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Author: Lezlee Brown Halper & Stefan Halper
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 367 pp
Price: Rs 599
To the good fortune of all geopolitics enthusiasts, comes this authoritative work on Tibet written by two US academicians — Tibet scholar Lezlee Brown Halper and US-China relations expert Stefan Halper. The two authors have relied extensively on declassified CIA and Chinese documents for their findings. Hence, the book presents an essentially western perspective on the Tibet conflict with little sympathy towards the nation that has and will continue to be one of the biggest pieces in the Tibetan jigsaw puzzle — India.
The objective of this work is to educate the readers about three points. First, why was Tibet unable to become an independent state even though nations around it saw a tectonic shift of power as the colonialists retreated from Asia? Second, what role did the US, India, China, Russia and Britain play in the Tibetan game? And third, why is Tibet’s story relevant to global affairs today? Barring the scepticism with respect to the Indian role, Tibet: An Unfinished Story fulfils these three objectives brilliantly.
The first few chapters deal with the early representations of Tibet in western literature. Living up to its sobriquet of “Forbidden City”, the government of Lhasa isolated itself from the world ‘in order to preserve the Tibetan religious identity’. As a result, there were only a few missionaries and a handful of secular travel missions that were successful in ‘unveiling the last mystery of the East’ by the end of the 19th century. Quite analogous to the descriptions about India, these early visitors described Tibet as the land of plenty and wrote fascinating accounts that glorified the Tibetan way of life. By the first half of the 20th century, Rudyard Kipling’s widely read novel Kim and James Hilton’s reference to a mythical land ‘Shangri-La’ in his novel Lost Horizon took the craze about Tibet to its zenith.
What is missing in this pre-colonial description however, is an account of the Sino-Tibetan and the Mongol-Tibetan relations during the Qing, Mongol and Manchu dynastic rules throughout the second millennium that have had a great bearing on the Tibetan conflict. So much so, the terms ‘sovereignty’ and ‘suzerainty’ were never differentiated with respect to the Chinese control over Tibet and this continues to be a nagging issue to this date.
By the early 20th century, the British East India Company began looking at the economic aspects of Tibetan control and worked to ‘open Tibet and establish a trade route linking India with China and Central Asia’. It was here that Tibet gained geopolitical significance and became a part of the Great Game between the Russians and the British Empire. Angered by Lhasa’s refusal to permit British entry, the authors present a detailed account of how Sir Francis Younghusband in 1904 marched into Lhasa. It describes the lack of realism in the Tibetan government’s policy — while the British charged with modernised arms, the Tibetan soldiers armed with swords and muzzle-loading rifles believed that the Dalai Lama’s blessings would come to their rescue.
A Tibetan delegation in India in 1950
Tibet: An Unfinished Story also deals at great length with the Indian role in this conflict. The authors opine that India ‘held the key to Tibet’s future in many ways’. Here, the authors toe the line of the standard US narrative where India’s policy of non-alignment is perceived as being a shot in the arm of the communists. The book deals excessively with Jawaharlal Nehru’s personality fears and incorrectly implies that all decision making regarding Indo-China-Tibet were the personal prerogative of the Indian prime minister. There is little emphasis on the fact that the lack of capacity made a nascent Indian republic only a marginal player in the Tibetan struggle. Also, the authors fail to acknowledge that by allowing a Tibetan government in exile on Indian soil in 1959, India has managed to hold an upper hand in the Indo-China dynamics. This section on India is the book’s weakest part.
Drawing from CIA’s declassified documents, the authors go on to describe the various covert efforts by US to ‘stir up trouble’ for the People’s Liberation Army in Tibet. It has some chilling details of Washington’s clandestine programme in Tibet during the Eisenhower administration. However, these operations were effectively dismissed in the 1970s as the Nixon-Kissinger policy sought to normalise relations with the communist government in China.
Potala Palace
Tibet: An Unfinished Story is relevant today as it explains that in international affairs, it is matsyanyaya or the ‘law of the jungle’ that applies. The strong prevail over the weak and becoming powerful is the only way for a sovereign state to survive. Tibet, for too long stayed in isolation, had constant struggles over succession of leadership and lacked a modern government, economy and military — all essential for enhancing national power. As a result, it was overcome by a more powerful entity. Thus, this book serves as a practical lesson in realpolitik in the true sense of the word.
The writer is a geopolitical analyst at The Takshashila Institution, an independent public policy think tank
