Dalai Lama trip strains India-China ties

Sandwiched between Myanmar, the kingdom of Bhutan and Tibet, the lush, forested state of Arunachal Pradesh in the Himalayan foothills is governed by India but claimed by China.

Beijing tends to view visits to Arunachal by senior Indian officials as an unnecessary assertion of sovereignty and it protested vigorously over a tour of the region last month by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

A visit there by the Dalai Lama is seen as a double provocation, given China's sensitivity to anything involving the exiled Tibetan leader whom it regards as a "splittist" intent on fomenting separatist unrest in his homeland.

According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu, the three-day visit set to begin Sunday "further exposes the anti-China and separatist nature of the Dalai clique".

The mere presence of the Dalai Lama in India, where he has lived for 50 years and set up his government in exile, has been a constant irritation in a bilateral relationship that has struggled to overcome decades of distrust.

China and India fought a brief but bloody war over their Himalayan territories, including Arunachal, in 1962.

The conflict left a festering border dispute which 13 rounds of bilateral talks have failed to resolve.

India's growing economic and diplomatic clout has made it more assertive in dealings with its regional rival and the government has stood firm in the face of increasingly shrill Chinese protests over both the prime minister's and the Dalai Lama's trips to Arunachal.

During a regional summit in Thailand last month, Singh told Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao that India considered the Dalai Lama an "honoured guest" while foreign secretary Nirupama Rao stressed that he was "free to visit any part of our country".

Indian strategic analyst Pre Shankar Jha believes such statements are indicative of the failure of successive Indian governments to understand the depth of Chinese concern over the Tibetan issue in general and the Dalai Lama in particular.

"China has not been able to assimilate Tibet, and blames India for its failure because, by giving the Dalai Lama shelter, it has kept the Tibetan political and cultural identity alive," Jha wrote in the latest issue of the influential Outlook magazine.

India, Jha argued, views the Tibetan exiles here as refugees who must simply be discouraged from anti-China political activity on Indian soil.

"Beijing, however, regards them as a well-knit insurgent group that skillfully mobilises international sympathy and uses the Internet to reach Tibetans within China to foment insurgency," he said.

China has ruled Tibet since 1951 after sending in troops to "liberate" the Himalayan region the previous year.

Opposition to Chinese rule has bubbled over from time to time, most recently in March last year when fierce anti-China protests erupted in Lhasa and spread across the region.

Rahul Roy-Choudhury, who runs the South Asia security program at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees that New Delhi and Beijing approach their common disputes from different angles.

"For India the border issue is much more of a concern, along with trade issues. For China, the greater concern is Tibet," Roy-Choudhury told AFP.

"There is no common view on where the priority lies and it's this lack of consensus which is preventing any resolution."

The Dalai Lama, meanwhile, has expressed "surprise" at China's protests over his Arunachal visit and suggested that Beijing was being over-sensitive.

"The Chinese government politicises too much wherever I go," he told reporters on a visit to Japan last week.

The Nobel peace laureate has an emotional attachment to Arunachal which provided his point of entry into India when he fled Tibet in 1959 following a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

During his visit, he will give teachings at India's biggest Tibetan monastery in Tawang, which was briefly occupied by Chinese troops in 1962 before they withdrew.

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