SPECIAL FRONTIER FORCE – INDIA – CHINA RELATIONS:

I am pleased to share the article titled “TIBET IS THE REAL SOURCE OF SINO-INDIAN FRICTION” by Brahma Chellaney that was published by Nikkei Asian Review in its edition dated September 26, 2014. I speak on behalf of Special Frontier Force and The Living Tibetan Spirits. I often describe about my “Kasturi-Sarvepalli-Mylapore-India-Tibet-US” Connection and I openly promote friendly relations between India and Tibet and support the condition called ‘Natural Freedom’ in the Land of Tibet. The military invasion and occupation of Tibet is not consistent with the principles of Panch Sheela Agreement that India signed during 1954. At that time, both Tibet, and India desired friendly relations with China and had used diplomacy to influence China to relax its military grip over Tibet. Tibetans for centuries enjoyed a natural sense of Freedom in spite of foreign invasions by Mongols and later Manchu China. It may be noted that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was not arrested after China’s successful military attack in 1950. He had continued to occupy Patola Palace in Lhasa and had visited New Delhi along with China’s Prime Minister Chou En-Lai and during May 1956 during 2500th Buddha Jayanti (Gautama Buddha’s Birth Anniversary) Celebration.

Both India, and Tibet had good reasons to entertain an optimistic view about Tibet’s status and had anticipated that China would relent and allow Tibetans to enjoy their natural Freedom and their traditional way of life which is guided by the political philosophy called ‘Isolationism’. The Great 13th Dalai Lama had declared Tibet’s full independence on February 13, 1913 after the fall of Manchu China’s regime during 1911. However, Tibet did not establish formal diplomatic relations with other countries and remained aloof from the events shaping world history.

I am only seeking transparency and full public accountability while nations pursue their foreign policies to promote their own national interests. People’s Republic of China has to make a choice and it can choose to establish friendly relations with Tibet and India and maintain its trade and commerce relations with the United States and the rest of the world.

Rudranarasimham Rebbapragada
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-4162, USA
SPECIALFRONTIERFORCE.ESTABLISHMENT22

September 26, 2014 7:00 pm JST

Brahma Chellaney: Tibet is the real source of Sino-Indian friction

The sprawling, mountainous country of Tibet was annexed by China in the 1950s, eliminating a historical buffer with India. Today, the region remains at the heart of Sino-Indian problems, including territorial disputes, border tensions and water feuds. Beijing lays claim to adjacent Indian territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan ecclesial or tutelary links, rather than an ethnic Chinese connection.
So when Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled in mid-September to India — home to Tibet’s government in exile — Tibet loomed large. The Tibetan plateau, and the military tensions the issue provokes, will also figure prominently in the Sept. 29-30 summit at the White House between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Barack Obama, who has urged Beijing to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader revered as a god-king by Tibetans.
Xi’s visit to New Delhi began with the visitor toasting Modi’s birthday. But, underlining the deep divide regarding Tibet, the visit was overshadowed by a Chinese military incursion across the traditional Indo-Tibetan border. It was as if the incursion — the biggest in terms of troop numbers in many years and the trigger for a military standoff in the Ladakh region — was Xi’s birthday gift for Modi.

An Indian policeman restrains a Tibetan youth during a protest in New Delhi on Sept. 19. The rally against China’s control of Tibet was held outside the Taj Palace Hotel, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping was staying. © AP
Close

An Indian policeman restrains a Tibetan youth during a protest in New Delhi on Sept. 19. The rally against China’s control of Tibet was held outside the Taj Palace Hotel, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping was staying. © AP

Modi’s government, for its part, allowed Tibetan exiles to stage street protests during the two days that Xi was in New Delhi, including some close to the summit venue. This reversed a pattern that had held since the early 1990s, in which police routinely prevented such protests during the visits of Chinese leaders. During the decade-long reign of Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, police would impose a lockdown on the Indian capital’s Tibetan quarter and beat up Tibetans who attempted to rally.
Such brutal practices would have befitted a repressive autocracy like China, but not a country that takes pride in being the world’s largest democracy. In any event, the muzzling of protests won India no gratitude from an increasingly assertive China.
It was a welcome change that India permitted members of its large Tibetan community to exercise their legitimate democratic rights. Even the Dalai Lama felt at liberty to speak up during Xi’s visit, reminding Indians: “Tibet’s problem is also India’s problem.” The Tibetan protests, although peaceful, rattled China, which had grown accustomed to Indian authorities doing its bidding.
When Modi took office in May, the prime minister of Tibet’s government in exile, Lobsang Sangay, was invited to the swearing-in event. So Xi sought an assurance that the Modi government regards Tibet as part of China. Modi has yet to speak his mind on this issue in public, but the Chinese foreign ministry, apparently citing private discussions, announced: “Prime Minister Modi said that Tibet is a part of China, and India does not allow any separatist activities on its soil.”
Diplomatic fumbles
Tibet — the world’s highest and largest plateau — separated the Chinese and Indian civilizations until relatively recently, limiting their interaction to sporadic cultural and religious contact, with no political relations. It was only after China forcibly occupied Tibet that Chinese military units appeared for the first time on the Himalayan frontiers.
The fall of Tibet represented the most profound and far-reaching geopolitical development in India’s modern history. It led to China’s bloody trans-Himalayan invasion in 1962 and its current claims to vast tracts of additional Indian land.
Yet Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954 surrendered India’s extraterritorial rights in Tibet — inherited from Britain at independence — and accepted the existence of the “Tibet region of China” with no quid pro quo,not even Beijing’s acknowledgement of the then-prevailing Indo-Tibetan border. He did this by signing a pact mockingly named after the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine of Panchsheela, or the five principles of peaceful coexistence. As agreed in the pact, India withdrew its “military escorts” from Tibet and conceded to China, at a “reasonable” price, the postal, telegraph and public telephone services operated by the Indian government in the region.
Years later, another Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, went further. During Vajpayee’s visit to Beijing in 2003, China wrung from India the concession it always wanted — an unambiguous recognition of Tibet as part of China. Vajpayee went so far as to use the legal term “recognize” in a document signed by the two nations’ heads of government, confirming that what China calls the Tibet Autonomous Region was “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.”
This opened the way for China to claim the large northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh — three times the size of Taiwan. Please read on..

TIBET IS THE REAL SOURCE OF SINO-INDIAN FRICTION