We must confer a Bharat Ratna upon the Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama turns a youthful 88 on 6 July. He has spent three-fourths of that storied life in India—arriving in exile here as a 23-year-old monk in March 1959. India has consistently treated him as a revered religious leader and an honoured guest.
It also supported the large Tibetan community that followed him into exile, including the creation of self-contained Tibetan settlements across 12 Indian states. The Dalai Lama often jokes that his body, sustained for decades on daal-bhaat, is Indian; his mind, informed by the Nalanda masters of yore, is also Indian. Over the past few years, the call to confer India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, upon the Dalai Lama has gained strength.
It is time to heed this call. In 2019, 200 Members of Parliament across party lines, led by former Himachal Pradesh CM Shanta Kumar (of the Bharatiya Janata Party), signed a memorandum urging the Centre to award the Dalai Lama a Bharat Ratna. Kumar is part of the All-Party Indian Parliamentary Forum for Tibet, an informal group of MPs first established in 1970 to raise the Tibetan issue on relevant public platforms, and led for some time by George Fernandes, a politician who was a long-time supporter of the Tibetan struggle.
In August 2022, the Forum, now chaired by Biju Janata Dal MP Sujeet Kumar, passed a resolution to press the demand and invite the Dalai Lama to address a joint sitting of both Houses of Parliament. Many academics, students and public intellectuals also created the ‘Bharat Ratna for Dalai Lama’ initiative, a voting campaign to coalesce public support. There are some who argue for the Indian government to refrain from publicly recognizing the Dalai Lama to avoid offending China, which has long accused the
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