We should award Bharat Ratna to Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama often jokes that his body, fed on pulses and rice for decades, is Indian; His mind is also Indian, as informed by the Nalanda masters of ancient times. In the last few years, the demand for conferring India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, on the Dalai Lama has gained momentum. Now is the time to heed this call.

In 2019, 200 Members of Parliament across party lines, led by former Himachal Pradesh CM Shanta Kumar (of the Bharatiya Janata Party), signed a memorandum urging the Center to award the Bharat Ratna to the Dalai Lama. Kumar is part of the All-Party Indian Parliamentary Forum for Tibet, an informal group of parliamentarians that was first established in 1970 to raise the Tibetan issue in relevant public forums, and was briefly led by George Fernandes who was a longtime politician. Supporter of the Tibetan struggle. In August 2022, the Forum, now chaired by Biju Janata Dal MP Sujit Kumar, passed a resolution to press for the demand and invite the Dalai Lama to address a joint sitting of both Houses of Parliament. Several academics, students and public intellectuals also created the ‘Bharat Ratna for the Dalai Lama’ initiative, a voting campaign to mobilize public support.

There are some who argue that the Indian government should refrain from publicly recognizing the Dalai Lama in order to avoid angering China, which has long accused the Tibetan leader of being an anti-China separatist. Beginning in 2018, the Central Tibetan Administration’s events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s escape to India were canceled or moved from Delhi several times. The Indian government issued a directive advising bureaucrats and politicians not to attend these events as it was a “very sensitive time” for India-China relations.

But the Dalai Lama is not some obscure ‘Tibet card’ to be deployed on the high platform of geopolitics at the appropriate time. India should respect him for what he has done for India in the last six decades.

India has a proud tradition of honoring those who, even though they were not born here, made it their home and dedicated their lives to its service. Mother Teresa (1910–1997), who like the Dalai Lama spent almost her entire adult life in India, was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1980. We also honored anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) in 1990. Both share the distinction of being Nobel Prize winners for peace with the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama is an important religious leader for Buddhist communities throughout the Himalayas. Millions of Himalayan Buddhists in and around India see him as ‘Gyalwa Rinpoche’, the Precious Victorious One. The Tibetan exile community in India has played an important role in institution building to revive Tibetan and Himalayan studies in India. Tibetans have rebuilt several important monastic institutions, which welcome monks and nuns from the Himalayan states of India into their fold, and have served as educational nodes for the expansion and preservation of Tibetan Buddhism within India.

In December 2022, the Council of the Indian Himalayan Nalanda Buddhist Tradition passed a resolution on the controversial issue of reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. It stated that the people of the Himalayas would never accept a Dalai Lama candidate chosen by the People’s Republic of China “for political purposes” and condemned the move.

The Dalai Lama has personally supported India at several global forums. As a proponent of ahimsa (non-violence) and karuna (compassion), principles that he attributes to India or the Buddhist traditions of India, he has been a major supporter of India’s cultural and philosophical heritage and its Gandhian heritage.

Former West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi wrote of the irony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi showing the Chinese president around Gandhi’s ashram at Sabarmati, while “in India today the closest spiritual successor to the Mahatma, the Dalai Lama, is half a century old”. and even more so that “after he has become one of us, we must remain the gem we shall not call by his name.”

In 1999, when the deliberations of the Nobel Committee were made public, it was learned that Mohandas K. Not awarding the Peace Prize to Gandhi was one of its most regrettable lapses. In fact, if Gandhi had lived for a few more months, he would have been awarded the Nobel in 1948. In his honor, the committee had no other laureate that year, declaring that “no suitable living candidate could be found.”

The 1989 Nobel to the Dalai Lama was, in part, a salute to Gandhi. The Dalai Lama said as much in his acceptance speech: “I accept this as a tribute to the man who founded the modern tradition of nonviolent action for change – Mahatma Gandhi – whose life taught and inspired me.”

Such mistake should not happen again. To recognize the contribution of Dalai Lama, he should be awarded Bharat Ratna at the earliest. As Third Poll’s Omair Ahmed told our students, “He will do more to honor this award than it will to him, and we should have done this a long time ago.”

UPDATE: July 05, 2023, 10:30 PM IST