By: Manoj Nair
Mumbai, March 11 – Yesterday was Tibetan National Uprising Day (which commemorates the crushing of Tibetan unrest by the Chinese army on March 10, 1959) and one of the Tibetans in Mumbai was Tenzin Tsundue.
But the writer and freedom activist from Dharamsala was not here to commemorate the day, but to answer court summons.
Tsundue (30) is facing charges of criminal trespass, carrying arms and defying tight security during an incident on January 16, 2002, when he climbed 14 floors of the Oberoi Hotel to unfurl a banner protesting Chinese occupation of Tibet, during Chinese premier Zhu Rongji’s visit.
The Cuffe Parade police filed a chargesheet in the case a few months ago. On Monday, the court recorded his plea of ‘not guilty’. The next hearing at the Esplanade Magistrate Court is on March 20.
According to his lawyer Rohit Bavaskar, Tsundue has been charged for criminal trespass under Section 447 of the Indian Penal Code and for carrying a prohibited weapon and forming an assembly in a prohibited area under Sections 37 (1) and (3) of the Bombay Police Act.
Tsundue was carrying a penknife during his act of defiance.
The charges carry sentences from three months to one year of imprisonment.
D Y Dhobale, senior police inspector of the Cuffe Parade police station, said it was not unusual for cases of trespassing to come up before the magisterial court years after the incident had occurred.
Tenzin’s ‘crime’
Tsundue had stitched together three Chinese flags to make a 30-foot-long banner that read ‘China Get Out’. The motorcade of the Chinese premier was passing by when he jumped over the Oberoi Hotel fence and climbed a scaffold against the hotel building to reach a window on the 14th floor. There, hooking himself to a ladder, he unfurled the banner. He stood there for 40 minutes before he was forced to come down. He was later arrested and released on a surety.
