The very next day, Nehru himself arrived. At first, the Indian prime minister had granted asylum only to the Tibetan leader and his immediate entourage, unaware—as was the Dalai Lama at the time—that there would be a mass exodus of refugees from Lhasa and its environs following in the Precious Protector’s wake. But when reports reached Nehru of the fighting in Lhasa, he relented. Now all were welcome, provided they gave up their arms. For Nehru, the whole affair was deeply troubling. As he explained to the Dalai Lama, his “being in India [kept] alive the question of Tibet in the world,” which for China was “immediately one of irritation and suspicion.” On the one hand, he had hoped that with the mutual accord treaty signed in 1954, there might be permanently friendly relations between China and India. The presence of the Dalai Lama and his followers threatened this. On the other hand, he clearly felt some responsibility for having insisted on the Precious Protector’s return to Tibet three years earlier. In their four hours of talks, Nehru assured the Tibetan leader of his welcome, but at the same time emphasized that the Indian government would not support his claim to Tibetan independence. The prime minister’s plain speaking on the subject caused the Dalai Lama later to recall that Nehru could be something of a bully. For his part, though, it is clear the prime minister found the young Tibetan leader exasperatingly naïve. When the Dalai Lama told him of his determination both to win back independence for Tibet and to avoid any further bloodshed, Nehru exploded, “his lower lip quivering with anger . . . ‘That is not possible!’”
The twenty-four-year-old Dalai Lama may have been politically naïve, but he was well aware that he and his fellow refugees faced a decidedly uncertain future. Many Tibetans, including senior members of the Dalai Lama’s entourage, assumed it was simply a matter of time before their return would be negotiated. America and the other great powers would surely support Tibet as soon as they understood the reality of the situation. The Dalai Lama himself had no such illusions. Furthermore, it soon became clear that, while Mussoorie was a congenial place to stay, it was remote both physically and psychologically from the political hub of New Delhi. That the resort retained—as it does to this day—an air of colonial gentility with several once grand hotels and a number of prestigious English-style private schools was small recompense.*
There were some advantages to these new circumstances, however. Left entirely to their own devices, and having few demands on their time, to their satisfaction the monastic element within the Dalai Lama’s household was able, as Trijang Rinpoché later wrote, to “focus . . . on religious practice” and “observe the discipline of renunciates.”
While life in Mussoorie settled soon enough into quiet routine, one of the most trying aspects of exile quickly became apparent. Information about what was happening at home, still more so of what had become of individual people, was almost impossible to come by. The Chinese said only what they wanted to say and refused entry to all foreigners. And such news as did reach the Precious Protector’s ears was uniformly bad. The refugees who followed in his wake brought with them shocking tales of Chinese brutality. But then as the springtime heat gave way to the summer’s monsoon rain, another, more pressing problem made itself felt. Most of those arriving had nothing but the heavy clothing suitable to the Tibetan climate and were completely ignorant of conditions in India. Worse, they had little resistance to the tropical illnesses that quickly broke out among them. During a visit to Delhi in June 1959, the Dalai Lama therefore urged the Indian government to move them to camps on higher ground.*
By this time a number of international relief agencies were working with the refugees, who continued to arrive in large numbers until, by the end of the year, they were estimated to total around eighty thousand, including many children. In the beginning they were placed in camps close to the border, where the agencies, notable among them the Save the Children Fund and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, first encountered them. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama’s American friends had also not been slow to act. That summer the CIA was instrumental in obtaining for the Dalai Lama both the recently instituted Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership and, somewhat improbably, the Admiral Richard E. Byrd Memorial Award for International Rescue. The one commemorated a Philippine politician, the other an American explorer. But together these awards went a good way toward meeting the need for funds for the time being. The agency was also responsible for an investigation of the legal status of Tibet, undertaken by the International Commission of Jurists, whose personnel arrived among the refugees during the summer. The commission subsequently published a report, based on interviews and bolstered by historical research, which argued that Tibet had been, de facto, an independent sovereign state from the moment when the Great Thirteenth expelled the Qing garrison from Lhasa in 1912. This would form the basis of the legal case for subsequent appeals to the United Nations.
It seems certain that the CIA, acting in concert with sympathetic members of the Indian government, also had a hand in the new statement the Dalai Lama released at this time. Speaking of the “tyranny and oppression” of the Chinese authorities, the Precious Protector said that he would welcome “change and progress,” but that the Chinese had “put every obstacle in the way of carrying out . . . reform.” Instead, “forced labour and compulsory exactions, a systematic persecution of the people, plunder and confiscation of property belonging to individuals and monasteries and execution of leading men” were “the glorious achievements of the Chinese rule in Tibet.”
The public repudiation of the Seventeen Point Agreement that followed (and here one might be forgiven for supposing that the twenty-four-year-old leader had been writing political speeches all his life) was precisely the justification the CIA needed for its continued support of the resistance movement. But while the Dalai Lama’s clearly ghostwritten speech was enough for Washington, the Tibetan resistance still hoped for something more. To this end, Gonpo Tashi, the rebel leader, paid an early visit to Mussoorie. There he learned that although the Precious Protector supported the aims of the movement—a Tibet free of Chinese interference—and was full of admiration for the bravery and determination of the rebels, and accepted that there were times when the Buddhadharma must be defended by all means, including violence, giving his support was a step he could not in good conscience take. Besides, the government in exile’s impending appeal to the United Nations—which the Dalai Lama was determined to lodge in spite of Nehru’s stated opposition—would lose much of its force if Tibet could not present itself as a peaceful victim of China’s aggression.
This was a huge personal disappointment to Gonpo Tashi, described by his CIA handler, Roger McCarthy, as “one of the most impressive figures I . . . ever met.” Nonetheless, the Tibetan rebel leader played a leading role in planning a major operation scheduled for the coming winter.
In September, eighteen men (the first batch from Camp Hale) were parachuted into Pemba, a district approximately two hundred miles northeast of Lhasa, where the rebels were jointly led by a layman and a young reincarnate lama. The agents were accompanied by an extremely generous supply of war matériel: 126 pallets of arms and armaments, together with first aid and food supplies, dropped in three separate sorties. Altogether this was adequate to equip something like five thousand men.
Though properly armed for the first time, the rebels proved unable to capitalize on the munificence of their backers. While the CIA envisaged a classic, highly mobile guerrilla operation, with the rebel force taking to the hills and coming down in small numbers to attack the Chinese at moments and in places of weakness before disappearing back to the mountain trails they knew so well, the reality was very different. The Tibetans’ modus operandi was, as it had always been, to fight in large, loose, mainly mounted formations. This could be effective when they had numerical superiority on open ground but was much less so in the face of even small numbers of a well-armed enemy properly dug in. More significant still was the Tibetan fighters’ vulnerability to air strikes.
The result was a foregone conclusion.
Recounting the CIA’s reaction to the debacle years later, Roger McCarthy, the director of operations, recalled: “At first we didn’t believe the reports coming in. We thought it was an exaggeration, an error. But it wasn’t.” The Chinese attacked the rebel encampment—home not just to the soldiers but also to their wives and children—with aircraft and long-range artillery. “It was genocide, pure and simple.”
One might have expected the experience at Pemba to cause the Americans to lose faith in the ability of Tibetans to wage effective war against the Chinese. That it did not suggests the CIA hoped that, with more rigorous training in guerrilla tactics, Chushi Gangdruk could yet become a serious threat to the Chinese. The Tibetans knew their terrain and could survive the harshest conditions; they just needed to learn to fight in small detachments. This now became the focus of their training in the United States.
While the CIA was hopeful of modernizing Tibetan tactics through its training program, the agency also supported a more traditional force that had gathered at Mustang, a remote ethnically Tibetan province in northern Nepal. With arms and funding channeled through India, several thousand men gathered here to form what was intended as a reinvasion force. To keep morale up and to test the force’s readiness to fight, the Mustang guerrillas launched periodic raids into southern Tibet—scoring, on occasion, what has been described as “one of the greatest intelligence hauls in the history of the agency.” This was the acquisition, following a raid on a transport convoy, of a blue satchel containing detailed information about PLA troop dispositions and intentions, along with the first confirmed reports of famine and unrest in China during the Great Leap Forward. This was at a time when almost nothing was known either about the internal workings of the Chinese military or about conditions in China itself.
It remains open to speculation how fully aware the Dalai Lama was of the enormous scale of the operations both in Pemba and in Mustang, but there is room for supposing that he did indeed have a clear idea of what was going on, even if he did not know every detail. From the memoir of John Kenneth Knaus, the CIA’s director of operations in India, who met the Dalai Lama in 1964, it is evident that the Tibetan leader knew exactly who Knaus was. It is also clear that the Dalai Lama was profoundly ambivalent about the whole business. One side of him, the merely human, wished Knaus and his team every success. The other side, the religious, forbade him to do so. Knaus recalled how, as a result, the Precious Protector imposed “a remarkably effective, though invisible, barrier between us” when the American entered the audience chamber.
For the Dalai Lama, perhaps the only positive thing to emerge from the CIA program was its effect on people’s thinking. Knaus reports him allowing that “Tibet had been made up of many tribes who would not co-operate with one another. Now our common enemy—the Communists—had united us . . . as never before.”
In April 1960 the Dalai Lama and his entourage moved out of their temporary accommodations in Mussoorie. Early on, Nehru had instructed his officials to find a more permanent base for the Tibetan leader. When the village of McLeod Ganj, a small hill station above Dharamsala, was put forward as a possible solution, the Dalai Lama and his advisers were skeptical. Lying 250 miles due north of Delhi, it was even more remote from the capital than their present quarters. It looked to the Tibetans as if their hosts wanted them as far away as possible. Yet when the Tibetan minister dispatched to assess the offered land and accommodations returned proclaiming that “Dharamsala water is better than Mussoorie milk,” with no alternative on offer, a decision was made to accept and move.
On their arrival, a question quickly arose over whether the Tibetan official had been offered an inducement. The monsoon in McLeod Ganj is frequently the most severe in the whole of the Indian subcontinent; it is nothing for forty inches of rain to fall in a month and not unheard of for five inches to fall in a single day. As well as remote, the village was run-down and furnished with only the most basic facilities. The road up was scarcely drivable, and the housing was cramped and dilapidated, while the landowner to whom it belonged still lamented the day when “the Britishers” had left. This was Nauzer Nowrojee, whose family had grown prosperous trading with India’s late colonial masters.* Their family’s general store was by now as much a museum as it was a business, and the faded pictures of British royalty that jostled with advertisements for forgotten luxuries like Pears soap and the Illustrated London News only increased the sense of desolation. By the time of the Tibetans’ move, apart from the local Gadi tribespeople who farmed the steep hillsides, the population of this once wealthy resort consisted mainly of a handful of retirees from the Indian civil service and a single English family who had stayed on after Indian independence.
Little more than a year after he quit the splendors of the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama thus found himself sharing the former district commissioner’s residence with “his mother, his two sisters, his brother-in-law . . . the Masters of Robes, Ceremonies and Food, his Lord Chamberlain, and an assortment of secretaries and translators,” not to mention several personal attendants. This was a considerable population for a house that had been built for a single family and its staff. It was in poor repair, too: the roof leaked, and during the monsoon, rainwater filled several buckets in the Dalai Lama’s bedroom most days for two months and more, while in winter, the only heat came from a handful of small fireplaces scattered throughout the building. True, the winters in Lhasa were colder, but in Dharamsala the damp made it feel colder still. At least, though, the Dalai Lama was better off than several senior ministers who found themselves sharing an abandoned cowshed—though by all accounts they did so without complaint, their good humor and dignity intact, despite the lost opulence of the life they had known in Tibet.
If his accommodations left something to be desired, and if the situation in which the Tibetans now found themselves was utterly disorienting, the Precious Protector himself wasted no time taking advantage of the leisure he was suddenly able to enjoy. A Ping-Pong table was installed in one of the reception rooms, and that first winter of 1960–61 there were snowmen and snowball fights, while during the succeeding warmer months, and to the dismay of some of those closest to him, the Precious Protector took pleasure in making excursions among the surrounding hills. Climbing as high as the sixteen-thousand-foot pass below Mun Peak, he and a handful of companions would occasionally spend the night in a small trekkers’ hut.
While the Dalai Lama was now able to enjoy personal freedom to an extent that would have been impossible in Tibet, there was no denying that he and his court had effectively been released to a backwater. Nonetheless, he was pleased also to have more time for study and for spiritual practice, and he was glad, too, to have the opportunity to set about bringing real reform to the way the Tibetan government functioned. For a start, he decided—against the advice of Hugh Richardson, the last British political officer in Tibet, who had made an early visit to Dharamsala to offer his services—that a minimum of protocol should be observed toward himself, outside the religious sphere. People to whom he gave audiences were not to be required to sit on chairs lower than his, nor would guests be encouraged to prostrate themselves before him. More controversial still, Tibetans themselves would no longer be required to do so. And from the outset he made it clear that he wished to be accessible to all comers, most especially to any from overseas who asked to see him. Tibet had been isolated from the world for far too long.
Visiting Delhi in 1960, the Precious Protector granted his first televised interviews. One of these was with the director of the World Council of Churches. In it the Dalai Lama comes across as a remarkably grounded and clear-sighted young man. Speaking of the prospects for the Tibetan refugee children, he admits, “We are still backward in the field of education, and we suffer for it,” adding: “At the same time, we cannot ignore our own, ancient culture. This must be taught side by side with modern education.” Asked in the second interview, with Prince Panu of Thai
land, whether his resistance to the Chinese could simply be a cover for the “desire for power and riches,” he turns the question around adroitly: “How can that be? If I desired power and wealth, I could surely obtain them by forfeiting the right of my people to resist the invaders . . . I did not become Dalai Lama by use of force and power. Why then should I try to gain [these things]?”
This clarity of vision found its most powerful expression in the political field. Toward the end of 1960, barely eighteen months after arriving in India and only twenty-five years of age, the Precious Protector gave the first of a remarkable series of speeches. “We exiled Tibetans living in free India must exert our fullest effort,” he declared, “for the benefit of those who remained behind,” forced to work like “beasts of burden,” with limited food, “like hungry-ghosts,” and experiencing “tremendous fear and agony like hell beings.” It was the responsibility of the exile community to do all it could to prepare a better society for the future. They could not and should not “retain all the ancient systems of Tibet,” he announced to civil servants in November 1960. “We must have change in the future. As the world is changing rapidly, we should also move together with the rest of the world.” Yet while some understood the need for reform, others evidently did not. There were those who “genuinely [strove] hard through many challenges,” but also “some people who do not take responsibility according to their . . . abilities,” for which failing the Dalai Lama was quick to admonish them. “I am greatly disappointed with some officials, especially some senior officials,” he declared.
The Dalai Lama Page 24