All Roads Lead North by Amish Raj Mulmi;

All Roads Lead North by Amish Raj Mulmi;

Author:Amish Raj Mulmi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2021-12-22T00:00:00+00:00


Part Three

STATUS UPDATE

‘A great sorrow it is to bid adieu;

A great joy it is to make friends anew.’

– Qu Yuan, quoted by Mao to Nehru in October 1954

8

‘A Friendship Across the Himalayas’1

Fifty-five-year-old Tibetan-American Penpa Tsering was in for a surprise when he handed his passport to the immigration official at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu. It was Saturday, 22 June 2019, and Tsering had just arrived from Delhi by the 1 p.m. flight. The officer scanned his passport, and printed out a letter. ‘The letter contained Chinese characters at the top with some English characters below,’ Tsering told me over email a few months after the incident. Then, a most curious question was thrown at him.

The officer asked him if he was the former speaker of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile, the legislative body of the CTA that oversees Tibetans in exile. The former speaker’s name, it turned out, was also Penpa Tsering. Tsering said no, he was not. The officer told him the letter on his screen was from the Chinese government. Tsering repeated he was not the man the officer was looking for. The officer took him aside, asked him to wait and went away. Tsering tried to call the US embassy; a police officer snatched his cell phone away. ‘They didn’t even let me use my iPad.’ When he tried to get up and walk a few steps to stretch his legs, the officer shouted at him to sit down.

Four hours later, Nepali officials told Tsering he was to be deported back to the US. He insisted they had the wrong man, but to no avail. Although he had arrived from Delhi, Tsering was booked on a flight to New York via Doha. He was made to pay USD 700 for the ticket.

It emerged that the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu had written to the Nepali Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking them to disallow a man named Penpa Tsering, said to be a ‘campaigner for the Free Tibet movement as well as a strong advocate’ of the Dalai Lama, from entering the country.2 Tsering had worked for the CTA for twenty years, so I asked him if he had been confused for the former speaker anywhere else. ‘No, not at all,’ he wrote.

A note on the deportation, later reprinted in a newspaper, read, ‘Nijalai Nepal aauna nadine vanne Chinese Embassy ko letter 6’ (There is a letter from the Chinese embassy asking that the said individual not be allowed to enter Nepal).3 Nepali immigration officials were not sure whether the man they had deported was the right one or not, but chose to be on the safe side by deporting Tsering, an official later said. The Home Ministry confirmed that the Chinese embassy had instructed Nepal to refuse entry to people ‘China finds suspicious’.4 News reports suggested there were calls from the Chinese embassy to the Immigration Office and Home Ministry to detain Tsering.

Tsering, who was born to Tibetan refugees in Nepal, had returned in 2013 on a pilgrimage for his departed father.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Popular ebooks
The Postcolonial Contemporary by Watson Jini Kim;Wilder Gary;(505)
Chaco's Northern Prodigies : Salmon, Aztec, and the Ascendancy of the Middle San Juan Region after AD 1100 by Paul F. Reed(338)
Law Enforcement Interpersonal Communication and Conflict Management by Brian Douglas Fitch(331)
Digital International Relations by Unknown(327)
Critical Perspectives on Human Security : Rethinking Emancipation and Power in International Relations by David Chandler; Nik Hynek(315)
Skilled interpersonal communication: Research, theory and practice, Fifth edition by Owen Hargie(312)
The Enduring Color Line in U.S. Athletics by Krystal Beamon Chris M. Messer(309)
Evidence-Based Policy Making in Labor Economics by Hamermesh Daniel S.;Nottmeyer Olga K.;Nottmeyer Olga;King Sarah;King Sarah;King Sarah;(279)
EPSO CAST Political affairs EU policies: How to succeed in the selection procedure by Franco Reverte José María(272)
Writing Public Policy - A Practical Guide to Communicating in the Policy Making Process by Catherine F. Smith(256)
Criminological Theory in Context by John Martyn Chamberlain(250)
Threshold Concepts in Women's and Gender Studies by Christie Launius Holly Hassel(249)
Tibeton Yoga Its Secret Doc by Evans-Wentz(245)
Positive Psychology and Spirituality in Counselling and Psychotherapy (Conflict, Ethics, and Spirituality, 12) by unknow(245)
Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization in Palestine (Geographical Perspectives on the Human Past) by Ran Aaronsohn(245)
Social Problems, Social Issues, Social Science by James Wright(244)
Play in child development and psychotherapy: toward empirically supported practice by Sandra W. Russ(239)
Cognitive Development in Infancy and Childhood (Elements in Child Development) by Mary Gauvain(235)
Latin American Politics and Society by Gerardo L. Munck & Juan Pablo Luna(210)
What Makes a Social Crisis?: The Societalization of Social Problems by Jeffrey C. Alexander(206)