Dalai Lama will miss his Chanakya, Lodi Gyari
On many occasions he made positive contributions to India-US relations and lobbied for Indian interests at Capitol Hill.
In the history of modern diplomacy, there have been few diplomats like Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari—who died on 29 October 2018—of Tibet, who delivered stunning results despite the most limiting and unfavourable situations. As a Tibetan he belonged to one of the smallest refugee Diasporas—total population lower than 150-thousand across the globe—and represented a government-in-exile, which does not enjoy recognition from even a single government in the list of nations. Yet, he was able to push the United Nations to shun its inertia on Tibet; influence US policies like no non-American could ever do; and enjoyed more personal access to a wide range of policymakers on both sides of US Congress and White House than the best of international career diplomats.
His master, the Dalai Lama sent him to the United States as his special envoy in 1990, where he had already founded the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT)— a think-tank and advocacy group— in 1988, with his Tibetan colleague Tenzin Namgyal Tethong. Working as the president of ICT between 1991 and 1999 and later as the chairman of its executive board in Washington DC, until 2014, Lodi successfully won active support from, and influenced, innu- merable statesmen, heads of states, policymakers, thinktanks and advocacy groups from across the world on the Tibetan cause.
Lodi Gyari’s team at ICT, which included famous Hollywood star Richard Gere and Matteo Mecacci, was able to get the issue of Tibet institutionalised in the US political system. So much so that he could successfully mobilise Congressmen from opposing sides of the US Congress to adopt the famous Tibet Policy Act (2002)’. This Act mandated the US government to appoint a “Special Coordinator for Tibet”, which provoked Beijing to cross the limits of accepted diplomatic norms.
His first major success came in 1991 when the UN Sub Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities passed a resolution on Tibet despite all threats and pressures from China. Lodi Gyari’s work and reputation grew beyond Tibet as he was trusted and consulted by many world leaders, think-tanks and policymakers on issues as wide as US-China, India-China and India-US relations. Many US watchers would certify that very few individual career diplomats have had as clear an understanding of the functioning of Capitol Hill or had as much personal access to its functionaries, including the White House, as Lodi commanded as an individual “representative” of “no gov- ernment”.
No surprise, Lodi won the extraordinary distinction of a foreign diplomat who was formally praised by the US Senate. In a special resolution in 2012 (S. Res. 557) the US Senate admired Lodi Gyari’s personal contributions by stating that it “honors the services of Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari as Special Envoy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama; commends the achievements of Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari in building an international coalition of support for Tibet...”
There were many occasions when he made positive contributions to India-US relations and lobbied for Indian interests at the Capitol Hill. Lodi had his own logic behind his pro-India attitude. “As Tibetan refugees we have received so much of love and support from India. So it’s our duty to stand for India and support her whenever the situation demands”, he told this author on many occasions.
Lodi was born in 1949 as an incarnate Lama in an in- fluential Khampa family of Nyarong in the eastern Kham province of Tibet. In the years following the Chinese occupation of Tibet, his parents took shelter in India. Looking back one can say that Lodi was born to create institutions. He was 18 when he founded and edited Voice of Tibet, the first English news magazine which has come to stay as Tibetan Review today. He also founded Sheja, the first Tibetan newspaper in exile. He was also one of three founders of Tibetan Youth Congress, which is the largest socio-political organisation of the exiled community.
In the 1970s, this author was deeply impressed by the ease with which Lodi would mix and rub shoulders with senior Indian stalwarts like Jay Prakash Narayan, Acharya Kripalani, Morarji Desai, George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye, Balraj Madhok, Ashok Mehta, M. L. Sondhi, P.N. Lekhi, Major General S.S. Uban and T.N. Kaw, among others. You name a leader or senior Indian bureaucrat and good chances were that Lodi could call at his or her home within the next one hour.
As an activist himself, Lodi won elections for the exileParliament and soon became the youngest Speaker of the Tibetan House. Later, Dalai Lama inducted him into his Cabinet, where he served until he was deputed to the United States as his special envoy. Later he represented Dalai Lama as his chief negotiator with Beijing from 2002 to 2010. Unfortunately, Beijing used this period to fortify its position inside occupied Tibet and did not allow the talks to succeed.
Richard Gere, famous Hollywood personality and Lodi’s best friend and successor in ICT, paid tributes to him by describing him as “my dear friend and partner and mentor for over 30 years”. In her statement condoling Lodi’s demise, Nancy Pelosi, a leading Democrat leader expressed her gratitude to him as her “teacher”. She said: “The world has lost an extraordinary champion for the Tibetan people...Lodi Gyari was a religious leader and a diplomat, an administrator and an activist, but, most of all, he was a teacher. Through diplomacy, he taught us to how to seek understanding and create peace. Through advocacy, he taught us how to share the spirit of resilience with our children. Through faith, he taught us that all nations and all people are interconnected.”
Also, there are innumerable admirers and friends of Lodi Gyari like me who will miss him as a great friend who remembered each individual’s personal choices and tendencies. Tibet, especially Dalai Lama, will miss their Chanakya. Vijay Kranti is a senior journalist, Tibetologist and Chairman, Centre for Himalayan Asia Studies and Engagement. A day before she landed at Kochi airport on a chartered flight wanting to go to Sabarimala for a darshan of Lord Ayyappa, Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, to a query as to whether the state government would provide security to Trupti Desai, countered by asking, “Who is Trupti Desai?”. On Friday, Vijayan’s police confined the leader of Bhumata Brigade along with six other activists to the airport in a highvoltage drama lasting over 14 hours, before herding them off in a flight to Pune, citing law and order problems. Desai and company were not allowed to step out as “devotees” of Lord Ayyappa, mainly BJP workers, opposed to the entry of women of a certain age to the shrine, had laid a siege on the airport as the police stood watching. The Sabarimala temple formally opened on Friday for the first two-month-long pilgrim season, known as “Mandala puja”, when millions converge, after the Supreme Court verdict on 28 September, allowing entry of women of all ages to the temple. Before this the temple was opened for five days in October and for a day early this month that saw large scale violence and arrest of thousands protesting the government decision to implement the court order at any cost. As was then, on Thursday too, at an all-party meeting held at the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, CM Vijayan turned down all appeals for a conciliatory move and asserted that the state government was duty bound to execute the Apex Court order, leading the Opposition Congress and BJP to stage a walkout. Still, the Kerala police could not ensure even the travel rights of an individual, considering the fact that only a motley crowd of protesters had collected in front of the airport when Desai and other activists landed at 4.30 am on Friday. No wonder certain Opposition leaders had termed the day-long dharna at the airport as a farce enacted by the government to divert attention from its failure in providing even basic amenities for the pilgrims en route to the shrine.
As Trupti Desai and other activists were held captive at the Kochi airport and the protesting crowd gathered strength under the watchful gaze of the police and CISF personnel, who did nothing to disperse them, elsewhere in far off Pamba at the foothills of Sabarimala, a real farce unfolded when the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), which controls the temple, announced its decision to move the SC seeking more time to implement its order. On the face of it, this is seen as a climbdown on the part of the Pinarayi government, which had refused to approach the court on its verdict in any manner, but actually it is inconsequential. Board president and CPM legislator, A. Padmakumar, who was publicly chided by Vijayan for announcing TDB plans to move a review petition one-and-a-half months ago, said the petition would cite the dilapidated condition in and around Pamba after the devastating flood in August, restrictions on infrastructural developments imposed by the Supreme Court’s empowered committee and of course the violence last month. “The petition will not mention any time frame for delaying the implementation of the SC order,” he said, adding it would be submitted on Monday. Ironically, the court had not set “any time frame” regarding entry of young women into the temple. Instead, it was the state government which hurried with its decision to facilitate entry of women of all ages at the first instance when the temple doors opened for pujas at the beginning of the Malayalam month of Thulam, which was in October. A Constitution bench of the Supreme Court headed by the then Chief Justice Dipak Misra in a 4-1 verdict had simply struck down a rule that disallowed girls and women in the 10-50 age group from entering the Sabarimala temple. So where is the question of a deadline on such entry coming into the picture at all, many wondered; this is nothing but a ploy by the ruling government to paper its own failure in implementing the order while taking a grandstand over the issue, they said.
A wiser Trupti Desai and friends have vowed to return, unannounced, before the end of Mandala puja. Meanwhile, there are apparently over 700 women who have so far registered with the police seeking permission to visit the temple. Before leaving, Desai had told some newspersons that the police had repeatedly urged them to return as the “possibility of violence cannot be ruled out”. The government seems to be unfazed about the stand-off with protesters of different hues. While one minister has said that Desai was a Congress agent, another claimed she was a “paid agent of the RSS”. This shows that the government and CPM are still viewing the ongoing agitation through the prism of politics. No saner element in Kerala will deny the fact that the Opposition, especially the BJP, is trying to capitalise politically in the name of Lord Ayyappa. It is appalling that the government is trying to paint every aggrieved devotee with the same brush. Basically a god-fearing society, it will take time for a majority of believers in the state to accept the changing mores. But there is hope floating around for millions of women and men who wish that at least one young woman sets her sight on Lord Ayyappa this mandala season itself, at least to break the man-made myth surrounding the deity’s celibacy and end politicisation of a place of worship cutting across all religions and boundaries.
Lodi Gyari’s first major success came in 1991 when the UN Sub Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities passed a resolution on Tibet despite all threats and pressures from China. His work and reputation grew beyond Tibet.