Tibet, Tehran, and More

This week’s column will journey westward from Tibet to Iran via India and Pakistan. I begin with the Dalai Lama, who will turn 90 on Sunday July 6. As one who has had the good fortune of being with him multiple times, starting from 1959, when, almost immediately after his escape from Chinese rule, I was able to meet him, I join the large numbers worldwide who want to wish him many happy returns. 

Called Tenzin Gyatso before he was identified as the 14th Dalai Lama, he is seen by Tibetan Buddhists as an incarnation of what Indians who know Sanskrit would call Avalokiteswara, a word translated at times as the spirit of compassion. In 1959, at the age of 24, the Dalai Lama had descended the Himalayas with his followers and entered India, where people and the government gave him a warm welcome. Ever since then, he and a sizable Tibetan community have lived in Dharamsala in the state of Himachal Pradesh. 

In his wake, large numbers of Tibetans left their homeland and now live in many parts of the world. India hosts a substantial Tibetan population, especially in the states of Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, though many younger ones have moved to other places on our earth. 

From time to time, New Delhi clarifies to the world and to Beijing that the Dalai Lama is being hosted as a spiritual leader, and that India accepts Tibet as part of China. The Dalai Lama does not dispute that connection either, but he has always wanted to be sure of two things. One, Tibet’s cultural, linguistic, and religious identity must endure. Secondly, Tibet’s prized natural environment must not be seriously damaged. 

NO ONE ELSE LIKE HIM 

There is no one else in our world quite like the Dalai Lama. His physical stature reminds us of high-altitude Tibet, a home -- vast in space and rich in natural grandeur -- that he has perhaps missed every hour of his life since 1959. If he receives the loving veneration of millions of Tibetans, a large number of non-Tibetans marvel at his ability to offer friendship and wisdom to others, and to laugh freely, despite the sorrows he carries.

He is the symbol of Tibet but also a mascot among humans anywhere who seek a kinder and fairer world, or a way of coping with an unkind and unfair world. 

Today he announced in Dharamsala that a trust founded by him will identify his future successor. CBS reports that “the decision is expected to irk China, which has repeatedly said that it alone has the authority to approve the next religious leader. It insists the reincarnated figure must be found in China’s Tibetan areas.” Adds CBS: 

“Many observers believe there eventually will be rival Dalai Lamas - one appointed by Beijing, and one by senior monks loyal to the current Dalai Lama.” 

Earlier speculation that, departing from historical practice, the Dalai Lama would identify an adult, female or male, as a successor has been scotched by his latest announcement. However, he clearly wants the people he trusts, rather than Beijing, to preserve a center of spiritual and moral authority for the Tibetan people. 

According to the BBC’s China correspondent, a question-and-answer session at the foreign ministry following the Dalai Lama’s latest announcement “makes it clear” that Beijing wants “the next Dalai Lama to come from China and the person must be approved by the Chinese government.” 

At ninety, the Dalai Lama is not being granted a tension-free future. 

SULLYING “PURE” WATERS 

Not everyone knows or remembers that the Tibet region has been called the world’s Third Pole, the North and South Poles being the first two. The Tibetan plateau is the third largest source of freshwater in the world, the two Poles being the other two. 

From Tibet’s high ground, great rivers -- including some of the world’s greatest -- flow in all directions. To China. To Southeast Asia -- Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar. To India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. And to Pakistan. In many cases, and not just between India and Pakistan, international agreements and treaties have governed the distribution of the precious waters that start their journeys in Tibet. 

After last May’s four-day war between India and Pakistan, India announced that it would put in abeyance the 1960 Indus Water Treaty. That treaty had survived three wars between India and Pakistan -- in 1965, 1971, and 1999. Mercifully, the ceasefire that ended the latest war last May has lasted till now. 

However, neither India nor Pakistan appears willing at this time to permit any gestures or words of friendship that might pollute the “pure” waters, useful to many interests, of mutual hostility. 

I am not the only old guy left who remembers pre-1947 India, when neither lands nor river waters needed to be neatly divided between “us” and “them,” when, in undivided Punjab, the cities of Amritsar and Lahore were two intermingling parts of a vast metropolis, and when the great port cities of Mumbai and Karachi were so deeply interconnected as to belong, until 1936, to the same Bombay province, or presidency, as it was then called. 

INVENTED CONTRAST 

Today, if you read newspapers in Lahore, Karachi, and Peshawar, on the one hand, and in Amritsar, Mumbai, and Delhi, on the other, you would imagine a fundamental, genetic, and unbridgeable difference between “Indians” and “Pakistanis.” Compared with this manufactured contrast, the Chinese and the Tibetans of the 21st century come across as people who were twinned at birth. 

Despite hiccups and hitches, our net-connected world allows a look at newspapers in “enemy” lands, although governments can always intervene and impose barriers in the name of “security” or “public health.” An Indian can look at Pakistan’s Dawn and find insightful, thoughtful articles but also sentences like the following: 

1) “Chief of Army Staff (Field Marshal Asim Munir) paid rich tribute to the unwavering courage and resilience of Pakistan’s security forces, who continue to confront and neutralise the Indian-sponsored Fitna-al-Khawarij with exemplary valour.” (Fitna-al-Khawarij is a term employed by Pakistan’s military and government to describe terroristic activity originating in Afghanistan that uses Islamic language for attacking civilian and military targets in Pakistan.) 

2) “The military has said India was using its ‘assets’ to intensify terrorist attacks in Pakistan.” 

3) “Earlier today, at least 13 security personnel were martyred in a suicide bombing in KP’s North Waziristan district, carried out by Indian proxy terrorists.” 

Bombarded by their media with reports like these, many Pakistanis must think (to the astonishment of most Indians) that New Delhi has the time, resources, and skills to organize, simultaneously, half a dozen major insurgencies in Pakistan’s western regions located far from the India-Pakistan border. 

If, on the other hand, you read India’s media, you would certainly have no idea of the range of the insurgencies that Pakistan does face day after day, including in Balochistan, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and in parts of Punjab. You would also think that the only South Asian country facing terrorism was India, and that Pakistan was behind that terrorism. 

The truth, discernible to the simplest of calm minds, is that the bulk of India’s and Pakistan’s difficulties are purely indigenous. The difficulties are pretty similar, too, for Indians and Pakistanis are pretty similar people – after all they were one people not so long ago. Advanced by power-seekers in both countries, the so-called “two-nation theory” holds that Hindus and Muslims possess different human natures and must clash with and destroy one another within one country or across the border. This is poisonous falsehood, not theory.

The Dalai Lama will tell us that such theories are bred by hate, greed, and fear, and that clear minds can easily expel the poison. 

ASSAULTS ON IRAN 

West of Pakistan, west also of Afghanistan, lies Iran, which also, for now, has the relief of a ceasefire after an 11-day war started by U.S.-backed Israeli attacks, a war which also saw massive, long-distance strikes by U.S. super-bombers on Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. Iran retaliated by sending missiles to Israeli cities that could not all be foiled by Israel’s fabled “iron dome”. 

The ceasefire has certainly not ended Iran’s hardships. And the possibility surely remains of fresh American, and perhaps Israeli, attacks on sites where uranium may continue to be processed, or of attacks to force the surrender of uranium already processed. The leaders and people of Iran will have to figure out whether continuing to refine uranium for possible military use is wise or not. 

Like the rest of us, Iranians live in an unfair world. There is nothing impartial in policies that permit Israel to amass nuclear weapons while firmly preventing Iran from getting anywhere close to even the possibility of preparing weapon-grade uranium. Still, if the choice is between fairness and survival, those who love the people of Iran will hope that they choose the latter.

The people of Iran will also choose the sort of internal reform they need. Meanwhile the people of the world are still absorbing the callousness of the bombing and the threats that sought but failed to bring Iran to its knees. 

“Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” That, in five words, was what the city’s ten million, living their animated lives in bustling Tehran, were told on June 16. Those ten million, rich and poor, women and men, the old and the children, are inheritors of an almost incomparable legacy of poetry, art, wit, and skills of a hundred kinds, including the culinary. Built over centuries, Tehran’s legacy is available to the world as a whole.

It would only be natural if people in the world wish Tehran a noble recovery.