Tibetan movement, the white paper mentions how the leaders of a Tibetan armed rebellion fled to India in 1959.

The present Dalai Lama—the 14th one—had escaped from his Lhasa palace, called ‘Potala’ on May 17, 1959, before reaching India’s Arunachal Pradesh by March-end. His presence and organizational set-up headquartered at McLeodganj in Himachal Pradesh has been a constant irritant for the Chinese.

Read:|Dalai Lama turns 85, Tibetans dedicate 2020 as 'Year of Gratitude'

In a reference to the secret commando force formed by Tibetan refugees in India called the Special Frontier Force (SFF), the paper says: “In 1962, with support from external powers, they built a para-commando force composed of mainly Tibetan exiles to harass Chinese border troops and civilians along the China-India border.”

The SFF, mainly comprising ethnic Tibetan soldiers originally hailing from the Khampa region, was instrumental in undertaking a military masterstroke and regaining vital heights on August 29-30 last year thereby handing an important military tactical advantage to India during the ongoing India-China border tension in eastern Ladakh.