Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said yesterday he was surprised at China’s protest against his planned visit to an area of India claimed by Beijing, hinting he backed India on the border issue.
The Dalai Lama also criticized China’s one-party rule and its state-controlled media, while praising India’s “successful” democracy.
The Buddhist monk, who arrived in Tokyo on Friday for a week-long stay in Japan ahead of a Nov. 8 visit to Arunachal Pradesh state in the northeast of India where China and India fought a border war in 1962.
“I was surprised” at China’s criticism of the planned visit, the Dalai Lama told reporters when asked about the motive behind his trip.
“Because in [19]62, the People’s Liberation Army already reached that area, already occupied ... then India sort of pushed them back. The Chinese government unilaterally [made] ceasefire, withdrawal,” he said. “So what’s the problem?”
The Dalai Lama added that Beijing was overpoliticizing his travels, saying his decisions on where to go were spiritual in nature, not political.
He said the Chinese government saw him as a “troublemaker” and had read too much political meaning into his frequent travels abroad.
“The Chinese government considers me a troublemaker, so it is my duty to create more trouble,” he quipped. “The Chinese government politicizes too much wherever I go. Where I go is not political.”
The Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after China crushed an anti-Chinese uprising in Tibet, is viewed as a “splittist” by Beijing, although he says he wants autonomy rather than full independence for his Himalayan homeland.
China has said it is “firmly opposed” to the Dalai Lama’s trip to Arunachal Pradesh.
“One reason why India is successful in democracy is ... that [for] more than 2000 years India [has had] this strong tradition to respect different views,” the Dalai Lama said, stressing the importance of respecting different religions and the views of non-believers.
In September he visited Taiwan, his third trip there, to bless the survivors of Typhoon Morakot, which left at least 700 people dead after it hit the country on Aug 8. He visited disaster areas in southern Taiwan, comforted survivors and held a prayer meeting for typhoon victims attended by 15,000 people, according to his official Web site.
He also criticized China’s one-party state and lack of media freedom.
“People in China [have] no free information, too much sensation. And their own newspaper, media — all their information is one-sided propaganda,” he said.
The Dalai Lama called on the foreign media to visit China to “find the reality” in the western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, home to the Tibetan and Uighur ethnic minorities respectively.
Deadly unrest broke out in Tibet in March last year and July this year in Xinjiang as part of long-standing friction between China’s majority Han population and ethnic minorities.
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