Dear Mrs. Maneka Gandhi,
Unfortunate, uninformed, unfair and agonizingly untrue remarks that all the Tibetans are poachers and they should be expelled from India if India
were to save wild life shocked most of the Tibetans living in India. Of course, your prescription is unrealistic and has no support from the Indian general public yet it has succeeded to some extent in raising furor amongst the Tibetan in exile. Many of the Tibetans have said your statement is of very bad taste and many more were angered over it.
I am of the belief that your statement is on the spot reaction to the questions than the informed judgment. I respect you for your sustain efforts in saving human persecution of the wild life and your diligent in creating awareness over the continual loss of life sustaining vitality of the eco-system. I am also of the belief that your sincere engagement in saving wildlife from the human brutality and also your interest in environment is a result of your love of humanity. I genuinely admire your dedication to wildlife. I sincerely believe in what you have been doing yet over this statement, I am disheartened and concerned that you have spoken out without estimating the whole truth.
If only you will not brand me partial and if you know me, I would like to inform you that if there is one country and one race in the world that
has sincerely included all the sentient beings in their daily prayers are the Tibetan people. If only you had gone through some of the Tibetan literatures, you will find that Tibet prior to Chinese invasion has no environmental problems. Those times, the Tibetan government would proclaim a law during certain period in a year prohibiting any killings of fauna and aquifers and the general public would religiously follow it. If only you had read some of the speeches of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama or any of the books by Tibetan Buddhist masters written from the last one thousand years, I am sure you would not have said it. If only you would list out names of the Tibetan people proven by the court of law to have been involved in this wild life illegal trades, it really is a matter of great shame but then branding whole people on the basis of few instances is not right. There are little more than 100 thousand Tibetan people in India and obviously, all these people cannot bribe law enforcement agencies to escape from the law. I hope there are enough laws to protect the wildlife in our country.
Now, we all know that our environment inclusive of all the vital parts of our eco-systems has a human created problems and it needs human solution.
Care and attention it deserves must come from the leadership at the local and the global level. It should have the steadfast support of the general public especially the industrial community at the national and the international level. The World from the developed countries and also the developing countries led by the culturally more humanistic society should concentrate on improving the sustainability of our eco-system. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said,” the destruction of others is virtually self-destructive”, the right thinking people must come together to create awareness over the loss of plant and animal species. We must act but in
the right direction because the misdirected approaches will be very costly moreover, we cannot effort to waste our time when we are losing one species of flora and fauna every next hour.
Coming back to your statement, if presuming there is a guarantee and that it is applied as a last resort to save the wild life in India, as you to claim with such vehemence then I cannot disagree with such an easy act, just expel the Tibetan. However, I cannot imagine this sickness is to be so simple to go away with an application of a single dosage prescription. Therefore, I would like to suggest you to form a forums where an experts from all walks of life come together to some unanimity in methods in solving these problems and recommend to the Governments and Institutions like
WTO, IMF etc.
To end this short reaction to your seemingly immature statement, I would like to state here that the people are just one species in this domain
of life whose greed has driven them to choose his powerful intellect in
wrong way and due to that when whole planet as such faces challenges, one
cannot segregate the particular kind of people to blame on. We all must be a part of the solution. Therefore, I would suggest you to kindly look at the problems from rationale perspective rather than have your agitated mind overtake your mental balances.
Like you, I have also freed myself from the temptation of meats and doing my best to assist Tibetan Volunteers for Animals (TVA) who has been
promoting vegetarianism in the Tibetan society and their message were received
very well by the Tibetan Populous.
Dorje Damdul,
Kathmandu, Nepal
