Lhasa, July 26
The government of Tibet says that if the Dalai Lama accepts the preconditions set by the Chinese government and returns to Tibet, it will make “good arrangements” for him but he should not expect any special privileges because he has done “no good” for his country during the 45 years that he has been away from it.
Mr Tuden Tsewang, Executive Vice-Chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), said here today that while on the one hand the Dalai Lama says that he wants to return, on the other he wants total autonomy for Tibet and some other Tibetan majority states. This was an unrealistic and impractical demand. He should realise that Tibet is and always was an integral part of China and history could not be rewritten.
Mr Tuden Tsewang even went to the extent of saying that according to his perspective, if the Dalai Lama breathed his last in Dharamsala or any other place outside Tibet, his body won’t be buried in the Potala Palace — a privilege extended to his predecessors — because in place of acting as a religious leader, he had been conducting himself as a political leader and harming the Tibetan cause.
He repeated the pre-conditions which everyone in China parrots about the Dalai Lama’s return. One, he must accept that Tibet is an inalienable part of China and so is Taiwan. Two, he must stop all activities aimed at “splitting the region from China”. Three, he must accept the sovereignty of the Chinese government. ‘Since you live in India, you have always heard only what the Dalai Lama says. For this once, please also listen to our side of the story and see and assess the ground situation yourself,’ he pleaded.
The number two man in the Tibetan administration was at pains to assert that Tibet had made big strides since the TAR was established. The GDP which was 265 million yuan in 1965 today stood at 18 billion yuan. The annual average income in this period had risen from 240 yuan to 680 yuan. There were better roads, airports, schools and health centres today.
He also denied the large-scale incursion of Han Chinese into Tibet, saying that they did not number more than 5 per cent. Many of these were temporary visitors during the summers, he claimed. In any case, he said the ethnicity should not matter as long as a person worked towards the development and progress of a region.
His government was all for opening more trade routes and welcoming Indian tourists, but first this matter had to be settled between the two governments bilaterally.
Earlier, Mr Tu Deng, Assistant Supervisor of the Nationality and Religious Affairs Committee of the TAR, took an equally firm line on the return of the Dalai Lama. When this correspondent confronted him with a blunt question as to why his government did not allow anyone to worship the present Dalai Lama or even carry his picture, while at the same time claiming that the Tibetan people were totally free to follow any religion, he flatly denied that any such restrictions were in place. It was their private decision.
’We cannot force people not to believe him’. People were free to worship the Dalai Lama although they could not be allowed to do so in public. Why? “Because there are serious and fundamental differences between him and the Central Chinese Government”.
In fact, he plugged the line that the centre should educate the people and ‘expose’ the Dalai Lama’s ‘hypocrisy’. His pictures are not allowed in public ‘because there is no need for this’.
Incidentally, there is no picture or statue of the Dalai Lama in the Potala Palace. He also does not find any mention whatsoever in official publications.
