Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the Geopolitics of the Himalayas : Reflections on Dr. Lobsang Sangay’s Address at Shyam Lal College

 

Some academic engagements do not end with the conclusion of a lecture or the dispersal of an audience. They remain with us, compelling us to revisit questions larger than the immediate occasion. On 24 September 2026, as the Teacher-in-Charge of the Department of Political Science at Shyam Lal College, University of Delhi, I had the privilege of convening a seminar titled “The Geopolitics of the Dalai Lama’s Reincarnation.” What began as an academic initiative became, for me, an occasion for deeper reflection on Tibet, China, India, and the future of the Himalayan region.

We were privileged to have as our Chief Guest and keynote speaker Dr. Lobsang Sangay, Lecturer on Law and Senior Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School and former Sikyong, or President, of the Central Tibetan Administration. His association with Delhi made the occasion particularly meaningful. Before proceeding to Harvard Law School, Dr. Sangay had studied at the University of Delhi. He subsequently served two terms, from 2011 to 2021, as the democratically elected political head of the Central Tibetan Administration. He therefore spoke not merely as an academic observer of Tibet but as someone who has spent a considerable part of his public life representing and articulating the Tibetan question internationally.

For me personally, Tibet has never been merely another subject in International Relations. I have always felt an emotional connection with the Tibetan people. Their history, their experience of exile, and their struggle to preserve their culture have remained close to my heart. I have written a detailed human rights report on Tibet while I served as the Secretary General of the Center for Democracy, Pluralism and Human Rights (CDPHR), a New Delhi-based research institute. I had the privilege of inviting Dr. Sangey as the Chief Guest at the report release event at the Constitution Club of India in 2021. Since then, Tibetan people's aspiration to exercise meaningful autonomy over their religious and cultural traditions has compelled me to engage academically with the issue. Sympathy should never become a substitute for critical academic enquiry, but scholarship need not require the abandonment of human empathy either. It is difficult to remain completely detached from the predicament of a people who have struggled for decades to preserve their monasteries, language, religious institutions and inherited traditions.

It is equally important to state accurately what the Tibetan leadership has formally sought. The Middle-Way Approach advocated by the Central Tibetan Administration does not seek Tibetan independence from the People’s Republic of China. It seeks what the Tibetan leadership describes as genuine autonomy, particularly in areas such as religion, culture, language, education, and environmental protection. The distinction is important because the Tibetan question is frequently reduced to a binary choice between Chinese sovereignty and Tibetan independence, whereas the stated approach of the Tibetan exile leadership attempts to locate a negotiated space within that debate.

Perhaps the continuing resonance of the Tibetan question became evident to me in an unexpected way after our seminar. I uploaded Dr. Sangay’s lecture to my YouTube channel so that students and others unable to attend the programme could listen to him. Within barely two days, the lecture had crossed 6,500 views, accompanied by an unusually large number of comments, likes and responses. For a channel such as mine, primarily devoted to academic lectures, discussions and public affairs, this was a rare response. I do not regard digital viewing figures as scientific evidence of public opinion, but the experience was nevertheless revealing. Something about Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the question of religious freedom had clearly touched a chord well beyond the physical audience that had gathered in our College.

The response also reminded me that Tibet is not merely an issue concerning Tibetans. Questions about a people's relationship with their homeland, their ability to preserve their religion, and their right to sustain inherited cultural institutions possess a universal human resonance. This perhaps explains why the Tibetan cause continues to attract attention and sympathy in India and in many parts of the world despite the passage of decades. The extraordinary global moral stature of the Dalai Lama has certainly contributed to that visibility, but beneath the personality lies a larger question: how does a community preserve its civilizational identity when the institutions through which that identity is transmitted become subject to extensive state regulation?

For India, Tibet carries an additional significance because it is simultaneously geopolitical, geocultural and ecological. Long before modern nation-states drew boundaries across the Himalayas, monks, scholars, pilgrims, traders, texts and ideas travelled between India and Tibet. Buddhism journeyed from India into Tibet, where it developed into one of the great traditions of Buddhist philosophy and monastic scholarship. Indian masters such as Shantarakshita, Padmasambhava and Atisha occupy an enduring place in Tibetan Buddhist memory. Much of India's Buddhist intellectual heritage that subsequently declined in its land of origin survived through Tibetan translations, commentaries and monastic traditions.

Tibet, therefore, cannot be regarded as culturally distant from India. There exists a civilizational relationship that predates the political boundaries and strategic anxieties of the twentieth century. This makes Tibet a geocultural question for India, even as contemporary developments have made it an unavoidable geopolitical one. The Himalayas were certainly formidable geographical barriers, but historically they were also bridges through which civilizations interacted. To look at Tibet only through the contemporary India-China boundary is consequently to see only one layer of a much older relationship.

Geography adds another dimension. The Tibetan Plateau and the wider Hindu Kush-Himalayan high-altitude system are often described as the “Asian Water Tower.” The region forms the headwaters of major Asian river systems and supports water security for vast downstream populations. Recent scientific research estimates that the wider Asian Water Tower sustains water resources for approximately 1.9 billion people and encompasses the headwaters of eleven major river systems.

This hydrological geography makes Tibet and the wider Himalayan region enormously consequential for India. The Brahmaputra, Indus and other river systems demonstrate how developments in the upper reaches can eventually acquire ecological, economic and strategic consequences downstream. India and Nepal are among the countries whose societies and economies are deeply connected to Himalayan river systems. Climate change, glacial retreat, changing precipitation, hydropower development and river management therefore make the ecological future of the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding mountains a matter of regional rather than exclusively domestic concern.

The terrible Himalayan disaster of August 2026 provided a painful reminder of this ecological interconnectedness. A massive collapse involving the Langtang Lirung glacier in Nepal, close to the Tibetan frontier, triggered a devastating flood and landslide. By 21 September, more than 1,400 deaths had been reported and thousands remained missing, while hydropower infrastructure and settlements suffered enormous destruction. Earlier scientific assessments pointed towards unusually high temperatures and accelerated glacier loss as important background conditions, although investigation into the precise dynamics of the catastrophe continued.

There is no credible evidence that Chinese actions caused this catastrophe, and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise. The more important issue is structural. A rapidly changing Himalayan cryosphere does not respect political boundaries. Scientific understanding of glaciers, river flows, extreme events and infrastructure risks therefore requires transparency, continuous observation, exchange of hydrological information and cross-border research. A recent scientific review specifically identifies enhanced transboundary coordination and data-sharing as important components of water security across the Asian Water Tower.

It is in this context that restricted external access to Tibet acquires an ecological dimension as well. The Tibet Autonomous Region remains subject to special entry requirements for foreigners, and independent foreign journalists have repeatedly faced substantial restrictions. U.S. State Department reporting covering 2023 recorded that requests by American officials for official travel to the region were not approved and that journalistic access remained tightly controlled; independent reporting also documents Tibet as uniquely restrictive compared with other provincial-level regions of China. These restrictions should not be conflated with the causes of natural disasters, but limited independent access can complicate outside observation and scrutiny of a region whose ecological changes have consequences extending across national borders.

This is why Tibet should increasingly be approached not merely as a territorial or human-rights question but also as an issue of ecological security. Scientific research shows that the Asian Water Tower is undergoing significant warming and hydrological change, with consequences for the Brahmaputra, Indus and other transboundary rivers. In an age of climate change, upstream-downstream cooperation, environmental transparency and scientific exchange are not concessions by one state to another; they are increasingly necessities imposed upon all of us by geography.

The same question of openness arises in another, very different sphere—the condition of Tibetan Buddhist religious institutions. The experiences of Larung Gar and Yachen Gar, two major centres of Tibetan Buddhist learning, have attracted considerable international concern. Human-rights organisations have documented demolitions, expulsions of monks and nuns and increased administrative controls at these institutions. Chinese authorities have explained measures at Larung Gar partly in terms of safety, overcrowding and administrative management, while human-rights organisations have regarded their scale and character as severe restrictions upon Tibetan religious life.

A monastery, however, is rarely only a physical structure. It is a repository of memory, scholarship, ritual and community. It is one of the institutional spaces through which knowledge passes from one generation to another. When the autonomy of such institutions is curtailed, what is potentially at stake is therefore not simply control over buildings or land but the ability of a civilization to preserve and reproduce its intellectual and spiritual inheritance.

This brings us directly to the subject of our seminar: why should the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama become a geopolitical issue at all? Reincarnation belongs fundamentally to the religious universe of Tibetan Buddhism. Yet the future succession of the Dalai Lama has become a matter of political contestation because two different conceptions of authority confront one another. The 14th Dalai Lama has reaffirmed that the institution will continue and has assigned responsibility for recognising his future reincarnation to the Gaden Phodrang Trust, acting according to Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Beijing maintains a fundamentally different position, asserting that the reincarnation must comply with Chinese law and procedures involving state approval.

The resulting paradox is difficult to overlook: a Communist Party-state grounded officially in an atheist ideological tradition claims regulatory authority over the reincarnation of Buddhist spiritual leaders. Dr. Sangay’s explanation of this apparent contradiction was one of the most thought-provoking parts of his lecture. His argument was that Beijing is less interested in the theology of reincarnation than in the institutional authority represented by the office of the Dalai Lama.

For millions of followers, the Dalai Lama derives authority from a centuries-old religious tradition. From the perspective of statecraft, however, that same institution possesses a form of transnational influence that cannot easily be created through administrative power. The spiritual influence associated with the Dalai Lama extends beyond Tibet into the wider Himalayan Buddhist world, including regions such as Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh in India and communities in Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia and elsewhere. Sangay therefore argued that controlling the succession process could provide Beijing with an opportunity to influence the institution itself. In his words, the objective is to “control the office of the Dalai Lama.”

There is a larger lesson here about the nature of power. Students of International Relations are accustomed to understanding power through armies, economies, technology, territory, and material capabilities. Yet legitimacy itself is a form of power. Religious institutions, cultural memory and civilizational authority can transcend political boundaries in ways that armies cannot. A government may appoint an official, but it cannot automatically manufacture spiritual acceptance among believers.

If, after the present Dalai Lama, two competing processes eventually produce rival claimants, one recognised through the Tibetan Buddhist process identified by the present Dalai Lama and another approved by Beijing, the resulting contest could extend far beyond two individuals. It would potentially become a contest over religious legitimacy, Tibetan identity and political authority, with consequences throughout the Himalayan Buddhist world. The geopolitics of reincarnation is therefore, at its deepest level, also a geopolitics of legitimacy.

It was in this context that Dr. Sangay connected the Dalai Lama question with what has popularly become known as China’s “Five Fingers” strategy. According to this metaphor, Tibet constitutes the palm of a hand, while Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh constitute its five fingers. Sangay related this strategic imagination to developments such as Doklam, Galwan and continuing Chinese claims concerning Arunachal Pradesh.

An important qualification is necessary. The formulation is frequently attributed to Mao Zedong, but its documentary provenance is disputed. Interestingly, Dr. Sangay himself acknowledged during his address that one cannot readily identify an official speech or document in which Mao articulated the doctrine precisely in these terms. Recent academic scholarship has similarly questioned whether a formally articulated Maoist “Five Fingers strategy” ever existed. Serious academic writing must distinguish between a useful geopolitical metaphor and a historically authenticated state doctrine.

Yet uncertainty about the phrase does not make the underlying geography irrelevant. Tibet occupies an extraordinary strategic position overlooking the Himalayan arc. Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh possess very different histories and political circumstances and cannot simply be grouped together. Nevertheless, China's relations, territorial disputes and strategic activities across the Himalayan region make the geography itself worthy of sustained attention.

Sangay went further. China, he argued, now possesses substantial economic, political or strategic influence beyond the traditional “five fingers,” including in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. With characteristic rhetorical flourish, he described the contemporary environment as one of “ten fingers.” This too should be understood as Sangay’s geopolitical metaphor, not as an officially declared Chinese strategy. Yet the question behind it deserves reflection: as Chinese influence expands across India's continental and maritime neighbourhood, how should India conceptualise the changing strategic environment around itself?

Perhaps the most important observation Sangay made that morning was also one of the simplest: if one wants to understand China, one must understand Tibet. I found myself returning repeatedly to this statement. India has understandably invested considerable intellectual energy in studying China from the perspective of Beijing that includes its Communist Party, economy, military, foreign policy and global ambitions. But perhaps India also needs to understand China from the Himalayas inward.

Tibet offers a vantage point from which borders, water, culture, religion, security and state power converge. Yet Tibetan studies remain far less prominent in Indian academic institutions than their strategic significance would warrant. During his lecture, Dr. Sangay suggested that institutions such as the University of Delhi should devote greater academic attention to Tibetan studies. For students of Political Science and International Relations, such study would hardly be antiquarian. Tibet brings together almost every major theme of our discipline: sovereignty and autonomy, power and legitimacy, territory and identity, ecology and security, religion and politics, civilization and statecraft.

As I reflected upon the seminar afterwards, I realised that our title, “The Geopolitics of the Dalai Lama’s Reincarnation”, contained within it a much larger question: Who has the right to preserve and interpret a civilization? Can political authority manufacture religious legitimacy? Can a modern state determine the succession of a spiritual institution when the community of believers locates that authority elsewhere? And what happens when an institution developed through centuries of religious tradition becomes entangled in the strategic calculations of powerful states?

My own conviction is that religious communities ought to enjoy the space to preserve their traditions and institutions without coercive political interference. Tibet reminds us that the survival of a civilization cannot be measured merely through control over territory. Civilizations live through languages, monasteries, texts, rituals, teachers and collective memories. And, above all, through the freedom of one generation to transmit its inheritance to the next. This is why the autonomy of religious institutions matters and why the question of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation cannot be dismissed as an obscure theological controversy.

It is also why Tibet matters so profoundly to India. It matters because of the Himalayas and India's security; it matters because of rivers, glaciers and ecology; and it matters because a significant part of Tibet’s religious and intellectual inheritance grew from an ancient civilizational dialogue with India. Understanding Tibet need not imply hostility towards China, nor should scholarship become a substitute for diplomacy. It means recognising realities that geography and history have placed before us. Dialogue is indispensable in international relations, but dialogue is strengthened, not weakened, by historical awareness, cultural literacy, ecological knowledge and strategic clarity.

The seminar at Shyam Lal College began for me as an academic initiative undertaken in my responsibility as Teacher-in-Charge of the Department of Political Science. It ended as a deeper reflection on the relationship between power and civilization. The unexpected response to Sangay’s lecture after I uploaded it online only reinforced that impression. A discussion that began inside a college auditorium travelled within days to thousands of viewers. Perhaps that response itself tells us something: despite the enormous changes in world politics, Tibet has not disappeared from public consciousness.

Dr. Lobsang Sangay’s address reminded us that the future of the Dalai Lama cannot be understood simply by asking who will be recognised as his reincarnation. Behind that question lies another: who will possess the legitimacy to make that recognition meaningful? Behind even that lies the larger question of Tibet itself, its people, its monasteries and religious traditions, its glaciers and rivers, its civilizational memory and its place in the strategic geography of Asia.

Perhaps, therefore, Sangay’s proposition deserves to be remembered: to understand China, we must understand Tibet. I would add that to understand Tibet, we must look beyond political maps. We must understand its people and monasteries, its mountains and rivers, its religious traditions and civilizational memories. Only then can we comprehend why the succession of a Buddhist spiritual leader has become an issue of international politics, and why the future of Tibet remains inseparable from the geopolitics, ecology and civilizational future of the Himalayas.