Tibet 'The Forgotten Neighbour'
Tibet 'The Forgotten Neighbour'

Tibet ‘The Forgotten Neighbour’

Tibet : The Forgotten Neighbour

A peace-loving nation that fell pray to the dragon

To the north of India beyond the Himalaya Mountains lies a mystical faraway land which is so high that it is often called ‘the Roof of the World’. Referred to as ‘the Water Tower of Asia’ for being home to the headwaters of many great rivers including Indus and Brahmaputra, and termed as ‘the Third Pole’ because of its countless glaciers that contain largest reserve of fresh water outside the polar regions; this land is the world’s highest and largest plateau. This is the land of Tibet, a little-known part of the world, occupied by a well-known foreign power, China.

India’s northern border, the Line of Actual Control as we know it, wasn’t always like this. It wasn’t always the border between India and China. In fact China was not a neighboring country before 1950. From Ladakh to Himachal and Uttarakhand, from Sikkim to Arunachal, we had a common boundary with a peaceful independent nation before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950. China imposed itself as our neighbor by annexing Tibet with brute force. In reality, the northern boundary of our country is the Indo-Tibet Border that we seem to have forgotten.

China says Tibet had been a province of China for centuries, sort of like a vassal state i.e. a country that depends on and is controlled by a more powerful state. But that’s not true. That’s actually a false claim that China used as a pretext for occupying Tibet. The truth is Tibet was never a full-fledged Chinese province. Chinese suzerainty over Tibet was always nebulous and nominal, and was challenged by the Tibetans whenever they were strong, or the Central Chinese Government was weak. China never had any direct control over Tibet except by conquest.

The communist revolution swept China, and in October 1949, Mao Zedong, the chairman of Chinese Communist Party, proclaimed the establishment of People’s Republic of China. Mao knew the importance of Tibet’s strategic location. He could see the huge potential of Tibet’s untapped rich geologic resources, and the headwaters of key Asian rivers. He himself said, “He who holds Tibet dominates the Himalayan piedmont; he who dominates the Himalayan piedmont threatens the Indian subcontinent, and he who threatens the Indian subcontinent may well have all of South Asia within his reach, and with that, all of Asia”. Just a year after the creation of People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong ordered the People’s Liberation Army to ‘liberate’ Tibet. Liberation meant occupation. Chinese troops advanced into Tibet on 7th October 1950.

Chinese forces ruthlessly crushed the Tibetan uprising. Thousands of Tibetans were killed during the suppression of the revolt. Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political head of the country, had to take refuge in India. Tibetans lost all their freedom and autonomy to an autocratic China. Mao was a staunch communist. He wanted Tibet to be like China and adopt the Chinese culture because he believed in One Country, One Culture, One Nation. He was strictly against all religions including Buddhism. Over the decades, the Chinese regime has oppressed the Tibetan people and destroyed the Tibetan culture using brutal measures. Tibetans who raised their voice against the Chinese occupation were imprisoned, tortured, or killed often in exceedingly gruesome ways. Every voice of dissent was silenced. Since the invasion, over a million Tibetans have been killed, and thousands of monasteries have been destroyed. China has suppressed the freedom of Tibetans completely. Certainly, it’s not a liberation; China has colonized Tibet and committed war crimes.

Tibet’s forcible absorption not only helped China to expand its landmass by one-third, but also gave it a contiguous border, for the first time in history, with India, Bhutan and Nepal, and an entryway to Pakistan and Myanmar. On the other side, India suddenly found itself sharing a land border with a large, powerful, and hostile country. Through most of history, Tibet and the Himalayas served as a buffer between India and China, a buffer vital to India’s strategic defense. The abrupt removal of this buffer altered the geopolitical balance. India now had a live northern border to reckon with.

Mao Zedong considered Tibet to be China’s right-hand palm, with five fingers – Nepal, Bhutan, and the three Indian territories of Ladakh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh – that China is also meant to ‘liberate’. As the hand metaphor indicates, Tibet is the key to China’s territorial claims in the Himalayan region. Evidently, the strategic presence in Tibet helped China gain more territory in Ladakh, the Aksai Chin region, in the 1962 war against India.

Unfortunately, the then Indian Government failed to understand the mindset of China’s new communist rulers and the strategic implications of Chinese presence in Tibet. A peaceful neighbor of ours disappeared from the world’s map as a free nation; we continued to believe in friendship with an expansionist state; and the dragon gobbled up part of our own territory.

Mr. Shubhra Atreya
Content Writer
IT Department, SVSU

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