Tibet's Next Incarnation

By Hannah Beech / Dharamsala Saturday, Oct. 01, 2011

He has never been to Tibet, never breathed the thin air of the high plateau, nor spun a prayer wheel in the shadow of the great Buddhist monasteries. Yet on Aug. 8, 43-year-old Lobsang Sangay was sworn in as the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Born in a refugee camp in India and educated in the U.S., Sangay holds no passport or nationality, only a travel certificate. He expresses homesickness for a place that exists in the foreign mind as an otherworldly haven, and in the Tibetan one as an occupied homeland. "Like all of us in exile, I will never be completely at peace until I go to Tibet," he says when we meet in Dharamsala, a scruffy settlement in the Himalayan foothills of India where the Tibetan refugee community coalesced five decades ago. "The question is: How do we get there?"

Sangay's inauguration as Kalon Tripa, or Prime Minister, comes at a critical moment for Tibet — both for the 5.4 million Tibetans living inside China and for the 150,000 or so who have chosen exile. Young refugees whose votes carried Sangay to office are questioning their movement's longtime commitment to nonviolent resistance, while an ongoing crackdown by Chinese security forces has failed to suppress dissent within Tibet.
(Watch TIME's video "The Dalai Lama on Tibet, China and the Nobel Prize.)

Unlike protest campaigns in the 1950s and '80s, the new wave of demonstrations has flared across the entire Tibetan Plateau, from what China calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region to Tibetan-dominated parts of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. Beijing routinely blames Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, for political instability on the high plateau. But many Tibetans argue that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in fact prevents a violent uprising from erupting in the region. "There is so much anger in Tibet now; it is only because of His Holiness that the people don't rise up," says Tsering Migyur, a Mandarin-speaking undersecretary in the Dalai Lama's office in Dharamsala. Migyur should know. For decades he was a senior officer for the Chinese police and military intelligence in Lhasa, serving as a minority poster boy. In 2000, however, he defected to Dharamsala. "China believes that once the Dalai Lama dies, the movement will lose power," says Migyur. "But the Dalai Lama is actually China's best friend because the next generation will not be so accommodating."

The vast terrain has languished in a state of suspended political animation since 1950, when Chinese communist forces began marching in. Nine years later, rather than further submit to atheist overlords, the Dalai Lama escaped by horseback over the Himalayas to exile in Dharamsala. His flight precipitated an exodus of Tibetans to India, which granted them a refuge that has lasted for generations. Ever since, the cleric who was deemed at age 4 to be the 14th incarnation of a Tibetan deity of compassion, has been reviled by Beijing, which calls him "a wolf in monk's robes."

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the next Tibet Buddhist Govt' will not be a theocratic oppressor of non-Buddhist religions.

You should be pleased.