How time flies! In four days it would be fifty years since the famous Tibetan revolt that forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India where he was readily given political asylum as a result of which Tibet became a far greater strain than before on the already uneasy India-China relations. Two years later followed the traumatic war in the high Himalayas. Even today, Beijing’s paranoid complaints persist despite India’s acceptance of Tibet being an “autonomous” region of China and a complete ban on any political activity on Indian soil by the Dalai Lama or the 100,000 Tibetan refugees. Never have the Chinese admitted their stark failure to pacify Tibet.

The trouble that eventually erupted in Lhasa had, in fact, begun in the land of the Khampas at least three years earlier. Though inhabited by Tibetans, this area had been absorbed into China well before the Communist revolution. As it happened, in 1956, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were in India for the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s parinirvana. They were worried and they told Jawaharlal Nehru that, given the terrible conditions in Tibet, largely because China had reneged on its 1951 agreement with the Dalai Lama on Tibet’s autonomy, they did not want to go back there.

Also present in New Delhi at the same time was China’s Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai. Nehru and he had detailed discussions about Tibet and Zhou repeatedly assured Nehru that Beijing would honour Tibet’s autonomy. In view of Zhou’s assurances and Nehru’s advice, the two Lamas returned home only to be dismayed by what was going on, even though Mao Zedong had personally ordered the postponement of land reforms unacceptable to Tibetans.

... contd.