03-20-2008, 07:13 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-"ramana"+-->QUOTE("ramana")<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pioneer, 21 March 2008
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India paying for China's hubris
Kanwal Sibal
<b>The Chinese had made themselves and most others believe that the Tibetan issue had been more or less settled on their terms. Progress, modernisation and prosperity in Tibet were supposed to have eliminated any serious resistance to Chinese rule. Their grip on the territory had become tighter with Han migration, enhanced military presence and quicker means of communications like the railway line, a show-piece of their engineering skills and political determination to fully control their periphery. Because of intolerance of any public expression of dissent, the authorities presumably depend on diverse agencies for assessment of the public mood. A people's pulse cannot always be reliably felt this way. Errors of judgement can also come from a deeply materialistic regime believing that prosperity trumps all non-material aspirations of a people.</b>
The Chinese had, in recent years, opened up Tibet to foreign visitors and tourists, including Indian, in a show of self-confidence. Tibet had long ceased to be a real political pressure point on China in foreign policy terms. <b>India gave up its Tibet card decades ago, even when the Chinese have played the Tibetan card against us all these years. Their claim to Arunachal Pradesh or, at a minimum, Tawang, and their occupation of more territory than they themselves have claimed in the past in Ladakh, are extensions of their own claim on Tibet as an integral part of China historically.</b>
<i>{He was Foreign Secy and yet does not show any sense of how and why that card was given up!}</i>
<b>The West has also long spurned the cause of the Tibetan people. </b>Even when the Chinese were considered a Communist threat, the West had ignored Tibet's plight. <b>Now that the West has manifold interests locked up in a country set to be the world's second power, it would have even less reason to actively promote the Tibetan dossier and derail existing relations.</b> China can live with pinpricks over Tibet by odd US Congressmen, and take in their stride the increasing willingness of Western political leaders to receive the Dalai Lama officially in order to satisfy human rights lobbies at home, not to mention the publicity oriented activities of Hollywood personalities.
<i>{Maybe they take their cue form the West? Once the West gave up GOI also gave up? The West gave up so they could play the China card in the Cold War. But what about India why did it give up the Tibet card? If a Foreign Secy cannot expalin who can? Is he implying it was political decision? Then what explains the Sunmdrongchu in 1987? When was the Tibet card really given up? }</i>
The current events in Tibet have exposed the fiction that the Tibetans have found contentment under Chinese rule. The Han settlers in Lhasa have been attacked. Riots have engulfed other provinces with a Tibetan population. <b>The Tibetans have an identity and a culture different from the Chinese.</b> In a democratic polity that respects diversity and does not feel threatened by difference, regional aspirations can be accommodated without endangering central control. An authoritarian system is by definition intolerant of demands that diversity makes on governance.
<i>{But PRC is not a democratic system. So why this surprise at what happened in Tibet? Was the MEA swallowing its own lies and led to this lack of response to the Tibet atrocities?}</i>
There is no external threat to Tibet. India has legally accepted the Tibetan Autonomous Region as part of China. <b>Unless India is supportive, no other power can destabilise China's rule in Tibet. India's own vulnerabilities and China's considerable capacity to create problems for it within and around it are powerful arguments against any Indian adventurism in Tibet.</b>
China has got the rest of the world to adhere to the 'One-China' policy. While China itself makes territorial demands on others, it demands from others recognition of its own territorial indivisibility. India has once again during the current violence in Tibet underlined its support for the 'One-China' principle. <b>India should not fish in the troubled Taiwan waters, but to go out of the way to show respect for China's territorial integrity when China shows little for India's territorial integrity, whether in its claim to Arunachal Pradesh or its unwillingness to take a position in our favour on the legality of the Jammu & Kashmir issue with Pakistan, is to give it one-sided advantage.</b> <b>The West can hardly support separation of Tibet when it rejects separation of Taiwan, a politically and economically sustainable democratic entity that is geo-politically much more important. Tibet for the West is an NGO issue, not a hard political one.</b>
<b>There is no internal threat to China's sovereignty over Tibet either. </b>The Dalai Lama himself is against Tibetan independence, and has said so repeatedly. He seeks genuine autonomy, which the Chinese are legally committed to. The political jargon resorted to by the Chinese Prime Minister in his latest remarks shows China's unwillingness to face the reality in Tibet. To say that China is ready to have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama if he gives up his position for "Tibetan Independence" and recognises "Tibet and Taiwan as inalienable parts of China" is wilful disregard of the Dalai Lama's position on independence at one level, and a desire to humiliate him at another.
<b>The current unrest has refuted China's propaganda about normality in Tibet, but is unlikely to materially change the long-term scenario. The Dalai Lama is right in saying that the Tibetan deer is in the grip of a tiger. </b>China is relatively vulnerable in the run-up to the Olympics as it would not want to tarnish its image by being embroiled in a controversy over an issue of human rights and suppression of domestic dissent. The Tibetans seek to use this occasion to draw attention to their cause and mobilise sympathy for it across the world. It is doubtful whether they can sustain their protests for too long in the face of repression.
The Dalai Lama has called for an end to violence. This is consistent with his philosophy, but the moral impact of this on the Chinese leadership would not be much. <b>The younger Tibetan generation may be more aggressive, but their capacity to support the struggle inside Tibet is very limited. The Chinese will have no qualms about quelling any serious unrest with the required use of force. Once the Olympics are over, the Chinese will have a freer hand.</b>
The Chinese Prime Minister has spoken about the sensitivity of the Tibetan issue in the India-China relationship, praising India's position on the current uprising. <b>This is also a subtle warning to India to put restraints on the Tibetans. The irony is that the Chinese are deliberately keeping both the border problem with India and the Tibetan issue unresolved. The two are interlinked.</b> The landscape of Asia can change if China settles the border issue with India. Perhaps China feels it can continue to soar even with the weight of Tibet and India on its wings, but India cannot in equal measure. We will continue to pay a price for China's hubris.
-- The writer is a former Foreign Secretary
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ITs amazing that all MEA personnel become wise beings who comment on affairs but do nothing to develop any capabilities whil they are in the service. There is something rotten in the way the MEA adn the foreign policy is run and kept out of bounds of common people.
Kanwal Saab is wrong. Tibet can unravel PRC to its historical boundaries and pull it down from its primacy. Its a Western controlled lizard and hence the silence on the Western part. Kissinger's China opeing was to make them pliant to Western demands.
However there is no need for Indian silence. Tibet is a national interest of India.
I have a bigger question. <b>Was Indian establishment surprised at the timing and extent of the Tibetian rage at PRC dominaince?</b>
Is it a coincidence that Tibet breaks out every 20 years or so (1958, 1989, and now 2008)? Might be a generatonal thing. The young ones come of age and rebel and the PRC crackdown begins. It takes two to three decades for new generation to emerge and seek their rights again.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
India paying for China's hubris
Kanwal Sibal
<b>The Chinese had made themselves and most others believe that the Tibetan issue had been more or less settled on their terms. Progress, modernisation and prosperity in Tibet were supposed to have eliminated any serious resistance to Chinese rule. Their grip on the territory had become tighter with Han migration, enhanced military presence and quicker means of communications like the railway line, a show-piece of their engineering skills and political determination to fully control their periphery. Because of intolerance of any public expression of dissent, the authorities presumably depend on diverse agencies for assessment of the public mood. A people's pulse cannot always be reliably felt this way. Errors of judgement can also come from a deeply materialistic regime believing that prosperity trumps all non-material aspirations of a people.</b>
The Chinese had, in recent years, opened up Tibet to foreign visitors and tourists, including Indian, in a show of self-confidence. Tibet had long ceased to be a real political pressure point on China in foreign policy terms. <b>India gave up its Tibet card decades ago, even when the Chinese have played the Tibetan card against us all these years. Their claim to Arunachal Pradesh or, at a minimum, Tawang, and their occupation of more territory than they themselves have claimed in the past in Ladakh, are extensions of their own claim on Tibet as an integral part of China historically.</b>
<i>{He was Foreign Secy and yet does not show any sense of how and why that card was given up!}</i>
<b>The West has also long spurned the cause of the Tibetan people. </b>Even when the Chinese were considered a Communist threat, the West had ignored Tibet's plight. <b>Now that the West has manifold interests locked up in a country set to be the world's second power, it would have even less reason to actively promote the Tibetan dossier and derail existing relations.</b> China can live with pinpricks over Tibet by odd US Congressmen, and take in their stride the increasing willingness of Western political leaders to receive the Dalai Lama officially in order to satisfy human rights lobbies at home, not to mention the publicity oriented activities of Hollywood personalities.
<i>{Maybe they take their cue form the West? Once the West gave up GOI also gave up? The West gave up so they could play the China card in the Cold War. But what about India why did it give up the Tibet card? If a Foreign Secy cannot expalin who can? Is he implying it was political decision? Then what explains the Sunmdrongchu in 1987? When was the Tibet card really given up? }</i>
The current events in Tibet have exposed the fiction that the Tibetans have found contentment under Chinese rule. The Han settlers in Lhasa have been attacked. Riots have engulfed other provinces with a Tibetan population. <b>The Tibetans have an identity and a culture different from the Chinese.</b> In a democratic polity that respects diversity and does not feel threatened by difference, regional aspirations can be accommodated without endangering central control. An authoritarian system is by definition intolerant of demands that diversity makes on governance.
<i>{But PRC is not a democratic system. So why this surprise at what happened in Tibet? Was the MEA swallowing its own lies and led to this lack of response to the Tibet atrocities?}</i>
There is no external threat to Tibet. India has legally accepted the Tibetan Autonomous Region as part of China. <b>Unless India is supportive, no other power can destabilise China's rule in Tibet. India's own vulnerabilities and China's considerable capacity to create problems for it within and around it are powerful arguments against any Indian adventurism in Tibet.</b>
China has got the rest of the world to adhere to the 'One-China' policy. While China itself makes territorial demands on others, it demands from others recognition of its own territorial indivisibility. India has once again during the current violence in Tibet underlined its support for the 'One-China' principle. <b>India should not fish in the troubled Taiwan waters, but to go out of the way to show respect for China's territorial integrity when China shows little for India's territorial integrity, whether in its claim to Arunachal Pradesh or its unwillingness to take a position in our favour on the legality of the Jammu & Kashmir issue with Pakistan, is to give it one-sided advantage.</b> <b>The West can hardly support separation of Tibet when it rejects separation of Taiwan, a politically and economically sustainable democratic entity that is geo-politically much more important. Tibet for the West is an NGO issue, not a hard political one.</b>
<b>There is no internal threat to China's sovereignty over Tibet either. </b>The Dalai Lama himself is against Tibetan independence, and has said so repeatedly. He seeks genuine autonomy, which the Chinese are legally committed to. The political jargon resorted to by the Chinese Prime Minister in his latest remarks shows China's unwillingness to face the reality in Tibet. To say that China is ready to have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama if he gives up his position for "Tibetan Independence" and recognises "Tibet and Taiwan as inalienable parts of China" is wilful disregard of the Dalai Lama's position on independence at one level, and a desire to humiliate him at another.
<b>The current unrest has refuted China's propaganda about normality in Tibet, but is unlikely to materially change the long-term scenario. The Dalai Lama is right in saying that the Tibetan deer is in the grip of a tiger. </b>China is relatively vulnerable in the run-up to the Olympics as it would not want to tarnish its image by being embroiled in a controversy over an issue of human rights and suppression of domestic dissent. The Tibetans seek to use this occasion to draw attention to their cause and mobilise sympathy for it across the world. It is doubtful whether they can sustain their protests for too long in the face of repression.
The Dalai Lama has called for an end to violence. This is consistent with his philosophy, but the moral impact of this on the Chinese leadership would not be much. <b>The younger Tibetan generation may be more aggressive, but their capacity to support the struggle inside Tibet is very limited. The Chinese will have no qualms about quelling any serious unrest with the required use of force. Once the Olympics are over, the Chinese will have a freer hand.</b>
The Chinese Prime Minister has spoken about the sensitivity of the Tibetan issue in the India-China relationship, praising India's position on the current uprising. <b>This is also a subtle warning to India to put restraints on the Tibetans. The irony is that the Chinese are deliberately keeping both the border problem with India and the Tibetan issue unresolved. The two are interlinked.</b> The landscape of Asia can change if China settles the border issue with India. Perhaps China feels it can continue to soar even with the weight of Tibet and India on its wings, but India cannot in equal measure. We will continue to pay a price for China's hubris.
-- The writer is a former Foreign Secretary
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
ITs amazing that all MEA personnel become wise beings who comment on affairs but do nothing to develop any capabilities whil they are in the service. There is something rotten in the way the MEA adn the foreign policy is run and kept out of bounds of common people.
Kanwal Saab is wrong. Tibet can unravel PRC to its historical boundaries and pull it down from its primacy. Its a Western controlled lizard and hence the silence on the Western part. Kissinger's China opeing was to make them pliant to Western demands.
However there is no need for Indian silence. Tibet is a national interest of India.
I have a bigger question. <b>Was Indian establishment surprised at the timing and extent of the Tibetian rage at PRC dominaince?</b>
Is it a coincidence that Tibet breaks out every 20 years or so (1958, 1989, and now 2008)? Might be a generatonal thing. The young ones come of age and rebel and the PRC crackdown begins. It takes two to three decades for new generation to emerge and seek their rights again.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->