‘India, Dalai Lama blocking Beijing from using Buddhism as soft power’

BEIJING : India is the biggest challenge for Beijing to use Buddhism in support of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to tackle terrorism and separatism and for strategic purposes, leading Chinese scholars have said.

For one, the Chinese Buddhist scholars argued at a recent symposium, the Dharamshala-based Dalai Lama has established a “separatist” base in India and promotes traditional religion and culture – as opposed to the Communist Party’s socialist values – to maintain his base.

India itself is a “stumbling block” as it has not joined BRI, a connectivity project worth billions of dollars, because of geopolitical reasons.

The scholars gathered this week in northwestern Qinghai province to discuss how to leverage Buddhism in constructing and expanding the BRI. The symposium was seemingly focussed on “sinicising” – and also politicising – Buddhism for the purpose of statecraft.

“Soft power like religion, if used properly, will convert to hard power,” one scholar said.

“Guided by the core socialist values, the symposium aims to encourage Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to the socialist society and teach the religion to serve the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative,” the sitetibet.cn news website reported.

Tibetan Buddhism can act as a bridge between BRI countries so that they can better communicate with each other, since religious and cultural beliefs are similar in Central and South Asia, Qin Yongzhang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told Global Times tabloid.

The BRI, for example, has “injected new energy into China Nepal ties” and China has built a relationship with Mongolia through Tibetan Buddhism. Not so the case with India. “One immediate challenge of promoting BRI through Tibetan Buddhism comes from India, which has been holding back for geopolitical reasons,” Qin said.