A Shadow over the Himalayas: India's Tibet Problem

It analyses three years of building tensions between China and India over, nominally, the Arunachal Pradesh that could very well have led to conflict. These tensions were ultimately diffused after a high-level, bilateral discussion held on the margins of the APEC meeting at Hua Hin, Thailand on October 24, 2009. The author explains that "the root cause of China's ambivalence towards India is not the persistence of disagreement over the demarcation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), or the status of Arunachal Pradesh, but its own failure to assimilate the Tibetans into the mainstream of its civilization and politics." But New Delhi's misreading of the importance of the Tibetan issue for Beijing is also problematic. "New Delhi's failure to link the deterioration of relations...with China's growing problems in Tibet arises from the vast asymmetry in the importance China and India attach to Tibet. To India, the Tibetans in exile (around 120,000) remain refugees who sought political asylum, and have now only to be discouraged from taking hostile political actions against China from Indian soil. Beijing, however, regards them as a well-knit insurgent group based in India that skillfully mobilizes international sympathy and uses the internet to reach Tibetans within China to foment an insurgency."

Despite the calming of tensions following Hua Hin, "the underlying problems in Tibet remain. The Dalai Lama remains in India with his freedom and respect unimpaired. The Tibetan community in India continues to grow, prosper and communicate with Tibetans in the West, and within China via internet. The Tibetan ethnic and political identity therefore remains undented. Thus a resurgence of Sino-Indian tension whenever the Chinese face problems in Tibet remains a distinct possibility."