India red-flags China: Dalai Lama flies on IAF helicopter in Ladakh

The official defence ministry tweet of the Dalai Lama flying on a military helicopter and blessing the IAF air warriors is bound to make China see red, writes Sanjib Kr Baruah

New Delhi:Of late, China is being ribbed a real lot. If the August 2 daring visit of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to Taipei was not enough, the relay baton has now seemingly been handed over to India.

Close on the heels of an announcement of a two-week long military exercise by Indian and US soldiers in a high-altitude area near Auli in Uttarakhand, India has taken potshots at China by flashing pictures of the Dalai Lama being transported by an Indian Air Force (IAF) helicopter in Ladakh.

Auli is close to the troubled Line of Actual Control (LAC) where in several points, Indian and Chinese soldiers are engaged in face-offs that have not eased even after 16 rounds of talks at the senior commander level among other parallel channels of communication and negotiation. The telling tweet posted by the Srinagar Defence Ministry spokesperson at 6:40 PM on Wednesday is sure to get China’s goat.

Along with a photograph of a grinning Dalai Lama surrounded by a big group of IAF personnel in flying fatigues and Buddhist devotees with hands folded, the tweet read: “His Holiness @DalaiLama flew in IAF Dhruv helicopter from Air Force Station Leh to Lingshet. He was received by Air Cmde PK Srivastava, AOC Leh. His Holiness showered his blessings on all air warriors of the station.”

The Dalai Lama arrived in Leh from McLeodganj on July 12. According military hospitality to Tibetan Buddhism’s supreme religious leader amid an ongoing border row may also be seen as a definitive move to escalate on the LAC. More than 80 km from Leh, Lingshet—situated at the junction of Leh and the Zanskar Valley—has a continuing Buddhist tradition of more than 900 years.

In order to escape oppression during China’s crackdown on Tibet, 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.

Ever since the current India-China border conflict broke out in April-May 2020, both the Indian army and the PLA have mobilized and deployed more than 1,00,000 soldiers along with war-like equipment along the LAC and in depth areas, resulting in one of the heaviest force deployments in the difficult border region between the two Asian giants.