HOW A VISIONARY DALAI LAMA CREATED AN UNBELIEVABLE HISTORY IN EXILE
-By VIJAY KRANTI
What makes the Dalai Lama and his fellow Tibetan refugees stand tall as a community among a host of other refugee groups across the world today is their remarkable success in reviving their national identity despite the most ruthless adversary and emerging as one of the most organized and productive refugee communities of recent human history.
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, represents one of the most outstanding examples of how a single leader with vision, commitment and faith in his people can play wonders. When he escaped from Tibet to India in 1959 from the clutches of Chinese army, he was a 24 year old monk. He had already lost whatsoever residual powers and privileges that the occupying People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had granted him as the dethroned monk ruler of occupied Tibet in 1951. Neither he nor any of his accompanying Tibetan officials had any experience in international politics. The 80,000 and odd Tibetans, who followed him in exile, were in a still worse shape. Traumatized by the violence unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the PLA and exhausting journey across snow covered high passes, they hardly qualified to be an ‘asset’ to themselves or their leader. In their early years of exile hundreds of these penniless and homeless refugees died in their shanty camps due to unbearable exhaustion, sudden climate change, Cholera and other diseases. In terms of language, education or skills too, hardly anyone among them was equipped even to earn their next meal in a totally unfamiliar world.
With all such liabilities and disadvantages at his hand, it was surely not an envious position from where the Dalai Lama was supposed to take on his belligerent Communist adversary. The very first part of this challenge was to organize safe and peaceful shelter for the refugees and initiate a new era of reconstruction with the help of whatever manpower at this command. The other challenge was to win support of a not so enthusiastic community of nations. But thanks to Dalai Lama’s own vision, his organizational capacities and the fellow refugees’ faith in him, we today find him and his Tibetan diaspora quite reasonably successful in making a respectable place for themselves in a half-friendly, half-indifferent world.
DALAI LAMA
At his personal level too, the distance that the Dalai Lama has covered in past 65 years of exile is surely a matter of envy even for some of the best known political and social personalities of recent human history. Today he stands tallest among the living generation of statesmen and social leaders. Decorated with a Nobel Peace Prize, Magsaysay Award, the Congressional Gold Medal of the US Congress, The Templeton Award and countless other honours from leading international institutions, parliaments and governments, the Dalai Lama has emerged as a unique statesman and spiritual leader with an exceptionally wide acceptance and respect across faiths, nationalities and political ideologies.
REHABILITATION
The Tibetan refugee community under Dalai Lama’s leadership too has evolved over this period to a level from where it can present itself as one of the most successful refugee stories of modern world. In all, about 150,000 Tibetans live in exile today. Out of this nearly 100,000 live in India and about 20 thousand in Nepal and Bhutan. Rest are scattered across the globe — a good majority of them living in Switzerland, the USA, Canada and some other Western countries. Thanks to a well thought rehabilitation policy for the Tibetan refugees, initiated by Late Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, the erstwhile Prime Minister of India, most of the Tibetan refugees in India are settled in about 35 well-organized settlements in Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Kashmir, Uttarakhand, West Bengal, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and some other states of India. There are 10 similar settlements in Nepal and 5 in Bhutan. The largest section of these refugees in India has been settled in Karnataka, the erstwhile state of ‘Mysore’ in southern India, at places like Bylakuppe, Mundgod, Kollegal and Hunsoor.
Late S. Nijlingappa, the Chief Minister of erstwhile Mysore state played a historic role in rehabilitating the Tibetan refugees in India by providing large tracks of jungle lands to them in his state. The next state that has made most remarkable contribution in this direction is Himachal Pradesh which, besides playing host to the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government-in-exile at Dharamshala, has provided land and other facilities for Tibetan settlements in places like Shimla, Bir, Paonta Sahib, Chauntra, Pandoh, Purwala, Manali, Palanpur and Dalhausie. Former undivided state of Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand) is another state which hosts a sizeable number of Tibetan refugees in well-organized settlements at Dehradun, Herbertpur and Mussoorie. While government of India provided land and education facilities to the Tibetan refugee community, generous financial and material support from numerous aid agencies and individuals from some western countries too has played remarkable role in helping Tibetans reach where they have proudly arrived today.
The Tibetan settlement of Chandragiri in Odisha state also occupies a place of pride in this list because of personal initiatives of this state’s former Chief Minister (late) Biju Patnaik. Before entering politics and becoming the Chief Minister of his home State, Patnaik was a dare devil pilot of Indian Air Force who played an important role in the establishment and training of Tibetan guerrilla warriors into a specialized elite unit of Indian Army in the form of ‘Special Frontier Force’ (SFF) which is more popular as ‘Establishment-22’ or ‘Two-Two’ in short. In later years the SFF played a decisive role in the liberation war of Bangla Desh in 1971. And most recently in 2020, it thronged the hearts of entire India and became the topic of news headlines when the ‘Two-Two’ boys turned the table on the aggressive Chinese Army in Ladakh by occupying some strategic heights overlooking the Chinese PLA.
ECONOMY
Established as exclusive mini Tibetan-zones, these Tibetan settlements in India enjoy a reasonably good cultural and economic autonomy, as provided by the Central government of India and the host state governments. This has helped the Tibetans to preserve and promote their language, religion, education, handicrafts, spiritual and secular fine arts and their regional social practices. Access to vast farming lands and establishment of a variety of cooperative handicrafts centres in these settlements too have proved a blessing for the Tibetan refugees to make a respectable living. The cooperative societies of Tibetan refugee community have also emerged as a unique success story in India where, though the cooperative movement has been adopted at national level, yet it has been always facing many problems due to corruption and politics. Tibetan settlements represent one of those rare communities in India where cooperatives have not only succeeded in effective functioning but have also played a significant role in the economic emancipation of the concerned Tibetan groups and communities. Right from conducting their farming activities in the fields to marketing of agro products, milk societies and handicraft centres, the community has demonstrated outstanding capability of working as an organized and disciplined society. Personal entrepreneur skills and business acumen at individual and family levels, a quality for which Tibetans have been known since ages, too have helped this refugee community to acquire a reasonably reliable financial autonomy and prosperity.
HIGHER LEARNING AND EDUCATION
Over these decades a big chain of monasteries have now come to stay as centres of higher learning in various aspects of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism in the Tibetan settlements. Established and run by the Tibetan scholars, the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies (CITHS) at Sarnath near Varanasi has emerged as a leading centre of studies in the field of philosophy and religion in India. Because of its achievements in the field of education and research CITHS has attained recognition as a deemed-university from the University Grant Commission of India. In addition to the CITHS the Tibetan scholars have also played important role in establishing more than two similar deemed-universities which include ones at Leh in Ladakh and one at Gangtok in Sikkim. In addition to CITHS quite a few other Tibetan centres of learning in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh too are attracting scholars and researchers from many countries across the globe. One of many remarkable contributions of CITHS is its project of reviving lost Indian literature. It has brought back to life over 100 such classic Sanskrit manuscripts which Indian scholars had given up as ‘dead’ or permanently lost due to Moghul vandalism in Nalanda and other reasons in past centuries. These books had survived in Tibet as Tibetan translations by Tibetan scholars who had studied at Nalanda. Interestingly, these manuscripts have been revived from the books brought by Tibetan refugee scholars with them to India while fleeing from Tibet. There are approximately 230 such high ranking monasteries and institutions today in India and some other countries which have come to life as a result of efforts by Tibetan refugee scholars.
One of the basic reasons behind Tibetan diaspora’s success story is its education system which has so far produced two generations of educated Tibetans who are now managing the entire Tibetan system in exile. It was Indian Prime Minister Nehru who, on the very first day of his meeting with Dalai Lama in 1959 at Mussoorie, initiated the establishment of ‘Central Tibetan School Administration’ for providing modern and traditional education to Tibetan children. Today there are 62 Tibetan schools with over 15 thousand students and over 2000 teachers and staff in India and Nepal which have made Tibetan diaspora a proud community with over 90 percent literacy.
REVIVAL OF MAHAYANA BUDDHISM
On the front of religion too, the Tibetan diaspora has played big role in giving a new lease of life to Mahayana Buddhism which had lost its popularity in recent history. Although forcible takeover of Tibet by China and subsequent flight of Dalai Lama to exile in India has been the most unfortunate development of Tibet’s modern history, yet it proved to be blessing in disguise for Mahayana Buddha Dharma. Thanks to Dalai Lama’s personal popularity at the international level and his extensive travels across the world, hundreds of Buddhist centres of learning and practice with millions of non-Tibetan followers have made the Tibetan Buddhism quite popular today.
ARTS AND CRAFTS
Besides these centres of learning the Tibetan refugee community has also developed an impressive network of high ranking centres which provide training in traditional Tibetan fine arts, folk crafts, traditional music, performing arts and Tibetan medicine. These remarkable achievements of this microscopic Tibetan refugee community in India have made India the largest reservoir of authentic Tibetan culture in the world. A major secret behind this success story of Tibetan diaspora is the Dalai Lama’s vision for future Tibet and his skill of organizing his follow refugees. It was mainly because of Dalai Lama’s ability of identifying the talent and capabilities of surviving Tibetan artists, craftsmen and scholars and encouraging them to pass on their knowledge and skill to the younger generation that these efforts have today grown into institutions of excellence in their respective fields. This success story of Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people looks far more impressive when seen in context of the fact that these institutions are built by those hapless people who had lost all their worldly possessions and could just manage to escape from their Fatherland in the midst of Chinese atrocities.
THE ‘MOMO’ REVOLUTION
There are quite a few areas in which the Tibetan refugee community has made its own mark and has won a special place in the hearts of their Indian hosts. Some prominent areas in this list are the business of retail woolen selling, fast food, medicine and education. In the winter months there is hardly any Indian city which does not boast of a ‘Tibetan Market’ where Tibetans, most of them women, are omnipresent as ‘Sweater Sellers’ with loads of knitted and other woolen clothes at attractive prices. Another thing which has made Tibet a household name in India — right from Ladakh in North to Kanyakumari in South and from Jamnagar of Gujarat in the West to Guwahati in the East – is the omnipresent Tibetan MOMO — the mouthwatering dumpling. In earlier years of Tibetans’ arrival in India, Momo became synonymous with Tibet as students and families, out on a shopping spree at Tibetan places like Majnu-ka-Tila in Delhi, would enjoy it as an exotic and low cost food at small Tibetan ‘Dhabas’ (roadside food joints). But very soon the popularity of Tibetan Momo broke all flood gates and today it has become an integral part of normal Indian Dhabas and food joints too.
Like Tibetan food the Tibetan medicine too has played a big role in winning hearts of ordinary Indians. An impressive chain of scores of ‘Men-tse-Khang’ clinics, popularly known as ‘Tibetan Medical Centers’ and manned by Tibetan doctors, has come up in many cities and towns across India. A large number of Indian patients come to these centres for treatment of a large variety of ailments ranging from ordinary skin and digestion problems to complicated diseases like arthritis and Cancer. These medical centres, known for their low-cost and effective treatment are run by Tibetan doctors who have been trained at the ‘Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute of HH the Dalai Lama’ at Dharamshala. The medicines and other herbal formulations, produced by this Institute today occupy an important place in the Tibetan community’s exports list as do the Tibetan rugs and carpets, metal crafts, Thangkas (religious paintings) and noodles.
The large network of Tibetan schools in Tibetan settlements too has come as a blessing for the families and children belonging to surrounding Indian communities. Following a drastic drop in the number of Tibetan escapees from Tibet in recent years the number of Indian students has increased noticeably in these Tibetan schools. Similarly the Tibetan monasteries and other institutes of higher learning too are accommodating a good number of students form India’s Himalayan border states and foreign countries including Europe, America, Mongolia, Russia and Vietnam etc.
THE GREAT PUBLISHING COMMUNITY
Tibetan people’s love for music, dance, theatre and literature has expressed itself in a unique way which has placed this microscopic diaspora in a league which none other refugee community across the world can ever join. The number of published music albums and published literature of every kind – from popular literature to serious philosophical works – produced by the Tibetan artists, writers, philosophers and researchers during past 65 years can be a matter of envy for many independent nations too.
NEW TECHNOLOGIES
The agility and dexterity of the Tibetan people on the front of adopting newer trends in technology too is outstanding. I remember how the development of Tibetan language typewriter by an enthusiastic team of Tibetans in Dharamshala was celebrated as an epoch making development in mid 1970s. Having been in close association with the Tibetan diaspora for over fifty years, I am always amazed at the speed with which this community has adopted to new and complex technologies like computer and information technology. While organizing my long chain of international webinars on issues related to Tibet and China in recent years, I have been always impressed by the perfection of young Tibetans who run the ‘Tibet Action Institute’ at Dharamshala and operate an effective firewall against highly resourceful Chinese army of digital intruders.
The latest example of this Tibetan versatility in new digital technologies is the ‘Monlam IT Research Centre’ which has attained remarkable success on four primary machine learning models namely Machine Translation Model, OCR Model, Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech Model. This project has established a very efficient and practical bridge between the Tibetan and many other world languages. Developed by Geshe Monlam, a dynamic Lama, this system has already crossed its critical stage and is now available (www.monlam.ai) to anyone across the world to exchange texts between Tibetan and other languages. Besides developing the Tibetan ‘Monlam’ font for using computers in Tibetan language, this monk scholar has also developed a massive ‘Monlam Grand Tibetan Dictionary’ in 223 volumes.
A DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM
The Tibetan political system too has moved a long distance from a typically feudal theocracy to a modern democracy which functions through an elected ‘Sikyong’, (Tibetan equivalent of ‘President’) and the ‘Chitue’, the Parliament. Both are elected through adult franchise and secret ballot by the Tibetan community members who are spread over more than two dozen countries across the continents. Under this system all three pillars of Tibetan system namely the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary enjoy independent powers to maintain the equilibrium of the system. It was soon after his escape to India in 1959 that the Dalai Lama made a revolutionary change in the Tibetan system of governance. On 12th September 1960 he redefined the Tibetan constitution on modern democratic values in contrast to the prevailing system based on theocratic and feudal values. Since then he has been introducing many more democratic reforms. This process touched it crescendo in 2011 when he handed over all political powers, vested in him for being the Dalai Lama, to the Tibetan executive under the leadership of the ‘Sikyong’. A second tier legislative system also operates at each refugee community or settlement level. Currently there are 38 such local Assemblies, functioning in various settlements.
The ‘Central Tibetan Administration’ (CTA), better known as ‘Tibetan Government-in-Exile’ (TGIE) has its headquarters at ‘Gangchen Kyishong’ (in short ‘Gang-Kyi’) in Dharamshala. A complex of typically Tibetan looking buildings, spread along the hill slopes and overlooked by the snow-line of Himalayan Dhauladhar range, ‘Gang-Kyi’ houses all main offices of the CTA. These include the Parliament House, the Cabinet Secretariat, the Supreme Justice Commission and also the offices of the Ministries of Home, Religion and Culture, Health, Finance, Information and International Relations, Education and Security. Each ministry is headed by a ‘Kalon’ (minister) who are selected by the ‘Sikyong’ and approved by the Parliament. Some other prominent institutions that dot this Tibetan complex include the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Tibetan Medical and Astro Institute, Delek Hospital and the state oracle Nechung’s temple.
The CTA also runs 12 international Missions, designated as ‘Office of Tibet‘, ‘Dalai Lama’s Bureau’ or ‘Tibet House’ in New Delhi, New York, Paris, Brussels, Taipei, Tokyo, Geneva, London, Canberra, Moscow and Pretoria. The Representative office of Dalai Lama in Kathmandu was shut down by King Gyanendra under pressure from Beijing in 2007.
In matters of political education and activities among the Tibetan refugee community a number of action groups and community groups are quite active among the Tibetan diaspora. Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) is the largest and most popular political group among them. Other groups which dominate the political and NGO scene in their respective fields include Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA), Gu-Chu-Sum the organization of former political prisoners, Tibetan Freedom Movement and Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD). Similarly, hundreds of active Tibet support groups. Initiated and run by local supporters have emerged across the world in recent years. Some Tibet support and outreach groups like “International Campaign for Tibet” (ICT), “Students For A Free Tibet” (SFT) and “Friends of Tibet” (FOT) have grown beyond the boundaries of any single country of their origin into international movements.
It is not an ordinary achievement that parliaments across the world, including the European Parliament, US Congress and a host of other parliaments have passed over 100 resolutions expressing their support to Dalai Lama and Tibetans, or criticizing China in context of Tibet. Every 10th March, the anniversary of Tibetan people’s uprising of 1959 against the Chinese occupation, hundreds of city municipalities across Europe, especially in Germany, hoist Tibetan national flag on their official buildings to express their solidarity with Tibetan people. In Germany alone, this count has crossed the 1000 mark many times in recent past as a result of the initiatives taken by the ‘Tibet Initiative Deutscheland’. Recent passage of “Tibet Policy Act” by the US Congress and its subsequent signing by the US President to make it a law has come as a historic shot in the arm of Tibet’s fight for justice and independence. All this shows how the Dalai Lama and his fellow Tibetan refugees have fared in their national struggle since 1959. No wonder the Tibetan refugee community has earned a place in the list of most successful refugee stories of modern world history. That explains why Dalai Lama stands tall in the international community of leaders and statesmen of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The post Tibet Reborn – A Unique Refugee Saga first appeared on Central Tibetan Administration.
The post Tibet Reborn – A Unique Refugee Saga appeared first on Central Tibetan Administration.
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