Unrest in Tibet

The suddenness and ferocity of the Tibetan protest against Chinese rule has taken everyone by surprise. The official Tibetan explanation is that March 10 being a 'Martyr's Day', there is nothing unusual about the protests. But given that this is the 49th and not the 50th anniversary of the 1959 massacre, the explanation is not very convincing. The Chinese government, in contrast, says that the protest is being funded by foreign forces and is designed to embarrass China before and during the Olympic Games, scheduled for the summer.

China may well have a point, but that does not let it off the hook. The fact is that it occupied Tibet in 1953, on the sort of territorial claims that it is prone to make. It has since persecuted Tibetans relentlessly by what has come to be called "cultural genocide". It has done so by altering the demography of Tibet by settling Han Chinese there in large numbers. While counting the number of Tibetans, it excludes those Tibetans who live outside the Tibet Autonomous Region. The two million or so Tibetans who are still left in the TAR are thus heavily outnumbered by the Chinese. And, ever since the Lhasa railway was built, around 3,000 Chinese tourists arrive there every day and a third of them stay on. There are only three other instances of such a takeover by population transfer: North America, Australia and New Zealand. Little wonder then that the Tibetans are protesting. Indeed, they have been doing so for half a century. It is just that this time they are doing so more forcefully. The world has chosen to stand by and watch because there is little else it can do.

This helplessness, however, is not the only thing that has encouraged China to follow highly repressive policies in Tibet. A combination of social, cultural, historical and political factors has also helped. Socially, to the Han Chinese, who comprise 90 per cent of China, the Tibetans and other minorities simply don't matter and their welfare is not something to wonder about. Culturally, the Confucian ethic permits the government to be highly autocratic because the Chinese accept the proposition that individual sovereignty has narrow limits. This tendency is reinforced by the ethic of Communism and the Communist party, which tends to regard paternalism as the natural way of doing things. And, historically, central authority in China has been strong and mostly unchallenged because challenge has invited heavy repression. Overall, the consequence is that while consultation is an important element in China's way of doing things, participation in power is not. As the Dalai Lama said recently, China does not have any method other than repression for managing and settling disputes. This lies at the heart of the incomprehension that most Indians experience when they discuss Tibet. Quite simply, India tends to be more accommodative of dissent than China does. And this is what perhaps explains the discomfort of Indians at their government's policy in regard to Tibet.