TRANSCRIPT OF THE TIBET CONNECTION
INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR ROBBIE BARNETT ON THE KARMAPA’S VISIT TO AMERICA
Robbie
Barnett is a Tibet scholar at Columbia University and the author of LHASA: STREETS WITH MEMORIES.
TC:
Do you think that the fact that the Karmapa was given permission to leave India represents a policy shift by the Indian or
Chinese governments?
RB: There have been no public statements by the Chinese authorities ,
or even by the Indian authorities, that have come out recently, so the situation now is not clear. But it’s almost certain
that it does represent an interesting policy development that this has been allowed to take place, and we don’t know
if that is a policy being made by India alone or India in consultation with China. It might be both India and China that have
modified their positions in the last few months, or the last year or so, because this
does seem to suggest that either India is not concerned with Chinese opinion, which is possible but not usual, or else China
has changed it’s opinion and decided to take a more trusting and more un-typically moderate view of this.
TC:
What do you think, if you had to hazard a guess?
RB: If I had to guess—although
there are some quite strong concerns within India about Chinese issues concerned with their borders, and so on, these are
live issues in Indian politics—my guess is that his is not a short-term reaction to the current situation, and that
there might have been some discussion with China, and that China might have quietly indicated that it’s not going to
raise major objections as it has in the past. We’ll have to wait and see if this is right.
It’s clear that China does not want to make any public issue out of this, otherwise we would already know,
I think.
TC: What is China's policy on the Karmapa? How do they view him?
RB:
China has never made any public criticism of the Karmapa. When the Karmapa left [Tibet] they tried to maintain the idea that
he would return soon. [Their actual statement was “He has left to collect his hat from Rumtek’] As they put it
at the time, they left the “door open” for him to return. Now, that door only closes if he does something insulting
or damaging to “the motherland”. This is China’s position on the Karmapa question.
In other words, they have no intentioned see no benefit in making an enemy out of him if they don’t
feel they have to. Indeed, since they have made the only credible Panchen Lama disappear and demonized the Dalai Lama beyond
any credible degree, they have left themselves with no other options. There are no senior religious figures they can turn
to for support, and their theory of ruling the non-Chinese is dependent on having local figureheads of stature to endorse
their claims. You can make your own view as to whether this means they regard the Tibetans and other non-Chinese as inherently
backward or whether it means they suspect their claims have weak validity, but either way, they see having at least one such
leader as essential to the success of thier rule. he Karmapa has been extremely skilful
in conveying, more or less through actions rather than words, what the major problems are in Tibet while at the same time
not provoking the Chinese side, so that it can maintain the fiction that his defection is a temporary excursion. That fiction
is I fact helpful to all sides, since the Chinese attitude to the Dalai Lama is, sadly, so destructive.
TC: Do you think that the Karmapa's visit
to the United States is significant?
RB: His visit to the US is important because it has the potential to communicate
to a distrustful world that major religious leaders of his caliber are not always concerned just with promoting their own
religions, as other religious leaders often do, or with only building up their own institutions or wealth, which some lesser
lamas have been seen as doing. Many major Tibetan lamas in the West have left the burden of political and community responsibilities
to the Dalai Lama; in many cases, it could be seen that they left him to do the difficult work. The Karmapa is different.
He represents an important way of being a diplomatic representative for his culture and community, giving religious teachings
in a low key way while at the same time quietly embodying wider political and humanitarian concerns just by the fact that
he is outside China. This will significantly improve the wider efforts of the Tibetans to articulate their concerns in non-confrontational
ways, and will gradually mean that the Dalai Lama will be seen as not alone as a sophisticated spokesman for Tibetan concerns.
