Dalai Lama visits San Diego: US Pivot to Asia cloaked in spirituality
By
Norisa Diaz
29 June 2017
On Friday the Dalai Lama—Tenzin Gyatso—addressed a crowd of 25,000 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), his first visit to the US since meeting President Barack Obama in 2014. The following day he spoke before similar numbers at the university’s graduation ceremony, with San Diego being the first stop on his US tour.
While in town he also addressed a crowd of 200 Indian community members at a private meeting organized by the Friends of the Dalai Lama, which has close connections to the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) government of Narenda Modi. At the meeting he urged the “preservation of Tibetan religion and culture,” and referred to himself as a “Son of India.”
Gyatzo’s remarks came in the context of the closer relationship between the US and India, which offered its air bases and ports to the US Air force and Navy in 2016 in the buildup against China. Last month New Delhi boycotted the One Belt One Road (OBOR) forum in Beijing to further signal its loyalty to Washington.
Gyatso was born in 1935 and chosen at the age of two as the reincarnation of the deceased 13th Dalai Lama. Following a mass uprising in 1959 suppressed by Chinese troops, the then 24-year-old fled Tibet and has been living in exile in India ever since.
Although portrayed by the political establishment and media as a simple Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama speaks for a social layer within the Tibetan ruling elite that has lent itself to foreign intrigues against China over the course of more than half a century.
Following Indian independence in 1947, the Tibetan cabinet sought assistance from New Delhi and London to prevent “communist” influence from…