“Does A Conference In Tawang Reveal India’s Thoughts On The Dalai Lama’s Reincarnation?”, Open the magzine, December 08, 2025
“Every Dalai Lama visit to Arunachal Pradesh follows a certain pattern. China, which claims the state as its own, lodges a strong protest with India. There are warnings of serious damage to bilateral ties, and editorials about New Delhi playing its ‘Tibet card’. India’s response is usually to frame it as a purely religious visit.
It is clear to see what animates China’s anxiety. It claims Arunachal Pradesh as its own, as southern Tibet, and views every visit by the Dalai Lama as New Delhi deliberately challenging that claim and emphasizing its own sovereignty over the region. It’s helpful to remember that it was independent Tibet, under the previous Dalai Lama that settled this part of the border by ceding this region in an agreement to British India, notably in the absence of China, in 1914. Tawang has historically also shared ties with the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and remains an important location within Tibetan Buddhism, and China views this as a vulnerability to the absolute control it asserts towards Tibet and Tibetan identity today. It also more specifically worries that its plans of appointing the next Dalai Lama, and thereby finding what it hopes will be a final solution to its so-called Tibet problem, will face a major challenge if the exile Tibetan Buddhist community recognises someone from this region as the next Dalai Lama.
It is thus likely that while Beijing did not issue a protest to the recently-concluded four-day conference on the 6th Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, in Tawang. (The 14th Dalai Lama was after all not visiting, even though a representative of his, in Yangteng Rinpoche, a scholar and secretary at the Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, was. And the conference was anyway about someone born in this region in the 17th century.) But it would no doubt have been following the proceedings with more than mild irritation……”
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