The involvement of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India in matters outside their purview on a political level is worrisome. The political leadership of the Tibetan refugees is making provocative statements which impact India’s internal affairs and jeopardise the fragile relations between India and China.
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THE worry beads used by Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus are believed to focus the mind. However, as we approach the end game of the Great Game on the Tibetan Plateau, focus seems to be the one thing missing in the Indian ruling party’s trans-Himalayan policy.
The return to an autonomous— forget an independent— Tibet is akin to a pilgrimage to the mythical Shambala.
Since the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s era, populism and its twin, authoritarianism, have found their feet in what has become the present Hindu fundamentalist dispensation.
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INDIA was a successor state to the British Raj. For a post-colonial State, it had a design fault. From day one, it did little to democratise the repressive apparatus of the colonial State it inherited.
Preventive detention was retained and strengthened. Due process of law was given the heave-ho. The intelligence agencies who had served the colonial masters so well continued to do so under their Congress masters with no parliamentary accountability.
Institutional impunity for human rights violations and the calls for mandatory compensation were met with classic stonewalling.
On the economic front, the new Nehru government scuppered land reform, the one major issue that would have brought a degree of equity to rural India, where most of India lived then as now.
In spite of professed claims, no real effort was made to create a welfare State on the western social democratic model. Universal healthcare and education were not priorities. Employment generation was in the realm of ether.
Since then, populism and its twin, authoritarianism, have found their feet in what has become the present Hindu fundamentalist dispensation.
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“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing, beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(Ozymandias— Percy Bysshe Shelley)
THE major theme behind Ozymandias is that no matter how arrogant or tyrannical a ruler may be, all power is temporary. Even the most powerful will eventually be brought low, their name nearly forgotten and monuments to their power becoming buried in the sand.