Despite China’s earlier assurance to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, there no longer seems any possibility of Beijing entering into negotiations any time soon with the Dalai Lama for a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue that, as recent rioting and violent protests show, remains a tinderbox. Beijing’s brutal suppression of the protests may have doused the situation but it does not necessarily solve even China’s immediate problem of ensuring the smooth conduct of the Olympics, on which it has invested not just $3 billion but also its entire prestige as a superpower in waiting, leave alone the long-term goal of ensuring peace in the discontented minority province.

It is therefore both astonishing and shocking that Beijing should have denounced, indeed maligned, the Dalai Lama in most intemperate language. It continues to accuse him of being the “mastermind” of the violent upheaval while the reality is that his adherence to non-violence is sincere and unshakeable. He went so far as to declare that he would resign if the agitation “spun out of control”. Not for nothing did Prime Minister Manmohan Singh call him the “embodiment of peace”.

Repeatedly and unambiguously the Dalai Lama has stated that he wants “genuine autonomy” for Tibet, not independence. But Chinese leaders go on calling him a separatist. One of them has even described him as a “wolf in a monk’s clothing”.

Obviously, it is not mere arrogance of power that is motivating Beijing. It has good reasons to believe that its power — military, economic and soft — is having its effect. The Dalai Lama’s angry followers in India, still planning a march to the China border, have apparently been encouraged by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi’s meeting with the Dalai Lama and her appeal to the “world conscience” over Tibet. But what is all this worth, when President George W. Bush’s spokesperson reaffirms that he would attend the Olympics at Beijing? In any case, the economic and political stakes of the United States and the West in China are too complex to allow for the kind of boycott that was enforced at the time of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Moreover, many — not in China alone — are asking whether China’s action in Tibet is different from that of the US in Iraq.

... contd.