From N Ram To Suhasini Haidar — How Indian Left's Red Blindspot Sees Roads In Tibet, Not People Buried Under

In early June 2025, news broke of the resumption of the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra via the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

The Hindu’s seasoned diplomat-journalist Suhasini Haidar, embedded in a Chinese-sponsored delegation to Lhasa, sent out glowing dispatches: the city had been transformed by new solar infrastructure, an impressive airport, tunnels burrowed through mountains, highways slicing across Himalayan passes. It was the kind of development, she seemed to suggest, that should earn admiration, even envy.

What was missing, conspicuously so, was any mention of the cultural genocide that made this “development” possible. No acknowledgement of the demolished monasteries, the re-education camps, the surveillance state, the near-total erasure of Tibetan language and religion.

No voices from the Tibetan resistance, in exile or underground. No sign that the reporter was in a country where even whispering the Dalai Lama’s name could result in detention. It read less like journalism, and more like a state-sponsored travel blog, a brochure in prose.

This, unfortunately, is not new.

Back in 2000, N. Ram, then editor of The Hindu and a lifelong Marxist, visited Lhasa and offered what must be one of the most disturbing pieces ever written by an Indian journalist on Tibet. “The sky is turquoise, the sun is golden,” he wrote in Frontline. “The Dalai Lama is away from the Potala, making trouble in the West. Yet Tibet’s on the move.”

For Ram and his ideological ilk, Tibet was not a tragedy but an inconvenience, an obstacle to their unwavering devotion to Communist China.

What does it say about a nation's intellectual class when the most prominent newspaper in India covers the reopening of a sacred pilgrimage not with reverence or moral clarity, but by fawning over oppressor's infrastructure?

This article attempts to interrogate a disturbing and under-reported truth: the long, shameful history of Indian Communists and liberal elites betraying the Tibetan cause, often with active complicity.

It will also ask uncomfortable questions: Would these same people praise Israeli highways in the West Bank and ignore Palestinian dispossession

Why is Tibet, an ancient civilisational cousin of India, treated as a political irritant rather than a moral imperative?

To understand this, one must begin not in Lhasa, but in the ideological corridors of Delhi (and Chennai).

The Party Line: How Indian Communists View Tibet

To understand why Indian Communists have long betrayed the Tibetan cause, one must examine not only their ideological proximity to China, but their deep-rooted antipathy towards the Tibetan identity itself. Religious, spiritual, and civilisational.

From 1950s onwards, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and later the CPI(M) have toed a disturbingly consistent line: Tibet belongs to China, the Dalai Lama is a feudal relic, and any resistance to Beijing is a Western-backed conspiracy.

When China invaded Tibet in 1950 and crushed the uprising in 1959, prompting the Dalai Lama to flee to India, Indian Communists were not just unsympathetic, they were hostile.

In one of the most shocking moments during the crisis, the CPI publicly alleged that Indian political officers and diplomats stationed in the border regions were shielding anti-Chinese spies. This was not mere criticism. It was tatamount to an outright attack on the Indian state, echoing Beijing’s propaganda at a time when China was militarily encroaching into Indian territory.

The allegation deeply angered Prime Minister Nehru, who responded in Parliament with visible frustration:

"The Communist Party of India goes about naming our principal officers. The Party shows more than we suspected a certain lack of balance in mind and total absence of feeling of decency and nationalism. What they are, I don't know. They cease to be Indians if they talk in this way."

This was not rhetorical exaggeration. Nehru, a man rarely given to sweeping condemnations, had encountered what many Indians were just beginning to realise: that the loyalty of the Indian Communists was no longer tethered to the Indian nation-state, but to an ideological fantasy that found its home in Beijing.

That fantasy persisted long after the war. In the decades that followed, Indian Communists and their intellectual allies continued to treat Tibetan nationalism with derision.

In the parliamentary debates of the time, leaders like Bhupesh Gupta derided Tibetan nationalism as a fantasy and blamed Jawaharlal Nehru, not China, for “provoking” tensions by sheltering the Dalai Lama.

While the rest of India grappled with the moral consequences of Chinese aggression, the Indian Left chose to treat Tibet as a territorial matter, not a civilisational one. They believed it was the duty of revolution to dismantle “theocratic structures,” even if that meant turning a blind eye to ethnic cleansing and cultural extermination.

This ideological rigidity only hardened with time. By the 1970s and 80s, the Indian Left’s alignment with the global Soviet bloc (which supported China post-Nixon) ensured further distancing from the Tibetan struggle.

Their publications, especially People’s Democracy and Frontline, offered a sanitised view of Tibet — one where “development” trumped dignity, and monasteries gave way to modernity. Tibetan monks on hunger strike were ignored. Chinese crackdowns were rationalised as “internal matters.” In 1999 it came out with a statement criticising Indian Minister George Fernandes for supporting the Tibetan people.

But it was N. Ram, then the face of The Hindu’s editorial leadership, who perhaps best captured the Indian Left’s Tibet position: a combination of intellectual disdain and moral relativism.

In his 2000 piece for Frontline, he went on to describe the Dalai Lama’s movement as “separatist, revanchist and backward-looking,” and dismissed Tibetan aspirations for self-determination as “pipe-dreams” supported by “external agency.” For Ram, the tragedy of Tibet was not the destruction of its heritage, but the persistence of its resistance.

In 2001, CPI(M) organised a function to observe the “50th anniversary of the peaceful liberation of Tibet” in New Delhi. Sitaram Yechury addressed the gathering then and “pointed out that the Tibetans had improved their standard of living and that life in Tibet was much easier than it could be otherwise because of the difficult physical conditions there,” according to the CPI(M) weekly newspaper People’s Democracy of 10 June 2001.

In 2008, outside the Parliament, Yechury described the murder of innocent Tibetans as an internal matter of China.

This hostility is not ideological as well as civilisational. Tibetan Buddhism, like Hinduism, is deeply spiritual, ritualistic, and non-materialist: values antithetical to the Marxist worldview.

That the Dalai Lama speaks of karma, not class, compassion, not revolution, renders him suspect. To Indian Communists, the Tibetan struggle is not a resistance movement, it is a religious relic.

Indian Communists, born in the shadow of Moscow and Beijing, often see indigenous Asian spiritual cultures, especially Hindu and Buddhist ones, as regressive.

This explains not just silence, but active betrayal.

Selective Outrage: Why Tibet is Treated Differently

In the moral imagination of India’s Left-liberal establishment, some struggles are sacred, while others are expendable. The difference lies not in the scale of the suffering, but in the ideological convenience of the oppressed.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the contrast between Tibet, Palestine, Kashmir and Bangladesh.

When it comes to Palestine, Indian Communists and their media allies offer a relentless torrent of sympathy. But the moral language used — occupation, apartheid, resistance, dignity, memory, exile — is entirely absent when these same actors discuss Tibet, a region with parallel, and in many ways far worse, symptoms of colonisation.

One must ask: Would they ever describe the Palestinian Authority as a theocracy, as they do the Dalai Lama’s exile government? Would they dismiss the grand mufti of Jerusalem as “backward-looking”? Would they laud Israeli highways and airports in the West Bank as proof that Palestine is “on the move”? Certainly not.

And yet, when those same “developments” are laid across the wounded body of Tibet. Airports built where monasteries once stood, highways slicing through ancestral lands. These become, somehow, a triumph of progress.

The hypocrisy deepens when you add Kashmir to the frame.

In the case of Kashmir, many in India’s Left have actively sought internationalisation by raising the issue in global forums, drawing in Western human rights groups, and even echoing foreign resolutions and UN statements critical of India.

The idea of “self-determination,” “plebiscite,” “military occupation,” and “freedom of speech” is freely and frequently invoked. Kashmiri voices, particularly separatist ones, are amplified and treated with reverence.

Now contrast that with Tibet.

There, the same Left insists on silence and sovereignty — parroting China’s line that Tibet is an “internal matter.” They do not demand referendums. They do not support Tibetan dissidents. They do not profile survivors of Chinese torture or families of self-immolated monks.

Where they internationalise Kashmir, they internalise Tibet because it suits Beijing.

This double standard is not accidental.

The Indian Left views resistance to a democratic Indian state as legitimate, even romantic, while resistance to a totalitarian Communist regime is viewed with suspicion.

If the oppressor is Western or “bourgeois,” resistance is sacred. If the oppressor is Communist or anti-Western, resistance becomes a threat to “stability.”

This leads to a peculiar moral blindness. Because the US once backed the Dalai Lama’s resistance (as it has many exiled groups), the Indian Left dismissed the Tibetan movement as a CIA project — conveniently ignoring the centuries-old cultural, religious, and linguistic links between Tibet and India.

For them, the Tibetan cause is tainted by association with the West; it does not matter that it is just.

Imagine a journalist flying to Tel Aviv on an Israeli government invite, marvelling at the smooth roads in the occupied territories, and writing a glowing piece about how Palestine is "developing". There would be outrage. Yet Indian journalists do just that in Lhasa, and no one blinks.

The Hindu’s recent dispatch is a case in point: no mention of the dozens of self-immolations by Tibetan monks, no comment on the ban on teaching Tibetan in schools, no voice of dissent — only admiration for solar panels and infrastructure.

This selective solidarity is not just hypocritical — it is complicit. It tells Tibetans that their suffering is not worthy of outrage unless it fits the ideological narrative of those who control the microphone. It erases a people not just from territory, but from moral memory.

The same applies to another group quietly enduring erasure: Hindus in Bangladesh.

For the Indian Left, acknowledging the plight of Bangladeshi Hindus complicates the neat secular binary many on the Left operate within — where Muslims are always victims, and Hindus, by definition, belong to the dominant majority and can never be vulnerable.

When it comes to Islamic countries like Bangladesh, the Indian Left is unwilling to highlight communal violence that targets Hindus, lest they be accused of Islamophobia. But that same restraint disappears when critiquing India’s own policies in Kashmir or Ayodhya.

In effect, the Indian Left has created a hierarchy of victims, where only some groups are allowed to suffer publicly.

This hierarchy echoes their approach to Tibet. Both the Tibetan Buddhist under China and the Hindu minority under Bangladesh fall outside the acceptable narrative framework of the Indian Left. They are too religious, too aligned with “civilisational” identities, too likely to invoke spiritual, not Marxist, worldviews. They cannot be cast as freedom fighters without undermining the Left’s core ideological assumptions.

So they are ignored.

Or worse, they are erased with polite indifference, while their oppressors, be it Beijing or Dhaka, are praised for their “progress” and “development”.

This is not just selective morality. It is a deep-seated refusal to deal with civilisational trauma unless it flatters the ideological priors of the people doing the reporting. It explains why a Chinese-built tunnel in Tibet is admired more than a Tibetan monk’s last cry of freedom. Why Bangladesh’s GDP growth matters more than a burnt-down Kali temple.

And it begs the question: When did development become an excuse for dispossession?

Tibetans in Exile: A Forgotten People

Once upon a time, Tibet was not just a neighbour. It was kin. The shared civilisational threads that connect India and Tibet run deep: in faith, in pilgrimage, in language, in philosophy. From Nalanda to Tawang, Tibetan monks once walked freely across a sacred geography that saw no political borders, only the quiet movement of seekers and sages.

Even during my visit to Tawang for my own thesis work in 2024, I could see reminiscents of this ancient relationship.

That world was shattered in 1959, when the 14th Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas and was given refuge by India. With him came tens of thousands of Tibetan refugees, most of whom settled in towns like Dharamshala, Bylakuppe, and Majnu-ka-Tilla.

In those early decades, the Tibetan cause had a spiritual weight and moral clarity. Jawaharlal Nehru extended asylum. Indian civil society sympathised. The Dalai Lama was seen as a voice of conscience.

But over time, the exile community became invisible, abandoned by the same intellectual class that once celebrated its culture.

Tibetans in India today face a paradox: they are free, yet ignored. They vote in no elections, sit in no parliaments, and are rarely invited to national conversations. The Indian press, especially its Left-leaning intelligentsia, barely acknowledges their presence, let alone amplifies their cause.

As China’s geopolitical clout expanded, so did its shadow over Indian policy and Indian opinion.

In 2018, the Indian government abruptly cancelled a major event planned by the Central Tibetan Administration to commemorate 60 years in exile. The message was clear: don’t irritate Beijing.

The Indian Left, rather than protesting this retreat from moral principle, welcomed it. They quietly applauded India’s newfound “realism”.

Even within Indian academia, the study of Tibet has been marginalised. While Kashmir has spawned hundreds of books, conferences, and research grants, Tibet remains frozen in silence.

Tibetan scholars and activists are rarely given mainstream platforms. Their stories of exile, of longing, of cultural loss, are sidelined as quaint or inconvenient.

It is difficult to name even five Tibetan dissidents or thinkers known in Indian public discourse today. And yet, this community has produced some of the most articulate voices for nonviolent resistance in the modern world.

Where is the solidarity? Where is the space to remember the monks who self-immolated in silence, hoping the flames might pierce the world’s indifference?

Worse still, this abandonment has allowed China to control the Tibet narrative within India itself. Chinese diplomats now attend Indian university events. Chinese-sponsored think tanks and fellowships influence how Tibet is studied, if it is studied at all.

Journalists flown to Lhasa on state-sponsored trips return with tales of “modernisation,” while never once speaking to a Tibetan who isn’t under surveillance.

And yet, despite this desert of silence, the Tibetan exile community endures.

Its children learn to chant ancient sutras and speak a language their cousins inside Tibet are forbidden to use. Its artists preserve iconography that Chinese authorities deem “reactionary.” Its leaders, under the Dalai Lama’s fading but formidable moral authority, still believe that the world may one day remember what it has forgotten.

But that hope is dimming.

For how long can a people survive as memory? How long can a civilisation live in exile before its cause is not just defeated, but deleted?

The Lure of Beijing: What Drives the Indian Elite’s Complicity

In a different age, speaking truth to power was the moral obligation of the intellectual.

Today, for many in India’s elite commentariat, the only truth worth speaking is the one that aligns with their ideological loyalties or their professional access.

This is the final tragedy of Tibet’s erasure: not just that it is happening, but that those who should speak out choose not to, seduced instead by the sheen of Chinese development, academic collaboration, and political influence.

The Indian Left’s defence of China is no longer just ideological. It is transactional.

Beijing funds conferences, invites academics, offers scholarships, and increasingly controls the terms of engagement for Indian universities and think tanks. Scholars who parrot Beijing’s “One China” policy are rewarded with access and publication opportunities; those who question it face blacklisting or quiet exclusion.

This influence now extends to journalism.

It is no accident that certain Indian journalists invited to Tibet by the Chinese state return with glowing profiles of Lhasa’s cleanliness, highways, and infrastructure projects. They are shown model villages and Potemkin towns, not demolished monasteries or re-education centres.

They are briefed by government handlers, not monks or activists. And they return to write “balanced” pieces. Ones that marvel at solar panels but omit the surveillance cameras.

The Hindu’s recent coverage of the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra typifies this genre: pilgrimage reimagined as propaganda, where development is framed as destiny and oppression edited out.

This phenomenon is not unique to Tibet. It is part of a broader trend in which China courts Indian influencers, through business, academia, and soft diplomacy, to normalise its hegemony in Asia.

Tibet becomes, in this narrative, an internal matter, a solved problem, a “stable” region where China has brought order to chaos.

To resist this narrative would require Indian Communists and liberals to confront an uncomfortable truth: that a nominally Communist regime can be authoritarian, colonial, and anti-spiritual, all at once. That development can coexist with genocide. That roads can lead to ruin.

But to do that would mean abandoning the romantic vision of China that many Indian Marxists have cherished since the 1960s: Mao’s China as the beacon of anti-Western resistance, the land that stood up to imperialism, the dreamscape of a planned modernity.

In this myth, Tibet is not a people — it is a speed bump.

And so, rather than reckon with the implications, the Indian Left chooses silence, or worse, collusion.

Its moral radar, so finely tuned to Gaza, Ferguson, or Shaheen Bagh, goes blind when the boots are Chinese and the victims wear robes instead of riot gear.

Tibet is not just a political dispute. It is a wound that bleeds into the very soul of India’s civilisational self-understanding. It is the place where the Ganga of Indian wisdom once flowed into the icy heights of the Himalayas.

To abandon Tibet is not only to abandon a neighbour, it is to abandon a part of ourselves.

But the Indian Left has done exactly that. Not by honest disagreement, but by quiet capitulation to Beijing’s power.

Towards an Honest Post-Ideological Lens

Tibet is a mirror that exposes the cracks in the Indian Left’s claimed commitment to justice, its selectivity in outrage, and its ideological compromises. A mirror that reveals how “anti-imperialism” has become code for anti-Westernism, not anti-oppression. A mirror that shows how power, not principle, now dictates solidarity.

The same intellectuals who thunder against Israel for its West Bank settlements, who tear into Indian nationalism over Kashmir, who invoke human rights at the drop of a hat — suddenly fall silent when it comes to Tibet.

They do not speak. They do not write. If they do, it is to praise “development”. This is not principled internationalism. It is partisan opportunism.

But the solution is not to reverse the hierarchy of outrage. It is to abandon it altogether.

The Tibetan monk who self-immolates under Xi Jinping’s watch deserves the same moral attention as the Palestinian child in Gaza or the Kashmiri protester in Srinagar.

The Hindu woman fleeing forced conversion in Barisal deserves the same solidarity as the Syrian refugee in Berlin.

It is time to shed the ideological blinkers that allow one to condemn Indian security forces in Shopian but remain unmoved by Chinese tanks in Lhasa. It is time to call out the cultural cleansing of Tibet for what it is: a slow-motion civilisational genocide disguised as modernisation, enforced through fear, and whitewashed by willing collaborators.

India, as the geographic and spiritual refuge of the Tibetan people, bears a unique responsibility. But that responsibility must be shared by its thinkers, writers, professors, and journalists.

For far too long, they have failed.

To support Tibet is not to support the CIA. It is not to oppose China’s rise. It is not to indulge in nostalgia for monarchy. It is to affirm a basic truth: that no people, no culture, no civilisation deserves to be erased in silence.

And so the question must be asked again. Not of Beijing, which we already know to be a coloniser in red, but of Lutyens Delhi and its cultural vassals:

If not now, when? If not for Tibet, then who?