The Dalai Lama recently announced that he would be relinquishing his political role as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile based in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.
Though the Dalai Lama will continue to be the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, an elected prime minister will soon take over his political role. Obviously, the Dalai Lama is conscious of his mortality and is taking steps to split the two roles to ensure that the struggle for Tibetan identity doesn’t live and die with him.
This move will upset China, even though Beijing might ignore it on the surface.
The next step will probably be the anointment of a new Dalai Lama, who will take over as his successor.
The formality of finding one after his death in the traditional way might have to be dispensed with because Tibet is under Chinese rule. Indeed, Beijing is waiting for the Dalai Lama to die, which Chinese officials hope will enable them to find a new Tibetan spiritual leader that satisfies their needs.
The Dalai Lama is acutely aware of this, which explains why he would be keen to make arrangements for his political and spiritual succession. This is important because his successors, both in their political and spiritual roles, will carry his enormous moral authority.
China obviously hopes that with the death of the Dalai Lama in the not-too-distant future, the Tibetan issue will fade away and eventually disappear. China’s leaders believe that as China continues to grow in power, the Tibetan cause will have fewer and fewer supporters in the international sphere for fear of offending China.
Chinese officials think the Dalai Lama’s death will help in this regard. His charisma, charm and sincerity have kept the Tibetan issue alive and kicking. China, therefore, believes that Tibet will lose whatever appeal it might still have when the Dalai Lama is not around. This is shortsighted thinking.
The Dalai Lama has sought, over the years, to resolve the issue of Tibet’s status peacefully by seeking autonomy, not independence. Through many hours of fitful talks over the years between his representatives and China, the Dalai Lama’s demand for Tibet has been for internal autonomy with Beijing in control of its foreign and defense affairs. With internal autonomy, Tibetans should be able to maintain their ethnic and cultural identity.
That is not too much to ask and Beijing should not have a problem with it, but it does.
First, Beijing does not trust the Dalai Lama to seek political and cultural space for his people without challenging China’s sovereignty. Beijing simply wants submission with the right to define and regulate how the Tibetans should and would live within their own territory. This is precisely what they are doing now. Because the Dalai Lama seeks better terms for his people, he is denounced as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Therefore, China has never been serious about talks with the Dalai Lama’s representatives to resolve the Tibetan issue.
A solution on the basis of genuine autonomy with the imprimatur of the Dalai Lama’s moral authority would be a lasting one and would be acceptable to the Tibetan people. However, China is not concerned with the moral and popular dimensions of the Tibetan cause. They have been busy all these years cutting at the roots of these considerations. For example, Beijing has sliced and spliced Tibet, with parts of it joined to neighboring Han-dominated provinces. Thus, Tibet proper is now much smaller than it used to be. Its population of 6 million is scattered, reducing Tibet’s potential to create “trouble.”
What is left of Tibet is now mixed up with Han Chinese, who have settled there in large numbers because of Chinese government incentives. In this way, Tibetans will soon become a minority in their own geographical territory, if this hasn’t already happened. In addition, there are severe restrictions on their cultural space to limit their language, religion and traditions. It is hoped that over time they will cease to be a distinct entity except for ceremonial purposes when the state wants to exhibit them as part of China’s “harmonious” society.
Tibet’s economy has changed so drastically that, short of assimilation, they will remain marginalized, living a miserable existence. Subject to surveillance, both electronic and through the massive presence of security forces, Tibetans live in fear. Chinese leaders tend to resort to overkill, both figuratively and metaphorically, when they fear rupture of their so-called “harmonious” society, and they have an aversion to peaceful dialogue to sort out national issues. They fear that such an approach would open a Pandora’s box of unresolved issues with their people. That fear explains Beijing’s paranoia that revolutions in the Middle East will spark unrest in China if people had free access to news from that part of the world.
Tibet has been at the receiving end of this paranoia for many years. China’s oligarchs believe that if they decide a problem doesn’t and shouldn’t exist, it will be swept away by the brute use of power. However, with Tibet, the unrest continues to erupt in big or small ways despite all the repression in that region. It keeps coming back to haunt China.
“Manpower, military power, monetary power, that is already there in China,” Pico Iyer quoted the Dalai Lama as saying in an article for the New York Review of Books. What is lacking, though, “is moral power, moral authority.”
Without that, at a deeper level there is a big vacuum, and that is where the old Tibetan Buddhist traditions could help. However, try telling this to China’s leadership, especially associating it with the Dalai Lama.
China’s leaders are drunk with power. They have no time for morality and tranquility. Tibet for them is just a sideshow. However, they don’t realize that sideshows, too, can occupy center stage when the central authority is weakened, as has happened so often in Chinese history.
The replacement of the Dalai Lama’s political power by a secular democratic government will become a legitimate organ of channeling Tibetan identity both among the exiled Tibetans and those at home. And once he has also designated his spiritual successor, the struggle for Tibetan autonomy will be set for the post-Dalai Lama period.
On the surface, China might prefer to ignore this, but arrangements for institutional succession are important for Tibet, especially when they carry the Dalai Lama’s imprimatur.
Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.
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