BENGALURU: Buoyed by the US Senate and the Congress recently passing ‘The Resolve Tibet Act,’ which is now awaiting Presidential assent, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the Tibetan government-in-exile, is now planning to draw a new map of Tibet with the “original geographical and historical contours and names,” said Sikyong Penpa Tsering in a telephonic conversation with this newspaper from Toronto. Tsering is the democratically elected President (Sikyong) of the Tibetan government-in-exile, which is run from Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh.
“The objective behind the new map is to counter Beijing’s claim on Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. Tibet is an independent State and the proposed map, which is in the planning stage, will have the original names of places occupied and sinicised by the Chinese. Earlier too, there have been cartography studies on the map of Tibet, including the one by the Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamshala,” said the Sikyong. The Tibetan map drawn by the institute has used the Tibetan systems of knowledge and references.
Tsering added that China has changed the names of places not just in Tibet. “They have done this in Arunachal Pradesh and elsewhere in the South China Sea, as part of their territorial propaganda,” he added.
Meanwhile, noted strategist and Tibetologist Claude Arpi said that the proposed map of Tibet, with the traditional place names, is an “excellent initiative as it will show the Indo-Tibet boundary, today disputed by China, in a proper historical light,” he said. “It is high time that the Government of India calls its northern border ‘Indo-Tibet’ and not ‘Sino-India’.
Similarly, what we call the McMahon Line should be called the McMahon-Shatra’s line since the border agreement signed in March 1914 had two signatures: of the then foreign Secretary of India, Sir Henry McMahon, and of Lonchen Shatra, the then prime minister of Independent Tibet,” said Arpi, adding that the CTA should work closely with the Indian authorities in order to produce a joint map of the Indo-Tibet boundary.
‘McMahon-Shatra line’
According to noted strategist and Tibetologist Claude Arpi, “What we call the McMahon Line should be called the McMahon-Shatra’s line since the border agreement signed in March 1914 had two signatures: of the then foreign Secretary of India, Sir Henry McMahon, and of Lonchen Shatra, the then prime minister of Independent Tibet.”