Former Indian diplomat Phunchok Stobdan courted controversy this week by raising questions about His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s silence on China’s recent border transgressions – this comes amid ongoing Sino-Indian tension relating to border disputes in Ladakh.
Speaking during a chaotic TV news panel discussion conducted via video conference, Stobdan said forcefully: “The Dalai Lama has to speak and cannot keep focussing on his prayers while China eats away the land [referring to Ladakh]. It doesn’t work like that. We have let him create a government in Dharamshala. He should offer clarification that this is not Tibet’s land; it is India’s.” Stobdan went on to question whether the Dalai Lama was in league with the Chinese and asked “Why is [the] Dalai Lama sitting idle in Dharamshala? Why is he not explaining it? He is hiding!”
His Holiness the Dalai Lama with Dr Lobsang Sangay, the elected President of CTA
His Holiness the Dalai Lama officially retired from political life in 2011. Sikyong Lobsang Sangay, the elected head of the Central Tibetan Administration, has commented on the Chinese incursions into Ladakh in recent days. “The whole of Tibet should become a demilitarised zone of peace,” Sangay said, “this will resolve the tension between India and China and bring lasting peace to the region.”
Various institutions, including the Thiksey and Diskit monasteries, objected to Stobdan’s comments and called on him to offer an unconditional apology. The Merchant Association of Leh decided to close all shops there on Monday June 1 as “a symbolic display of solidarity” in opposition to Stobdan: “we condemn such usage of blasphemous language hurting the sentiments of all Buddhist communities around the world,” the association said. Stobdan responded with a semi-apology for hurting religious sentiments but said he was simply commenting on a geopolitical situation from his perspective as an experienced diplomat. He said that “unnecessary religious colour” had been given to his statements and that they were made “entirely in the national interest.”
Phuntsok Stobden
Stobdan served as India’s ambassador to Kyrgyzstan from 2010 to 2012. His recent book The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas, provides an interesting insight into his personal world view. He calls Chairman Mao’s decision to allow the Dalai Lama to escape into India, documented in Jung Chang’s seminal biography of the Chinese dictator, a tactical “masterstroke” by the Chinese, before asserting that many of the Tibetan lamas in India are in collusion with the Chinese government on a mission to change the cultural landscape of the Himalayan region in China’s favour. His entire reasoning for this hypothesis seems to come from a speech given by the Dalai Lama in 2008 in which His Holiness referred to himself as a “Buddhist-Marxist”. The Chinese, Stobdan seems to proclaim, are tactical masterminds because they play the traditional Chinese boardgame “Go”, which requires players to engage in long term strategic thinking on multiple fronts, rather than chess, which is simpler “mano-a-mano”.
This tendency to extrapolate imaginary narratives from isolated facts is a feature of the book. Based on a comment made in 1980 by Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, that banning religious activity in China would alienate too many people, Stobdan argues that Xi Jinping is overseeing a Buddhist renaissance in China and that the current Chairman has become “a guardian of Buddhism”. He also argues that Sino-Tibetan relations had been “convivial” before 1950 and that they would still be today if only the Dalai Lama hadn’t escaped with CIA assistance.
In the final chapter Stobdan documents a 2018 trip he made to the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture at China’s invitation. Writing in glowing terms about the economic development which has taken place in the region, Stobdan says: “There wasn’t any case of poverty.” He documents a conversation with a lama in which President Xi was praised as “lingxiu” – a wise man; and another in which he “discreetly” asked someone why the Dalai Lama wasn’t being invited to return home and the reply came: “Why should we invite him? He left the country by himself.”
Jigme Ugen
In a widely circulated social media post critical of Stobdan, Jigme Ugen – a global activist and the first Tibetan elected as the United States Labour Union Officer – sharply criticises his “half assed” apology in relation to his recent comments and calls The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas a “fictional nonsense”. He argues that Stobdan’s comments were designed to drive a wedge between the Indian government and the Tibetan exiles before urging him to read up on the history of relations between China, Tibet and India.
China and India dispute various parts of their border and skirmishes have sporadically broken out between the two Asian superpowers for the past 60 years. A scramble for territory in the Ladakh region broke out between China and India after the British left India in 1947. Most of India’s northern border, including the McMahon line, which separates India from China at Arunachal Pradesh, and the Johnson line, which separates Kashmir from Xinjiang and Tibet, was drawn by British colonial officials and adopted by the newly independent government of India, but rejected as British imperialist machinations by the Chinese. Through the 1980s Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping offered India a “package settlement” of their border issues which would have involved India recognising the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh as part of Chinese territory in return for the Chinese accepting Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh. Eight rounds of talks between the two countries, however, reached no agreement.
Map source: CIA
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