In the recent geopolitical tussle between China, India, and Maldives, the competing influence in Maldives saw China gaining a substantial base with Muizzu’s government formally establishing defense ties with China. The apprehension and setback that India felt were pronounced in its boycott as one of the largest contributors to Maldives’s economy following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Lakshadweep, an Indian archipelago situated near Maldives. To make matters worse, the pro-China-leaning government under Muizzu received a million bottles of water from Tibet, a “gift” from Yan Jinhai, the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) to the small nation which is facing a drinking water shortage . The news media in India were quick to point out the degrading state of Tibetan glaciers, adding to the environmental concerns due to climate change.
The reason for pointing the incident above is to highlight how the Tibet issue is closely associated with South Asian countries (SAARC in particular) and not just limited to the India-Tibet-China debate. For many years, Tibet has exclusively been seen as a subject of concern between India and China, be it issues of historical, territory, geostrategic, or geopolitics. Tibet shares a border with three South Asian countries (India, Nepal, and Bhutan), a religious and spiritual network with four countries (India, Bhutan, Sri-lanka and Nepal), and most importantly, South Asia’s great rivers originate from Tibet (Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej and Indus).
However, it is vital to recognize the absence of Tibet’s relevance and its study in the large annals of South Asian literature. Why has Tibet remained isolated from South Asian studies despite its proximity and cultural affinity? Why isn’t Tibet a part of the South Asian scholarship when three generations of exiled Tibetans have been born and brought up in India, Nepal, and Bhutan as a displaced group of people?
This short piece attempts to comprehend and explore the assumptions and rationality behind South Asia’s detachment and reluctance to engage with Tibet. This is not a comprehensive analysis of the subject, but rather to engage in a much-needed discussion on the status of Tibet in the context of South Asia.
Peter Hansen contends that the absence of subaltern studies in Tibetan studies is due to what he called “Tibetan exceptionalism” as both a politics of knowledge and a politics of the present. He further asserts that the Chinese occupation of Tibet since 1950 has rendered all kinds of research about Tibet politically sensitive. The conscious and consistent effort to sensitize the subject of Tibet and attempts to make it irrelevant adds to China’s growing influence and its expanding coercive means to alter history and narrative.
Yet another crucial point is to critically deconstruct the measures to instrumentalize and dehumanize the subject of Tibet, particularly in South Asian politics. In asymmetric relations between China and South Asian countries, the economy often takes priority as a dominating factor in a real politik relationship. China’s increasing footprint in South Asia has made regional powers like India increasingly anxious. To keep China at bay, India’s strategic community is increasingly encouraged to treat the Dalai Lama as a “strategic asset” and use the ‘Tibet card’ more consistently and creatively as a deterrent against China’s hostility towards India. Antara Singh continues to write on how certain groups in India consider Tibet as an impediment to developing cordial relations with China. The Tibet question in South Asia, particularly in India, is more or less tailored between loss and benefit i.e. whether Tibet is an ‘asset’ or acts as a destabilizing factor. In this highly charged self-interest scenario, any debates or discussions over Tibet have always been confined to geopolitics and strategies.
Therefore, significant resources have been directed toward framing policies or India’s concerns on the border issue with hardly any genuine effort put towards understanding Tibet, its history, culture, and politics (such as political economy, its bureaucracy, and its relationship with Beijing). The increasing enthusiasm for studying the Himalayan region and the Himalayan border has time and again been misunderstood as studying Tibet. In fact, it is a tiny silver of Tibetan territory, which therefore cannot be taken and studied in isolation from the rest of Tibet’s history, culture, and politics. What happens inside Tibet, (the so-called TAR, Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai) has a monumental impact on the border regions, but we hardly see countries in South Asia studying all these different aspects.
Nepal is a vivid example of how China’s influence in South Asia has driven its policies towards Tibet. Since 2008 Tibetan uprising and the subsequent security and intelligence-sharing agreements between Nepal and China, Nepal has suppressed all political expression and protest by Tibetans living in Nepal, and continue to face routine abuses by Nepali security forces denying Tibetans of their cultural and religious expression . Nepal was among the first nations to host exile Tibetans who flee persecution from China and has played a crucial role as a haven and gateway for Tibetans fleeing repression under Chinese rule. Today, under China’s comprehensive campaign of transnational repression coupled with its geopolitical weight allows it to assert unparalleled influence over countries like Nepal. The relationship between China and Nepal, which Amish Mulmi buoyantly calls, Nepal’s newfound affinity to the north, was unabashedly conceived at the expense of Tibetan’s basic human rights.
Currently, Tibet is facing humanitarian issues such as violation of human rights, environmental issues such as excessive damming of rivers and its impact downstream Asian countries, recurring border issues with India. However, the reality is that most countries treat and engage with them separately outside of Tibet or its political future. India’s concerns with Tibet and China along the border go back to the 1914 treaty, and the subsequent McMahon Line, but every time China claims Arunachal or parts of Ladakh, there is hardly any conversation on why China refuses to acknowledge the McMahon Line, and how India’s wholehearted acceptance of China’s occupation of Tibet runs counter to its acceptance of the 1914 Treaty which was signed between Tibet and British India.
Similarly, when countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and others protest against China’s damming of Tibet’s rivers, they rarely speak about the issue in the context of China’s urbanization project inside Tibet, its political economy, human rights, occupation, etc. while the reality is that all these issues are deeply intertwined. Although there might seem to occasionally and rarely acknowledge Tibet’s importance for South Asian countries, these countries only engage with particular facets of Tibet’s political and environmental fabric, but seldom do they talk about the region itself in their political statements.
It is time for scholars and policymakers in South Asia to move beyond Himalayan/border/security studies and to critically engage with Tibet and its multiple facets including history, culture, politics. There is a need to recognize that China’s policies inside Tibet have a significant influence on South Asian countries.