Tibet, The Dalai Lama and China

I never heard of Lhasa until in recent past when there was a headline on CNN showing the first train between Beijing & Lhasa. At that time I had no idea about this remote (in fact made remote) capital city of Tibet. But the things happened on March 10 & thereafter motivated me to explore the past of Tibet & His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

One of the first books I read was about the life of a Tibetan author Tubten Khetsun. The author was 18 years old, working for the government as a clerk during the first uprising against the Chinese rule in 1959. He was at Dalai Lama’s summer palace when the Chinese responded by bombarding the residence. The Dalai Lama had already secretly left the country.

As a member of a prominent Lhasa family of government servants, Khetsun was declared a “class enemy” along with the rest of his family & sentenced to five years in jail. All their property was confiscated and the family scattered.

Khetsun was moved from prison to slave-labour camp and back again. When he was finally set free, he could only work where his neighbourhood committee ordained. That meant labouring on government hydro-electric stations or smashing stones on other building sites – underpaid jobs that only requisitioned labour could fill.

There is a deep sense of isolation reflected in this depressing and cruel story of men and women being deprived, crushed, starved and exploited.
There is also some shocking descriptions of Mao-induced famines when starving Tibetan prisoners would search the faeces and vomit of fellow prisoners for any food that had not been digested.

After reading on the life of the Dalai Lama it is easy to understand the Chinese leadership’s fear of him. Half a century after his escape from Chinese occupation, his name inside Tibet is as powerful as ever, perhaps more so given access to the rest of the world and the support he enjoys in the West.

For all Tibetans, in exile or living under Beijing’s rule, he is their homeland, their faith and their sense of self. For this reason the Chinese government seems content to stall talks with him on the assumptions that he will die soon and that will be the end of it.

The Dalai Lama’s suggestion that on his death he could be reborn outside Tibet is likely to distress Chinese rulers, if only briefly. The atheist Communist Party of China insists it is the only authority that can determine whose terrestrial body the soul of a dead monk will move to.

But the Dalai Lama may have outwitted them. His latest “modernist” suggestion is an internationally observed referendum in Tibet and among the Tibetan diaspora to decide how or indeed if he should be reincarnated at all. Tibetan nationalism remains a determined and untiring force.