Let the boy lama stay

Let the boy lama stay
Arvind Kala

India's seeming discomfort in granting political asylum to the 14-year-old Karmapa seems truly odd from a government packed with ministers who themselves suffered political persecution. Nearly all of them, including Atal Behari Vajpayee, L. K. Advani, and George Fernandes, were locked up during 20 months of Indira Gandhi's emergency rule in 1975.

Jawaharlal Nehru had no reservations about letting in the Dalai Lama and 80,000 of his followers in 1959. Some 50,000 Tibetan refugees still live in India as do over one lakh Tamil fugitives from Sri Lanka. India wouldn't return these refugees if Colombo asked for them. So why should it send back the Karmapa who is charged with no crime?

India won't, because Jaswant Singh is India's first thinking Foreign Minister who disregards the advice of our ponderous foreign affairs bureaucracy. But the debate about political asylum for the Karmapa should highlight a larger truth about the world's democracies. They unhesitatingly provide shelter to refugees fleeingpolitical or religious persecution and India shouldn't violate this long-cherished tradition.

The US provided refuge to the Philippines Senator Benigno Aquino (husband of a future prime minister) who had been sentenced to death by the Ferdinand Marcos regime. Norway gave political asylum to writer Taslima Nasreen of Bangladesh. Great Britain sheltered the Naga pro-indepedence leader A. Z. Phizo for many years, and it was Nehru's greatness that he never asked for his deportation. Mizo leader, the late Laldenga, also got political sanctuary in England. The US similarly allowed in Ram Jethmalani and Subramaniam Swamy in 1975 when they fled Mrs Gandhi's emergency.

Even India has been hospitable to political refugees. U Nu, a former Burmese prime minister, lived for a couple of decades in India and was given government guards, a car and a bungalow. The family of former Afghanistan President Najibullah still lives in Delhi. So, political asylum to the Karmapa would be entirely in keeping with India'sdemocratic tradition.

Ironically, India's nervousness about the boy lama's situation is unnecessary. It flows from an over-reaction over an imagined Chinese touchiness at him getting shelter here. We forget to see that cordial US-China relations don't deter Washington from giving refuge to China's pro-democracy dissidents. But that hasn't spoilt US-China relations. So why should a Karmapa stay in India jeopardise India-China ties? Foreign relations are carried out at several levels. Disagreement on one issue doesn't sabotage co-operation in another. The US government accuses China of stealing its nuclear secrets but the two nations co-operate on a dozen issues. Yet our unimaginative Foreign Office considers the Karmapa issue as a catastrophe for India-China ties.

This is typical of the haphazard manner in which India's foreign policy is conducted. Fernandes in May 1998 didn't think of Chinese wrath when he made an accusation against China that he never substantiated: that Beijing was using surveillanceequipment to spy on some obscure Indian islands. But now when we should see the Karmapa situation as a minor bump in India-China relations, we are viewing it as a crisis.

It isn't. Beijing knows that our boundary differences apart, India has always done the right thing for 50 years. We recognised Beijing as the capital of the real China while the western world was propping up Taiwan. We supported China's entry into the UN Security Council. And we called Tibet an inalienable part of China. About the Karmapa, Beijing knows that a democracy like India cannot deport a high-profile refugee easily because even a simple public-interest litigation could stall his return.

The case of the Karmapa, however, is not a political or foreign relations issue. It's an issue of human rights. China's human rights record is poor. India simply cannot afford to send the Karmapa back to China and to a long prison term. An action like that would not only rouse international condemnation, it could even dampen foreign investmentin a wired world where Tibet, the Dalai Lama and Buddhism are a rage among the world's rich and fashionable.

-- Kala is a Delhi-based freelance journalist