Bharat Ratna for Dalai Lama; Flip-flop on Rohingyas in India
Opinion Watch
The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, should have been given Bharat Ratna long ago. He made India his home in 1959. The Dalai Lama has given a fresh meaning to the idea of non-violence that won India’s its Independence.
The Economic Times in its Edit has called for conferring Bharat Ratna to the 14th Dalai Lama.
The daily has argued that he is in the league of Mother Teresa, who too had made India her home. Thus, being stateless is no ground for not being conferred with India’s highest civilian award.
True, India’s stand on Tibet and the exiled people residing in the country had been shifting like the sand dunes, representative of policy timidity to the fear of dragon backlash.
Andul Ghaffar Khan in 1987 and Nelson Mandel in 1990 had previously been conferred with Bharat Ratna, reminded the daily, while stating that the proposal to confer Bharat Ratna on the Dalali Lama has been made by the All-Party Indian Parliamentary Forum for Tibet.
While the daily has focused on the immediate issue, it has not gone to explore the defining blot on the international order that the powerful countries remained spectator while China annexed Tibet, which had always been an independent kingdom.
The world is finally waking up to call the bluff of China, and India should abandon its sand dune policy shifts on Tibet and the people in exile who made Himachal Pradesh as their home.
Rohingyas in India
Rohingyas by all accounts are the world’s most persecuted community.
Their villages in Myanmar had been burnt down. Many of them are stateless people, living sub-human lives in Bangladesh, India and other countries.
Thuggery of the Myanmar Junta, the ruling military, has pushed thousands of Rohingyas to places such as Delhi where they stay in makeshift shanties.
The Indian Express, The Pioneer and The Hindu have commented in their respective Edits on the flip-flop of the Union government over the Rohingya refugees in the national capital.
First the Union Minister for Urban Development Hardeep Singh Puri surprised die-hard critics of the Bharatiya Janata Party by stating that the refugees in Delhi would be resettled in the EWS (economically weaker section) flats with all amenities, while making them also avail the international aids.
In seven hours, Union Minister for Home Affairs Amit Shah set the record straight that Rohingyas would be deported, and surely not settled in flats.
The Pioneer commented “India’s refugee policy is rudderless and confused”.
TH underlined that India’s Rohingya policy is mired in conflict between India’s foreign policy commitments and domestic politics.
The daily has pegged that bout 40,000 Rohingyas are in India, while a million of them are in Bangladesh.
IE noted in its Edit that Myanmar shares a 1600-km border with India. The United Nations had stated that not less than 15,000 Rohingyas had crossed over to India after the military coup in Myanmar last year alone.
The border indeed is porous.
Myanmar is behaving as a rogue nation in the league of China and North Korea, with least regards to the human rights of its people.
The US must get its acts right and impose crippling sanctions against Myanmar and also rein in China from supporting the Junta.
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