Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Obama’s meeting with Dalia Lama is off for now

The time and energy wasted on non-issues such as whether the president forged his birth certificate makes us oblivious to flashing signals, some more urgent than others, from around the world.

Case in point: the remarkably under-reported news that President Obama has “quietly postponed an audience with the Dalai Lama until after he visits China in November.”

The Chicago Sun Times — the president’s hometown newspaper — notes that “White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrettt, who seemed to vanish at the end of last week, was actually dispatched to India on a delicate diplomatic mission: President Obama tapped her to meet with the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama.”

Even the vice president’s visits to Iraq appear to be more transparent!

The postponement of the meeting confirms, yet again, the triumph of realpolitik over principles.

When we owe China more than $800 billion, perhaps we have no option other than to make sure that we do not upset our primary foreign lender.

However, the postponement is not without geopolitical complexities involving the United States, China and India.

Sino-Indian relations, which had been improving in the 1990s, have been on a downturn over the past couple of years.

The downturn has even resulted in very brief military incidents. One of the main sore points is over Arunachal Pradesh, a state in northeastern India. China has always claimed Arunachal Pradesh as its territory and considers it a part of Tibet.

The territorial boundary that China disputes — the MacMahon Line — dates back to 1914, before the independence of India and before the founding of the China we know today.

India became independent of Britain in 1947, and the People’s Republic of China came into existence in 1949. It can be argued that neither India nor China was party to the MacMahon Line, but both have been forced to coexist with that boundary in the rugged Himalayan terrain.

So, where does the Dalai Lama fit into this territorial dispute, even when he is in no way directly responsible for the recent tiffs between these two countries?

For one, the Dalai Lama has lived in northern India — in Dharmasala — ever since he fled Lhasa, Tibet, in 1959. The Dalai Lama’s escape path out of Lhasa went through Tawang, which is in Arunachal Pradesh and whose monastery is the second oldest after Lhasa’s.

A few years after his arrival in India, the Dalai Lama was requested by the Tawang Monastery to send a lama who would be qualified to be the abbot, and this further cemented his association with Tawang.

In 2008, when the Dalai Lama planned to visit Tawang, the Indian government prevented him from doing so because it did not want to upset the Chinese government, which considers this trip a political act by the “splittist” Dalai Lama.

This year, however, the Indian government has approved the Dalai Lama’s plans to visit Tawang in November, perhaps sensing that continuing to appease the Chinese government might be interpreted as a sign of weakness and could cloud its sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh.

Meanwhile, there have been reports of Chinese military incursions into Indian territories.

All of these things have concerned the Indian government so much that the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was compelled to react, and promptly accused the media of blowing things out of proportion.

It was against such intense geopolitical backdrop that the Dalai Lama was scheduled to meet with Obama during the Dalai Lama’s visit to the United States in October. This meeting is now a no-go.

Of course, the story continues. In mid-November, Obama is scheduled to go to China on his first official visit, which is, ironically, about the same time as the Dalai Lama’s fifth visit to Tawang.

However, unlike the president, the Dalai Lama is not quite in control of his own calendar.

Buddhists — monks and laypeople alike — in India’s northeastern states have begun special prayers hoping that these would ensure the Dalai Lama’s visit.

Let us see if the prayers bear fruit. And, maybe, the Dalai Lama will even get to meet with Obama at the White House.

For The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Wednesday, Sep 23, 2009

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