Tibetan activists said Friday they will defy a police ban and protest during Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to the southern technology hub of Bangalore this weekend.
“We will express our wish to have a free Tibet, though the police are trying to silence us,” Tenzin Tsuendue, general secretary of the Friends of Tibet group told reporters.
Tenzin was arrested in January 2002, when he led a protest during the visit of the then Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, to Bangalore.
Police Commissioner S. Mariswamy said the activists had been denied permission to protest. India has given shelter to hundreds of thousands of Tibetan refugees, but does not allow them to engage in political activity.
Thousands of Tibetans took refuge in India after a failed uprising in 1959 against Chinese rule in Tibet. India allowed the Dalai Lama and his supporters to set up a government in exile in the northern Himalayan resort of Dharmsala.
China accuses the Dalai Lama of trying to split the country, but the Tibetan spiritual leader has in recent days reassured the Chinese that he is agreeable to Tibet remaining within China, but with greater freedom for the Tibetan people.
Wen will begin his four-day India visit in Bangalore, surveying the city’s booming software outsourcing industry.
