Dalai Lama decides to reincarnate. His successor may only get an imagined homeland to rule

The Print

06-07-2025

Last week, almost seven decades after he escaped the PLA and entered India in 1959, Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, laid out a map for his succession. The Gaden Phodrang Trust, which once ruled Tibet and now manages the personal affairs of the Dalai Lama, will seek his reincarnation in consultation with all four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
There was also evidence of genocide: From March 1959 to September 1960, the blue satchel documents revealed that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had killed more than 87,000 Tibetans as it sought to assert China's sovereignty over the region.
Elegant as ever in a conservatively tailored business suit and rimless eyeglasses, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency briefly removed his pipe from his mouth to deliver his verdict: 'The best intelligence coup since the Korean War.' The blood-stained blue satchel Allen Dulles held up had travelled thousands of kilometres, on foot from Tibet into Nepal and India, and then aboard a special CIA aircraft. The 1,600 pages of classified documents , recovered in a November 1961 ambush by Tibetan insurgents, showed that Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward had plunged China into desperate famine and social chaos.
The choice of a reincarnation will mark a decisive moment in Tibet's troubled relationship with China. From teetering on the edge in 1960, the Chinese state has become a global hegemon, with its control of Tibet now beyond question. The government of China has long insisted that the new Dalai Lama can only be chosen by drawing lots from a golden urn held at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, following a Qing-era imperial ritual dating back to 1792.
There is little doubt about what Beijing will do if the successor to the Dalai Lama is chosen from within Tibet: Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, a six-year-old identified by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, has simply disappeared. The People's Republic has no intention of allowing India or the West to influence its Tibet policy.
Also read: Battle over Dalai Lama's reincarnation is a geopolitical contest with global implications
The demographic tide
Figures make one thing clear: The Tibetan diaspora in South Asia is ageing and in decline. Three factors, scholars Tenzin Dorjee and Tsewang Rigzin argue, have brought this about. First, the PLA has made using mountain passes to leave Tibet increasingly dangerous. In 2006, the PLA opened fire on a group of Tibetans, including children, crossing the Nangpa La pass into Nepal, killing several. The threat of force, coupled with heightened digital surveillance, has slowly choked off refugee flows.
Larger factors, Dorjee and Rigzin argue, are also at play. Liberal immigration quotas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and France allowed thousands of young Tibetans to build new lives in the West each year. Meanwhile, Tibetans in India faced restrictions on buying property, obtaining business licenses, and voting in elections until 2014, when they became eligible to apply for citizenship.
Finally, like other communities with high levels of educational attainment, Tibetans in India have a low birth rate.
Economic opportunities, meanwhile, have drawn large numbers of ethnic Han and Hui migrants into the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), where they now make up an estimated 15% or more of the population of 3.2 million. The Han, scholar Tsultim Zangmo writes, have been drawn to the TAR by relatively high incomes, the availability of land, and private-sector opportunities. Many small businesses, shops, and restaurants in urban areas are owned by Han, Zangmo notes.
There is no shortage of evidence that the cultural changes resulting from these policies have angered many Tibetans. The flight of two high-profile Lamas considered pro-establishment—Arjia Lobsang Thubten from the Kumbum monastery in 1998, and the Karmapa from Tsurphu near Lhasa in 2000—shows discontent runs deep.
Even though the TAR periodically faces large-scale protests, as in 1998 and 2008, Beijing remains confident that its economic policies are creating a Tibetan élite that sees itself as Chinese. The government has set up a system of Tibetan-oriented lower middle schools for Tibetans living elsewhere in China. At the same time, it has scrapped plans for greater cultural autonomy within the TAR, abandoning efforts to grant Tibetan official status or require Han officials to learn the Tibetan language.
From the Chinese government's point of view, limiting autonomy and ensuring economic growth are the twin pillars necessary to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union. And history helps understand why this gamble might just work.
Also read: When Dalai Lama & Nehru talked about Tibet for 4 hours. 'He could be a bit of a bully'
The PLA's Tibet
For generations, Indians have seen Tibet through incense-tinted lenses, as a Shangri-La-La-Land punctuated by exotic palaces, prayer wheels, and colourful flags. Like many other feudal states in Asia, Lamaist Tibet was also a place of savage inequality and violence. Although there has been an ideologically charged scholarly debate on the scale and conditions of Tibet's peasantry before 1959, historians like Mervyn Goldstein have shown that hereditary serfdom was widespread, with much of the land held by monasteries and aristocrats.
The single monastery of Deprung, political scientist Michael Parenti has written, was one of the world's largest landowners, with 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herders. Monastic leaders were often scions of aristocratic families.
Even though Tibetan Buddhism rejected the death penalty on theological grounds, severe punishments were common. 'All over Tibet,' wrote, Robert Ford, the British radio operator in Lhasa, people 'had been deprived of an arm or a leg for theft.' These amputations, he reported, were carried out without antiseptics or sterile dressings.
For stealing two sheep from a monastery, Tsering Wang Tuci told the travellers Stuart and Roma Gelder, his eyes were ordered removed, one gouged with a knife, the other pulled whole from its socket with a half-hollowed ball. To complete the torture, two of his fingers were amputated. Even though these accounts might be tainted by ideological bias—the pro-communist Gelders infamously failed to report the 1960 famine in Tibet—similar accounts date back to the nineteenth century.
American-educated Tashi Tsering—who returned to Tibet in 1963, only to spend years in prison during the Cultural Revolution—has also recounted how sexual violence against young boys was institutionalised in the monastery where he studied as a child. This, along with the PLA's early efforts to build schools and roads, led some modernising Tibetans to support China in the early years of occupation.
Also read: Tibet has little chance to get help from UN against its powerful occupier
Fallen dreams
Following the incorporation of Tibet into China in 1951, policymakers in Beijing debated just how to deal with the new region. In 1955 and 1956, efforts to curb monastic power led to rebellions in the Kham region, culminating in the bombing of monasteries. Mao, believing the time wasn't ripe for enforcing socialism, counselled patience. Fan Ming, the party's head for the TAR, argued against holding back. Fan believed a delay would allow pro-independence forces to consolidate and pushed for PLA deployment across the region.
Refugees from Kham gathered in Lhasa and formed an irregular army. Their anger exploded into rebellion in 1959, prompting the PLA to step in and begin forcibly confiscating monastery lands. The CIA, declassified documents reveal, began funding the insurgency later that year. Alongside India and Nepal, the CIA supplied weapons and trained insurgents until 1974.
From the outset, however, the insurgency was doomed. Though many Tibetans resented China's assault on their faith and traditions, not all mourned the fall of the rapacious feudal families who fled with the Dalai Lama in 1959. The Tibetan insurgents generated valuable intelligence for the CIA, expert John Masko has written, but never came close to their stated goal of reversing Chinese control.
Lacking a genuine mass base, the insurgent leadership was further weakened by regional and sectarian divides. Theocratic institutions that had long governed Tibet had also failed to build the ideological or political foundations needed for a unified national identity.
Even after the insurgency collapsed, China recognised it had a political problem and made repeated efforts to address it. As early as 1979, China opened channels for dialogue with the Dalai Lama through Prince Peter of Denmark, a noted Tibetologist. Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang also reached out to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exiles in 1980. But though several rounds of talks took place, they led nowhere: The Tibetans insisted on genuine autonomy, while China was willing to concede some cultural space, but no political rights.
Time has proved to be on China's side. Most likely, the new Dalai Lama—the heir to the centuries-old Lamaist state that once ruled Tibet with the prayer bead and the sword—will reign over a nation that now exists only in the imagination.
Praveen Swami is Contributing Editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)