Talk of a misguided public-relations exercise. According to the good folks on the Left, India should be wary of importing Western rhetoric and demonising China, given our own experience of being routinely accused of human rights violations in Kashmir. China certainly doesn’t need this feeble defence from its Indian comrades, and the CPM undermines its own intellectual honesty by making these loose comparisons between sites that have entirely different histories and grievances.

First, despite the rising chorus of dissent in the run-up to the Olympics and the worldwide sympathy for the Tibetan cause, Tibet is seen to be indubitably part of China, while in Kashmir China occupies 5,800 square km of territory that India calls its own. In fact, the Kashmir example is an especially unfortunate one, given that China is a party to the Kashmir issue. But what the CPM completely ignores with this facile comparison is how, over the last 50 years, China has wrecked Tibetan traditions and enforced cultural regimentation, and tried to achieve its ends by a demographic engineering project and drawing the borders of the “Tibet Autonomous Region”. In contrast, the Indian attitude to Jammu and Kashmir is characteristic of our democracy, where even during the worst phases of the secessionist movements, there was no attempt to bulldoze diversity. Despite extreme nationalist demands for resettling the Valley, Article 370 disallows non-state subjects from buying land or altering its composite plurality. While China’s belligerent project in Tibet hinges on complete assimilation by the Han Chinese, India can survive difference, and thrives precisely because it allows democratic pluralism.

... contd.