AND NOW, A NEW FACE OF DEMOCRACY (April, 1993)

AND NOW, A NEW FACE OF DEMOCRACY April 1993 In his 10 March statement, the Dalai Lama has stressed on the need to focus on four fronts: continuing to seek a fruitful dialogue with the Chinese government, seeking more support for our cause in the outside world, studying Peking’s new economic policy in Tibet, and further democratization of the Tibetan administration in exile. The success on the first three of these fronts largely depends on attitudes of other people but the last one is entirely up to us. By now many features of a modern democracy are in place in our exile society, even if some of them only in name. So in this respect we can claim to have made successful transition to modern, civilized way of doing things collectively. This is fine for taking visitors on guided tours. However, we can’t, in the privacy our own rooms, seriously think of our society as a practicing democracy without bursting into hysterical fits of laughter. Strangely enough, though, this does not seem to be the result of some sort of conspiracy at the top. The problem appears to lie with the still unreconstructed attitude of the ordinary Tibetan people. A fine example of this problem was provided in the recent election in Dharamshala of the new council of ministers. The new election rules provided an excellent opportunity for a thorough overhauling of our administration which would have, if nothing else, taught the future holders of high positions that they cannot take them for granted. It was a great idea to let members of the Central Tibetan Administration recommend names for the ministerial posts, for no one else would be in a better position to know who is capable and who is not. Once the nominations based on these recommendations came down from the Dalai Lama, it was left to the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies to elect the seven ministers. The stage was truly set for a new era in Tibetan democracy. But the outcome was the biggest anticlimax we have ever seen. First, every single member of the old cabinet was returned. Not enough people, whether in the Central Tibetan Administration or in the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies, seem to have thought that if the purpose of the whole exercise was to find two new ministers, there would have been no need for the old cabinet to resign or indeed to change the election procedure in the first place. Secondly, once the smoke cleared out, the only new face we had up there was that of Rinchen Khando Choegyal. And her qualification for the august post: she is the wife of the Dalai Lama’s younger brother. Of course you will be told that the real reason why she got there is because she was president of the Tibetan Women’s Association. You will then need to be told that she was elected president of TWA for the same reason that she is now elected a member of the cabinet—her marital ties. Mind you neither she, nor her husband, nor anyone else told the TWA members or government officials or our parliament that she be elected on that account. Our people do not need to be told such things. They’ve got eyes, haven’t they? The Tibetan cabinet, which is not large even by its own standards, already has a brother and a sister of the Dalai Lama in it. However, unlike Choegyal, they were both closely associated with the Tibetan administration even before they joined it. Before her election in the TWA, Choegyal’s sole claim to fame rested on being a respectable housewife and a good hostess. True, after the election, she travelled abroad and made some speeches. But anyone put in that position could have done that. After all, she is not known to have said anything which would not have occurred to anyone else. Her election, therefore, leads to some interesting questions: Are we having so much trouble getting a full-sized cabinet because the Dalai Lama does not have enough brothers and sisters? Now that in-laws have begun to be roped in, will the process go on till all the in-laws have begun to be roped in, will the process go on till all the in-laws, some of whom are not even Tibetans, are in place? And finally, do people in Dharamshala really believe this is what the Dalai Lama meant when he said that “the implementation of democracy at the grass-roots level must be encouraged?”