By JYOTI MALHOTRA
The 14th Dalai Lama, also called Tenzing Gyatso, is likely to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this week, keeping up his tradition of getting to know India’s senior leadership ever since he fled from Lhasa 45 years ago.
Ironically, this is also the exact week when India and China signed the Panchsheel agreement 50 years ago, as a preamble to which New Delhi agreed to sign away the trading and other privileges it had inherited in Tibet from the British. Last year, when the BJP government of A B Vajpayee accepted in Beijing that the Tibetan Autonomous Region was an integral part of the PRC, it was not only arriving at the logical conclusion that Nehru and Zhou-en Lai had arrived at 50 years ago, but also removed the illusion of India’s special relationship with Tibet that has persisted since. The Dalai Lama had met Vajpayee once as PM, in the month of the nuclear tests in May 1998—another irony, perhaps even a message to China—and his senior officials before last year’s visit to Beijing.
And yet, India does have a special relationship with Tibet. It exists, at least in memory, both as dream and nightmare, in mythology, in religion, culture—and best of all, in the shelter that India still offers thousands of Tibetans who escape the hardship of their land year after year, every year. It’s an unescapable fact, commonly testified to in Dharamsala and in the border towns of Arunachal Pradesh.
