India Abroad, July 26, 1996 - By Aziz Haniffa

Milwaukee - India's reticence in recognizing Tibet's government in exile although extending a sage haven to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala and in criticizing Beijing for its human rights violations against Tibetans is borne of security concerns and opportunism.

This was the consensus among the experts who participated in the discussion on "Tibet and Human Rights Question in China," at the symposium here July 12 and 13 on comparative reforms in China and India, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and Marquette University Joint Center for International Studies.

Michael Sullivan, a scholar on Tibet at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, provoked some heated debate when he said he couldn't comprehend why democratic India "remained relatively mute on human rights violations in Tibet."

Is India's silence over human rights violations in Tibet a manifestation of its security concerns and/or Delhi's reluctance "to harm its recently expanded economic trade linkages with China?" Sullivan asked.

Professor Lloyd Rudolph immediately announced that "India has done more for Tibet than any other country in the world, "including the United States.

He said that besides offering a safe haven to thousands of Tibetan refugees who fled Tibet following the Chinese invasion, India had also not put a lid on the activities of the Dalai Lama, even though it had not recognized his government in exile. Rudolph noted that the Dalai Lama, "operating out of India, has been incredibly effective, traveling around the world and mobilizing support for Tibet in Europe and America."

He said India's security concerns had to be understood in the context of the Indo-China war in 1962, "where China very much dirtied India up and went back home."

"This was a very traumatic even in Indian history," Rudolph explained. "It shook the Nehru government, it resulted in Krishna Menon's resignation as Defense Minister, reorganization of India's defense budget (and) doubled India's armed forces."

He said that while the war was only "over a boundary line, the boundary line is still open."

Rudolph reiterated that security concerns and not trade "constraine" Delhi not to discuss Tibet with Beijing. "Trade is relatively minor," he said. "they are constrained by the border issue and the security issue."

He also noted, "China has nuclear weapons, which might threaten India, and India justifies its nuclear program in part because of Chinese nuclear capabilities."

Consequently, Rudolph declared, "there is a large context to all of this" and he lashed out at successive U.S. administrations for being much more lukewarm in taking up the Tibetan issue.

Gautam Sen, however, was of the view that India's silence on Tibet, was due to a much more "mundane reason." India and China, he said, "are cooperating internationally to prevent criticism of each other" at human rights forums. "They actually work together opportunistically in diplomatic forums" to torpedo resolutions against them on Kashmir or Tibet, he said.

Sen noted that China has given India "a lot of help in restraining Pakistan in terms of Kashmir" resolutions at human rights forums and, vice versa, Delhi had helped China on Tibet. "At the end," he said, "they both think that criticisms about human rights are totally cynical."

This was the basis of the hypothesis propounded by Sullivan in his presentation, in that "for China, the political significance of human rights on an international level is that the United States and other Western countries, mainly European countries, have used human rights as an anti-India tool."

Sullivan said, "Beijing believes the real intention of Western countries is not to improve human rights in China, but to exert political pressure on China and to derail China's development path and social system."

Consequently, he said Beijing "has made a concerted effort to win over other developing countries, by linking their struggles against international criticism of human rights in China with other criticisms of developing countries' human rights violations."

In this regard, he said, "the Chinese government is very successful in trying to promote this policy." He noted that Beijing had garnered "allies to defeat international criticism of its human rights policies."