Narendra Modi greets Dalai Lama on birthday in rare phone call

Beijing regards the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile in northern India for more than six decades, as a dangerous 'splittist'

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday not only called the 14th Dalai Lama over phone to greet him on his birthday, but also went public about it with a tweet, thus, making a rare gesture, which was apparently intended to send out a message to President Xi Jinping’s regime in Beijing.

New Delhi decided to go public about Modi’s call to the Dalai Lama at a time when the 14-month-long military standoff between India and China along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) brought down the relations between the two nations to a new low. The rare acknowledgment of the contact between the Head of the Government of India and the global icon of the protest against China’s rule over Tibet came on a day Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan attended a virtual event held by the Communist Party of China (CPC) on its centenary with representatives of foreign political parties from around the world.

Read more: No grand event for the Dalai Lama's 86th birthday this year: Report

“Spoke on phone to His Holiness the @DalaiLama to convey greetings on his 86th birthday. We wish him a long and healthy life,” the Prime Minister posted on Twitter, after talking to the monk, who has been living in exile in India following his 1959 escape from Tibet, which had been occupied by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1950-51.

The Dalai Lama, a staunch advocate of non-violence and freedom, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. He has been arguing for “genuine autonomy” – not independence from the Chinese Government’s rule – for Tibet. Beijing, however, still calls him a “separatist” and accuses him of running a campaign to split China. His meeting with the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in August 2010 or his visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan on an invitation from the then President Pranab Mukherjee in December 2016 triggered strong protests from China. The same happened after New Delhi’s decisions in 2009 and 2017 to allow him to visit Arunachal Pradesh, where China claims nearly 90,000 sq kms of territory of India to be its own.

Modi, however, did not have any public contact or engagement with the Dalai Lama over the past seven years after he took over as the Prime Minister in 2014, ostensibly to avoid hurting the sentiments of China. He did not change the policy of maintaining distance from the Dalai Lama and refrained from publicly wishing the octogenarian on his birthday on July 6 last year, even though New Delhi’s relations with Beijing nosedived after the June 15, 2020 clash between the Indian Army and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army along the LAC in Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh.

The last public engagement between the two had taken place in January 2010, when Modi had been heading the Gujarat Government as the Chief Minister.

What is likely to rile up Beijing further is that Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader also received greetings from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. The acting United States envoy to India, Atul Keshap too greeted him with a tweet: “His messages of peace and compassion inspire and transcend globally.”

As the Dalai Lama turned 86 on Tuesday, the Tibetan Government in Exile (TGiE) – formally known as Central Tibetan Administration and based at Dharamshala in India –called upon Xi Jinping’s Government to recognise that the octogenarian monk is the key to resolve the Sino-Tibetan conflict. Penpa Tsering, Sikyong (or President) of the TGiE, urged Beijing to invite the Dalai Lama to visit China and Tibet on pilgrimage without any precondition.