| jaw dropping main editorial in "The Hindu", a leading Indian newspaper run, not (as its name would suggest) by right wing Hindutva types, but by atheist Marxist types enamored of all things Chinese. |
If you go by western media reports, the propaganda of the so-called ‘Tibetan government-in-exile’ in Dharamsala and the votaries of the ‘Free Tibet’ cause, or by the fulminations of Nancy Pelosi and the Hollywood glitterati, Tibet is in the throes of a mass democratic uprising against Han Chinese communist rule. Some of the more fanciful news stories, images, and opinion pieces on the ‘democratic’ potential of this uprising have been put out by leading western newspapers and television networks. The reality is that the riot that broke out in Lhasa on March 14 and claimed a confirmed toll of 22 lives involved violent, ransacking mobs, including 300 militant monks from the Drepung Monastery, who marched in tandem with a foiled ‘March to Tibet’ by groups of monks across the border in India. In Lhasa, the rioters committed murder, arson, and other acts of savagery against innocent civilians and caused huge damage to public and private property. The atrocities included dousing one man with petrol and setting him alight, beating a patrol policeman and carving out a fist-size piece of his flesh, and torching a school with 800 terrorised pupils cowering inside. Visual images and independent eyewitness accounts attest to this ugly reality, which even compelled the Dalai Lama to threaten to resign. There was violence also in Tibetan ethnic areas in the adjacent provinces of Gansu and Sichuan, which, according to official estimates, took an injury toll of more than 700. Western analyses have linked these incidents to the March 10 anniversary of the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising, non-progress in the talks between the Dalai Lama’s emissaries and Beijing, China’s human rights record, and the Beijing Olympic Games, which will of course be held as scheduled from August 8 to 24.
Recent accounts, however, express unease and sadness over the containment of the troubles, the ‘large-scale,’ if belated and politically slow, response by Beijing, and the ‘brutal ease’ with which the protests have been ‘smothered’. In another context, say Pakistan under Pervez Musharraf, such a response would have been called exemplary restraint. As evidence accumulates, the realisation dawns that it is too much to expect any legitimate government of a major country to turn the other cheek to such savagery and breakdown of public order. So there is a shift in the key demand made on China: it must ‘initiate’ a dialogue with the Dalai Lama to find a sustainable political solution in Tibet. |