Beijing protests PM’s meeting with Dalai Lama

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Indian Express
By C. Raja Mohan
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New Delhi: China has objected to a recent meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people in India. The protests were conveyed this week through diplomatic channels.

Delhi sees the meetings between the top Indian leadership and the Dalai Lama as routine and rarely announces them.

Beijing, which denounces the Dalai Lama as a “splittist,” finds all such meetings unacceptable as it keeps a wary eye on his activities in India where he has been in exile since 1959.

Sources said the meeting on August 11 was the first since the UPA coalition returned to power last year. The Dalai Lama’s representative in Delhi, Kalon Tenpa Tsering, told Voice of Tibet radio that the talks covered Tibet and other international issues.

On its part, Delhi does not see the PM’s meeting with the Dalai Lama as a change in India ’s Tibet policy. Beijing , however, may see a disconcerting pattern.

Beijing strongly opposed the visit of the Dalai Lama to Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh last November. It also objected to Singh’s visit to the state last October. As part of the boundary dispute with India, Beijing claims the entire territory of Arunachal Pradesh as part of China and has begun to call it “southern Tibet” in recent years. Beijing also blocked lending by the Asian Development Bank loans to projects in Arunachal Pradesh last year.

Since the unanticipated cooperation between Singh and the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in the climate change summit in Copenhagen at the end of 2009, Delhi and Beijing have sought to defuse tensions over Tibet and the boundary and expand the areas of engagement.

A series of high-level exchanges since then, including the visit of President Pratibha Patil to Beijing this summer, had begun to put the bilateral relations on a positive track. The visit of National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon to Beijing last month as a special envoy of the Prime Minister, saw the exploration of a new framework for productive engagement.