BOMBAY, November 5 – About 100 Tibetan exiles chanted prayers as they began a hunger strike on Friday in a busy business district of Bombay, to demand the release of a Tibetan Buddhist monk jailed in China over a spate of bombings.
The group of monks, farmers, students and artisans, some clutching prayer beads, said Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, who faces a suspended death sentence since December 2002 for the blasts in the Tibetan-populated area of China’s southwest, was innocent.
Holding banners and posters that read: “Release Tenzin Delek NOW!” and “China, Get out of Tibet”, Tibetans held the protest at a playground in the southern part of the city.
“We are demanding the immediate release of Delek. He has been falsely implicated for crimes he did not commit,” Lobsang Yeshi, an activist of the Tibetan Youth Congress, a group leading the strike, said.
Despite heated protests from international rights groups and diplomats, China executed Lobsang Dhondup, another Tibetan tried alongside Tenzin Delek, last January.
The activists fear Tenzin Delek may be executed in early December, and the campaign for his release began this week when a group of monks and nuns began a hunger strike in the northern town of Dharamsala, the base of the Tibetan government in exile.
Yeshi said a five-day “relay” fast in Bombay would include a candlelight vigil and prayer meetings until November 9.
“China is using the pretext of a global war on terrorism and thereby suppressing the voice of freedom and human rights inside Tibet,” said activist Tenzin Tsundue, who wore a headband that read, “Free Tibet”.
Thousands of Tibetans have been living in India since the Dalai Lama, accompanied by several followers, fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Beijing’s communist rule, imposed after Chinese troops entered the Himalayan region in 1950.
Activists have planned similar protests in the southern city of Bangalore, Calcutta in the east and in the capital, New Delhi.
Beijing has shown intermittent signs of increasing tolerance toward Tibet, freeing several prominent activists and permitting a series of rare visits by envoys of the Dalai Lama.
But many Tibetans resent what they see as Chinese occupation and interference in their religious lives since the People’s Liberation Army marched in.
