Armed Struggle in the Offing
Editorial by Prof. Dawa T. Norbu (January/February 1976)
If the various Tibetan youth publications are any indication, there is growing militancy among the youth in exile. Some of their writings are full of sound and fury of violence, and whether they will signify anything is yet to be seen. However, at least one thing seems to be certain: a sizable section of the youth has at last summoned enough courage to challange the heaven-ordained policies of their leader. Even if their militant mood is a sign of youthful impatience and frustration, it must be welcomed as an encouraging reminder that the Tibetan youth in exile, upon whose shoulder the national burden falls, have not forgotten their cause.
The current militancy and impatience among the young exiles is understandable enough, although pragmatists might scoff at the idea. Most of them have grown up in exile under alien influences being thrown aboard and submerged in a sea full of ideas and changes their parents never experienced before. They have witnessed great changes in world politics during the last sixteen years of their exile. They have watched with envy the creation of an independent Bangladesh, the consummation of a popular national liberation struggle in Vietnam, Bhutan’s spectacular entry into the United Nations as an independent nation, and more recently Yasser Arafat’s astonishing success in the United Nations, which seems to vindicate the use of violence or terrorism as an effective instrument of struggle for national rights.
The youth have also watched with great dismay Nepal’s disarmament of Khampa guerillas after a decade of tolerance if not connivance, Bhutan’s ‘bully’ action against Tibetan refugees following a baseless accusation of Tibetan involvement in an alleged plot in the kingdom, and above all the benign neglect of the Tibetan Question by a world full of increasing apathy and indifference. All these seem to indicate to the youth the failure of non-violence - the way of prayers and petitions.
The failure of a strategies ultimately a reflection on a leadership that does not seem to take stock of the changing situation, a leadership that does not dare to take risks, a leadership that belives in survivalism. It must be admitted that the youth also have a share in this. As many a veteran Khampa points out the youth might know more and talk more but are not willing to suffer and sacrifice - ‘They are soft.’ Apart from the current sound and fury of violence, there has been no actual demonstration of sacrifice for the national cause by any youth. There have been no hijackings, no bomb outrages or spectacular kidnappings. The lamas have done no better. While Buddhist monks in Vietnam or elsewhere immolate themselves for their faith, Tibetan monks in exile seem to anhor the prospects of life after death and content themselves with rituals for a struggle that they hope their gods will fight for them.
In an important sense the core of the Tibetan failure in an armed struggle is the peculiar nature of the Tibetan leadership. In peacetime such a leadership could be admirable but under the present circumstances it is totally unsuited, especially if it is to be an armed struggle as some sections of the youth are advocating now. There is a tragic irony in the whole structure of the traditional leadership; if it is an asset for ‘peaceful means,’ it is a liability in an armed struggle. And it has brought almost an equal proportion of advantages and disadvantages to its people. Whatever the Tibetan refugees have achieved since 1959 - and the achievement is quite remarkable by refugee standards - owes largely to the international stature and powerful personality of the 14th Dalai Lama. While refugees from other parts of the world are forgotten one by one and never heard from again, the eighty-thousand Tibetan refugees have managed to remain as a cultural entity and a power to reckon with in their own right. The Dalai Lama is both the cause and effect of all this. Under his leadership they have managed to: set up a ‘governement-in-exile’ of their own, create a Khampa force, rehabilitate themselves honourably, educate their children on a scale that is unprecedent in their history and above all managed to raise the Question of Tibet in the United Nations on a few occasion. Few other refugee communities, if any, have achieved so much.
But if the preponderantly spiritual nature of the Tibetan leadership is largely responsible for the Tibetan ‘refugee achievments’, it is equally responsible for the conspicuous lack of progress in their armed struggle for independence. The tragedy is that given the basic nature of the leadership, the present leadership would be incapable of any drastic or violent action, no matter how much the situation cries for such action. The Dalai Lama is a Buddhist both by training and conviction, and cannot obviously become a Ho Chi Minh, a Yasser Arafat or even a Sheikh Mujib, although that is the urgent call. To make the matter doubly tragic it is impossible for any other leader, secular or otherwise, to replace or even challange the Dalai Lama’s leadership as long as he lives. This is not because he wants to perpetuate his ‘rule’ like other worldly politicians, but because of the five centuries of ‘papal’ authority and aura surrounding the name of the Dalai Lama which is convincingly substained by the remarkable character and personality of the present Dalai Lama. All this makes any alternative in the leadership impossible and adds a tragic inevitibility to the Tibetan drama.
Yet, if one were to objectively analyse the past twenty-five years of Tibetan resistance against the Chinese, one would arrive at the irresistible conclusion that the armed struggle could not produce much result because there was no Tibetan Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara or even a Tibetan Sheikh Mujib. The leader of a nationalist movement can not successfully conduct a struggle from a palace or monastery divorced from the struggle itself. As the experience of national liberation movements in the third world demonstrates, success of any such struggle depends much on the extent to which a leader is able to emotionally and practically identify himself with his people, and also on the degree of his actual personal participation in the movement. Yet no Tibetan in his right frame of mind can imagine the living Buddha of compassion (the Dalai Lama) leading an armed struggle! The impact of his benign leadership and of Buddhism on the Tibetan struggle is a surprising lack of hatred against the national enemy, apart from the colourful wrath of the Khampas. The bullwork of most nationalist movements in other parts of the world has been a fundamental hatred against the oppressor, and without that anti-enemy feeling it would be almost impossible to mobilise masses and lead a nationalist struggle.
Under such circumstances the role of a ‘God-King’ is far from easy. The Dalai Lama had been caught in an agonising dilemma, ever since the Khampas began their armed resistance. As he admits in his memoirs, part of him ‘greatly admired’ the Khampa warriors revolting courageously although helplessly against the Chinese. But his surprising sense of realism and his belief in non-violence compelled him to view the Khampa struggle as futile and suicidal. As such he contented himself with the role of ‘the only possible peace-maker’ between violent Tibetans who were desperately fighting for all that the Dalai Lama symbolises and the Chinese who were ruthlessly suppressing them. From this it is fair to conclude that the Dalai Lama opted for a ‘peaceful means’ more under practical considerations rather than on ground of Buddhist teachings. In that case the notion that an armed struggle is incompatible with the Buddhist tenet of non-violence is only of conceptual importance. It should be remembered that it waas only after the Chinese forces overhelmed the Tibetan army in Chamdo that they had to agree to a ‘peaceful liberation’.
The debate therefore is not whether an armed struggle is incompatible with Buddhist teachings; there is enough scope in the religion to find justification for violence, if necessary. The question, however, isa whether violence is worth the blood to be shed; and while the old guards in the Tibetan manner of horse-trading do not think so, the young on the other hand feel otherwise, especially in the light of recent terrorists’ experiences. Furthermore, they dismiss some of their elders’ toying with the idea of a Gandhian technique of non-violence being totally unsuited to the Tibetan situation, as a part of the refugee syndrome which has developed in India among Tibetans. But the real question in the ultimate analysis is not only whether the Dalai Lama will sanction and bless violence as an effective means of struggle, which he might under compulsion and which he might go a long way towards fighting for their cause, but whether the leader himself can become a fighter as well and lead an armed struggle. And that is a most difficult thing for a Dalai Lama to do, but short of that would not make much difference to the cause.
Whatever their final resolutions, the Tibetan leadership must accept a truth: the efficacy of violence as means of national liberation struggle. To prove the validity of this truth one need not to go outside Tibet’s history. Tibet had an Empire from the 7th to 10th centuries and it was build, like other empires, not by the miracles of religion but largely by steel and blood. Tibet’s dramatic reduction in size and power since Lamas became Kings, and her final disappearance in 1950 owes primarily to her obsessive preoccupation with religion and non-violence.
