In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  A few months later, the entire government-in-exile appeared in Byllakuppe to hold its annual report meeting in the settlers’ presence. Attending the event as a Youth Congress observer, Tempa was captivated by the proceedings, conducted according to the democratic constitution promulgated by the Dalai Lama in 1963. During a break one day he was approached by Mr. Kundeling, a Cabinet minister whom he had known slightly in the past. On hearing that Tempa had graduated from college only to be a farmer, Mr. Kundeling insisted he leave Byllakuppe and join the government in Dharamsala. He then instructed the secretary of the Information and Publicity Office to give him a job. A few weeks later, a letter arrived from the office offering him a position as an assistant secretary. “After receiving the letter I discussed it with my father,” Tempa related. “I had just finished school and I felt a responsiblity to look after him. I told him this. I also told him that the Byllakuppe settlement office would not be happy if I left. Then I said, ‘This time you make the decision. So far, I’ve made almost every decision in my life without your knowledge. Now this is up to you.’ He replied immediately, ‘From our point of view Dharamsala is the central government, whereas here it’s just one office, looking after three thousand people in the old camps. So obviously, if you go to Dharamsala, you’ll be of more service to all the Tibetan people. For myself, if I know you are sincerely working for His Holiness, then, even if I have to die alone, with no one to pour cold water in my mouth in the last days, I won’t have a single regret.’ When he said that, everything was clear. I said, ‘O.K.’, and I went to Dharamsala.”

  A few weeks later, still, after fourteen years in India, with few more possessions than his own clothing, Tempa said farewell to his father for what would be another six years. Taking a bus from Cauvery to Mysore, he boarded a northbound train to Pathankot in the Punjab, from where another bus deposited him on the fringe of Katwali Bazaar, Lower Dharamsala. There, he caught the local bus for the half-hour ride five miles farther up the hill to McLeod Ganj. On the way he watched intently through the barred windows as the road zigzagged up the pine-covered slopes leading to the military cantonment and the Tibetan Children’s Village above. After driving through Forsythe Ganj, another hamlet in the hills, the spindle-like ridge on which McLeod Ganj sat drew into view. In a few minutes more, St. John’s in the Wilderness passed, alone in the woods, and then the galvanized canopy of Nowrojee’s front porch hove in sight, a characteristic press of Tibetan monks, gaddis, or hill folk, and a few local tourists from lower in the valley beneath it, idly watching the commotion at the head of town. As the bus halted, Tempa jumped off, retrieved his bag from its roof and entered the energetic press of “Little Lhasa,” as Upper Dharamsala had rather wistfully come to be known.

  Since the first days of the Dalai Lama’s tenure, McLeod Ganj had shuddered through an onslaught of development. Its permanent population now approached 4,000, with hundreds of pilgrims, traders, government officials and foreign visitors in periodic residence. The serene colonial park at its center had been obliterated without a thought by the Tibetans. Three rows of buildings housing shops, restaurants and hotels had replaced it. At their center rose a tall gold-crowned chorten, dedicated, as its plaque explained, to the memory of all those suffering under Chinese occupation in Tibet. Day and night it was circled by a stream of faithful, spinning two lines of prayer wheels and reciting mantras. Outside of town stood their homes: an impromptu jumble of tin and stone shanties, ascending floor over roof like a ziggurat up the hill, graced by marigolds in the windows and hundreds of faded prayer flags strung between the trees overhead. The people of Little Lhasa were mainly sweater sellers who left their unheated huts in the cold winter months to ride the rails between Indian cities in search of commerce. When in Dharamsala, they made full use of their closeness to the “Precious Protector” by each day circumambulating a reconstituted Lingkhor or Holy Walk, similar to the one in Lhasa, surrounding his new residence, Thekchen Chöling. It was toward this that Tempa proceeded, walking out of the far side of town and turning down a narrow road to the knoll-like crest capping the farthest of the ridges surrounding McLeod Ganj.

  Built in 1968, Thekchen Chöling or “Island of the Mahayana Teaching” enclosed a great expanse of forest and hillside through which the Dalai Lama could stroll, tend his flower gardens, look after wild birds and meditate. The green corrugated roofing of his modest private cottage dominated a kitchen complex, office building, security and secretarial quarters all located at progressively lower levels leading to the front gate.

  Across a flagstone chöra or debating courtyard, used by the young monks of the Dialectical School and flanked along its southern end by the cells of Namgyal Dratsang, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, stood the new Central Cathedral, a three-story lemon-yellow hall topped by gold pinnacles and designed by the Dalai Lama himself in a modern idiom. Turning the battery of prayer wheels that lined its outer walls, Tempa entered the bright interior to offer prayers before its giant images of the Buddha and Tibet’s patron saints. Then, continuing down the hill via a rocky shortcut through the trees, he approached the new Secretariat compound of the government-in-exile, Gangchen Kyishong or “Abode of Snow-Happy Valley.” Halfway to Lower Dharamsala, Gangchen Kyishong had been built out of the same necessity as Thekchen Chöling: to replace the cramped, perennially leaking quarters of the old British bungalows. On the white pillars that framed its front gate the government’s emblem—two turquoise-maned snow lions holding the eight-spoked wheel of the Dharma before snow-capped peaks, the sun and moon—proclaimed its identity. To maintain congenial relations with New Delhi, no Tibetan flag was flown. Within, on a long flat, surrounded by the more temperate foliage of the lesser slopes, rose the monumental edifices of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and the Cabinet building, its ground floor an assembly hall for government meetings. The library was flanked by an amphitheater of dormitories for its hundred resident scholars and the Cabinet, by tiers of buildings lodging the government departments, on the uppermost of which, set back in typically Tibetan style with a wide roofscape before it, were the two rooms of the Information Office. Tempa’s quarters, which he was shown after reporting to his new superior, lay in a chalet-like log building facing the secretarial mess, not far away. With the knowledge that he had arrived at the very heart of the political struggle for Tibet, he settled in his first night, eager to begin work the following day as an active member of his government.

  5

  The Fight for Tibet

  1959–1984

  THE GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE that Tempa found in the summer of 1974 was an odd mix of innovation, bureaucracy and the hierarchic vestiges of the Ganden Phodrang of Tibet, the religious rule formed under the Fifth Dalai Lama in 1642. Recognized by no one save its own people—all of whom refused to accept Indian citizenship—Dharamsala’s powers were circumscribed, its resources scant; yet the government’s poverty surprised even Tempa. Its offices operated in a clutter of semi-audible phone lines, secondhand typewriters and formal portraits of the Dalai Lama, and the living quarters for the then 141 Secretariat workers, cramped together on the hillside around Gangchen Kyishong, were barely functional. The building in which Tempa lived had no heat or running water; his room, which he shared with another young man, lay in complete disrepair. Each day a shower of old Indian newspapers, mud patches and beaten-tin cans fell from the rotting walls onto his narrow cot, so worn that its wicker body sank beneath his weight to touch the concrete floor. Meals were taken in the spartan Secretariat mess and came out of Tempa’s salary which, hovering around fifty dollars a month, provided for only the barest essentials.

  The Information Office was the most political of Dharamsala’s departments. To promote Tibet’s cause it consulted closely with the four offices established abroad as well as the large bureau in New Delhi. It maintained a listening room to monitor Radio Lhasa’s daily broadcasts and screened recently escaped refugees for the latest information on China’s occupation —a job to whic
h Tempa was assigned. At the same time, he was put in charge of answering the inquiries addressed to Gangchen Kyishong from around the world. He also cut clippings on political, scientific and cultural developments for translation in She Ja or Knowledge, a current affairs magazine published to keep the refugee community informed of global events. Meanwhile, as his first weeks passed, Tempa acquainted himself with the structure of the exile government.

  At the head of government stood the Dalai Lama and his Cabinet, the Kashag. Below them, six major departments and two subdepartments (to which those of Health and General Audit were added in the early eighties) were divided among the ministers. Here the resemblance to Tibet’s former government ended. Just up the hill, behind Tempa’s own quarters, were the homes and office of the seventeen-member Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies, the body of elected representatives who, in exile, acted as a parliament. Unlike the Tsongdu, Tibet’s old National Assembly, the deputies were popularly elected to three-year terms—three men and one woman from each province, a cleric from each of the four religious sects, including one for Bon, Tibet’s indigenous religion, and an additional final member appointed by the Dalai Lama for distinguished service in art, science or literature. Their most important task was shared with the Cabinet; together they comprised the Tibetan National Working Committee, the highest policy-making organ of the government. They also conducted the Annual General Meeting, in which each department head was publicly questioned on his section’s performance during the past year. Although the deputies’ ability to redress Tibet’s plight directly was limited by the constraints of refugee life, the Dalai Lama believed that engaging in a democratic experiment in itself constituted an essential ingredient in his nation’s struggle. “Just to criticize China was not sufficient,” he explained. “We had to have a definite alternative of our own. So for this reason we created a representative government and to do this, we discussed and prepared a draft constitution.”

  In framing the constitution, the Dalai Lama adopted a blend of socialist guidelines, to ensure the equal distribution of wealth, and democratic procedures for conducting representative government. He also drew heavily on his own personal beliefs. “From a very young age I always felt how all-important the people are,” he related. “Therefore, any ideology that stands for the benefit of the poor, the downtrodden, the lowest people, I feel is sacred. The very thought of democracy, though I couldn’t put it in words, was with me in Tibet. Now, theoretically, Marxism also stands for the majority—the working class. This touches me, yet there is something wrong with its implementation in the present Communist states. Their excessively rigid atmosphere actually spoils the value of human life. On the other hand, while freedom is necessary, one must have an equal economic opportunity with which to exercise it. So it seems portions of both systems are needed.”

  On March 10, 1963, the fourth anniversary of the Lhasa uprising, the constitution was promulgated, carefully labeled as a “draft” pending approval by the six million majority in Tibet. In exile, save for a few noble families and Khampa chieftains, who thought that their power would be eroded, the majority of the refugees greeted the document as a momentous, if puzzling, step into the modern world. Among its seventy-seven articles, provisions were made to balance the immense powers of the executive branch, in the person of the Dalai Lama, with a strong legislature and supreme court. Renouncing war “as an instrument of offensive policy,” it declared the fundamental rights of all Tibetans to include those of universal suffrage, equality before the law, life, liberty and property, as well as freedom of religion, speech and assembly. Fulfilling socialist ideals, state ownership of the land was provided for as well as a prohibition against the amassing of wealth and the means of production “to the common detriment.” Once passed by popular referendum, the exile government set about supplying the constitution, as best it could, with a representative framework, one, however, which had already been in place for three years.

  Impatient to begin Tibet’s experiment in democracy, the Dalai Lama pushed through the refugees’ first elections as early as the summer of 1960—only months after his arrival in Dharamsala and more than a year before the constitution’s outline was even announced in the autumn of 1961. The election had been an extremely informal affair. Most Tibetans had never imagined participating in government, much less heard of voting; politics had been the business of monks and noblemen for centuries. As a result, there were no candidates. Assembled in their various road camps, people simply wrote on slips of paper the names of those they respected most. The sole requirement was to vote for a representative from one’s own region or, in the case of the clergy, one’s sect. Naturally, all of the thirteen men whose names appeared most frequently were either important lamas, aristocrats or tribal chieftains from Kham and Amdo. By September 1960, they had joined the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala to begin an undertaking as peculiar in its way as their election.

  Unfamiliar with administrative procedure, the first group of people’s deputies decided that, rather than oversee policy, they should gain experience by working in the various government departments as deputy directors. The second assembly of representatives, elected in 1963, continued in the same capacity. Those who were not reelected easily found new jobs with the understaffed administration. It was not until the third group of deputies was sent to Dharamsala in May 1966 that the government’s legislature and administration were finally separated, it having developed that, once trained, the deputies’ participation in the bureaucracy necessarily compromised their ability to regulate it.

  Despite the improvement, the electoral process itself continued to be run by the administration. In 1963, the second elections saw the introduction of election committees, ballot boxes and female representatives (to comply with the constitutional article ensuring equality of the sexes). In 1966, the third elections included actual candidates, mounted by the election committee at Dharamsala and not by political parties as campaigning, in exile, was considered a potentially destabilizing activity. It was not until 1975 that the fifth Commission of People’s Deputies finally instituted a two-tier vote whereby candidates could be popularly chosen in primary elections. However, even after fifteen years of refining the electoral process, many people—particularly older Tibetans—still found the concept of a popular vote obscure. As Lodi Gyari, chairman of the seventh assembly of deputies, noted, “A lot of people go into the election tent and just pray to His Holiness. ‘I don’t know any of these candidates, but please let me choose the right one to help the Dalai Lama and the people.’ Then they close their eyes, put their finger down and ask the election officer, ‘Would you see whose name is here.’ When they hear it they reply, ‘Oh, it’s so-and-so. I’ll vote for him.’ ”

  Resistance, not to representative government, but to its fundamental prerequisite, that of individuals declaring themselves as candidates, also hampered acceptance of democratic procedure. “If I go and ask someone to vote for me,” continued Lodi Gyari, “it would be considered an act of great shamelessness. It’s very funny, you find this in many Oriental cultures, but we are raised to always say, ‘I am very unable and uneducated.’ If someone does not behave like this, it’s considered a clear indication that he has personal motives and is not out for the common good.” As a result, some deputies found themselves elected against their will, unaware even that the committee in Dharamsala had nominated them as candidates until they were summoned to be sworn in. On the opposite end of the spectrum, even those willingly elected were subject to disqualification by either the Dalai Lama or the National Working Committee, who could judge them unfit to hold office.

  The issue of how much authority the Dalai Lama should command lay at the very heart of the struggle to create a genuine democracy. The Dalai Lama had used the constitution to weaken his position, ironically against the wishes of his own people. In its final draft, Article 36, section (e), provided, “in the highest interests of the state,” for the Dalai Lama’s impeachment by a two-thirds ma
jority of the National Assembly in consultation with the Supreme Court. Resistance was such that over 150 representatives had gathered in Dharamsala to refuse to approve the constitution unless the clause was deleted. “Of course this was my idea,” the Dalai Lama related. “If we were to have a true democracy there had to be provisions whereby the Dalai Lama’s powers could also be changed. But at the time people complained, mainly, I think, out of an emotional feeling and also because it was something new and difficult to understand. I had to convince them that it was absolutely necessary not just for the present but for the future of all the Tibetan people. This point was one of the most important issues of the early sixties.”

  “After working in the government for some time, I could see that just holding elections does not create a democracy,” observed Tempa Tsering. “Even in office, many of the deputies were very apathetic. They were more comfortable with the idea of an all-powerful executive than they were with a free legislature. So for this reason, I believe, democracy has yet to take hold. It’s only among the younger generation that people have a real understanding of the democratic spirit.” In the Tibetan Youth Congress, Tempa found a truly contemporary political climate. Becoming acquainted with its leaders, who, though they still lacked an office, all lived in Dharamsala, he realized that they, not the government, represented the vanguard of the Dalai Lama’s aspirations for a politically open society.

  From its start, the Youth Congress had captured the commanding role in the Tibetans’ political life. Dedicated to struggling for the independence of Tibet, it had been created by four young men, all from upper-class backgrounds and most educated in the best British-based schools in India.