So who cares for human rights in Tibet? Or Manipur?

A number of monks and nuns in the Tibetan monastery in Kirti, Chinese-Occupied Tibet, have immolated themselves in the recent past, to protest their genocide and cultural extinction by the Chinese. But this news has been underplayed by the media everywhere, which is either trying to cozy up to the Chinese totalitarians or is bullied into submission. The fact is that for Buddhists – and perhaps for Hindus – self-immolation is the ultimate form of self-sacrificing protest. It suggests that the individual has reached a level of despair at the prevailing situation for which the only response is a spectacular suicide, which the protester hopes will move the public and the rulers. (Interestingly, they do not take to violence and terrorism, although that does seem to pay dividends.) What are the Tibetans protesting? The rapid decimation of their culture and way of life and the violation of their rights to freedom of worship and thought. The Kashmiri Pandits, who fled violent ethnic cleansing, and who have lived in squalid refugee camps in Delhi since the late 1980s, would be able to empathise with their plight. The hope of achieving change, alas, is not realistic in many places today. It was, perhaps, appropriate in an earlier time when the rulers had a sense of noblesse oblige, and indeed, attempted to rule for the people. A good example of this is in Travancore. On 12 November 1936, as a result of agitation by the public, the Maharaja issued the Temple Entry Proclamation, throwing open all temples to all Hindus. But what is more likely in today’s modern (for lack of a better word) nations is the fate of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in Vietnam during the war years. In 1963, the dragon lady Madame Nhu, the malign power behind the throne (and a convert from Buddhism to Catholicism), declared “Let them burn and we shall clap our hands”. Madame Nhu called the self-immolation of the monk Thich Quang Duc, who was protesting the shooting of Buddhists, a “barbecue”, and offered to provide more fuel and matches! And she ordered attacks on and demolitions of Buddhist temples. The Vietnamese state did not care; the media manufactured consent among the public that the monks were basically fools. The same fate befell a protester in India, whose name, I am ashamed to say, I do not know. I only know him as the uncle of Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, the army officer who was martyred on 11/26 in Mumbai. He was anguished at the callousness of the Indian state towards its sacrifice of the lives of his nephew and many others. He knocked on many doors, but he realised that there would be no justice. [caption id=“attachment_135959” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“What are the Tibetans protesting? The rapid decimation of their culture and way of life and the violation of their rights to freedom of worship and thought. Prakash Singh/AFP”]  [/caption] He wrote clearly in his diary that he wanted to make a statement through his self-immolation in Delhi – that he protested, by sacrificing his own life, the cavalier disregard of the Indian state towards its own people, especially its armed forces, and in particular his nephew. Therefore he set himself on fire in New Delhi. Appallingly, the media did something grotesque: instead of demanding justice for Major Sandeep and his uncle, it made up something about how the uncle “wanted to feel the pain his nephew felt” – making the uncle appear either a buffoon or mentally disturbed, rather than an honorable man demanding accountability from an errant and uncaring state. The state in India is deeply uncaring – and Sandeep’s uncle reminds me of Professor Eachara Warrier, who demanded an accounting of what the state did during the emergency to his “disappeared” son Rajan. The state stonewalled, and after a lone and lion-hearted battle of 30 years, Professor Warrier died, still denied justice. Similarly, the Indian state is completely absent when the rights of the people of Manipur are trampled on due to an illegal blockade (with religious and ethnic intolerance the prime force), driving prices up to stratospheric levels – Rs 300 for a litre of petrol, for instance. The Indian state is not willing to stand up to the perpetrators of the blockade, a bunch of thuggish separatists from nearby states. But the Indian state is quick to want to remove the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFPSA) from J&K based on agitations. There is a failure to ask the question: why is there the need for the AFPSA in the first place? Why is it appropriate to remove it when the situation that called for draconian rules has continued to worsen? Why not fine-tune it, instead of, like with Pota, acting in haste and regretting at leisure? Thus it appears that India’s soft state is as uncaring about the rights of its people (well, to be precise, it is uncaring about the rights of some of its people: it has been known to weep excessive crocodile tears about the rights of some of its other people) as is China’s hard state. In both cases, self-preservation and self-aggrandisement, one might argue, are the primary objectives of the state. The Kirti monastery is a very large Tibetan monastery; it is nominally not in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, but in Aba in Sichuan, formerly the Tibetan province of Kham. It should not be forgotten that the actual territory of Tibet, traditionally independent and ruled by the Dalai Lamas, is huge: it accounts for about a third of the land mass currently occupied by the Han Chinese. Significant chunks of Tibet have been merged into other states by Chinese administrative fiat. And their Tibetan culture is besieged, under continuous attack. The troubles started in 2008, when, before the Olympics, Tibetan protests were put down with force. A monk attempting self-immolation was beaten to death by Han Chinese police. Several hundred monks have been arrested and taken away for “re-education” from Kirti since then. Given the fact that China executes more people than the rest of the world combined, and that there is no bigger crime in China than “splittism”, we can well guess what their re-education will consist of. A number of other monks and nuns – the latest a 35-year-old nun on 3 November - have self-immolated. The peripatetic Pandit Tom Friedman of the New York Times, in India for one of those inane gabfests, gushed that the US and India are, in his words, “alike as peas in a pod.” I fear I disagree. It appears, at least in terms of tolerating dissent, that it is China and India that are as alike as peas in a pod. And that, surely, is tragic.