Sonika Gupta

On the eve of Indian Independence, as Britain prepared to devolve the Crown’s treaties with Tibet to the Indian government, the Tibetan government was debating its future treaty relationship with India under the 1914 Simla Convention and associated Indo-Tibetan Trade Regulations. Soon after Indian independence, Tibetan government made an expansive demand for return of Tibetan territory along the McMahon Line and beyond. This led to a long diplomatic exchange between Lhasa, New Delhi and London as India deliberated its response to the Tibetan demand. This article decodes the voluminous correspondence between February 1947 and January 1948 that flowed between the British/Indian Mission in Lhasa, the Political Officer in Sikkim, External Affairs Ministry in Delhi and the Foreign Office in London, on the Simla Convention and the ensuing Tibetan territorial demand. Housed at the National Archives in New Delhi, this declassified confidential communication provides crucial context for newly independent Indian state’s relationship with Tibet. It also reveals the intricacies of Tibetan elite politics that affected decision-making in Lhasa translating to a fragmented and often contradictory policy in forging its new relationship with India. Most importantly, this Tibetan territorial demand undermined the diplomatic efficacy of Tibet’s 1947 Trade Mission to India entangling its outcome with the resolution of this issue. This was a lost opportunity for both India and Tibet in building an agreement on the frontier which worked to their mutual disadvantage in the future.

This article examines the EU weapons embargo on China as a major foreign policy challenge that China's new leadership has inherited. The article argues that the continuation of the embargo constitutes a failure of Chinese foreign policy to project China as a responsible global player. The article examines the legal framework and the political debate within the EU to emphasise that the embargo has been largely ineffective in its objective of denying advanced military technology to China. The continuation of the ban, however, suggests that China, while becoming an economic and military power, is finding it difficult to overcome the significant political resistance to it being accepted as a responsible global actor. © 2013 Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

This book offers a unique reconceptualization of cosmopolitanism. It examines several themes that inform politics in a globalized era, including global governance, international law, citizenship, constitutionalism, community, domesticity, territory, sovereignty, and nationalism. The volume explores the specific philosophical and institutional challenges in constructing a cosmopolitan political community beyond the nation state. It reorients and decolonizes the boundaries of 'cosmopolitanism' and questions the contemporary discourse to posit inclusive alternatives. Presenting rich and diverse perspectives from across the world, the volume will interest scholars and students of politics and international relations, political theory, public policy, ethics, and philosophy.

This paper examines the location and production of liminality with regard to voting rights of Tibetan exile community in India. Liminality is related here to the legal and bureaucratic ‘inbetweenness’ that characterises and orders the life of the Tibetan exiles in India. Tibetans born in India have been registered as voters in India’s electoral list albeit without an accompanying claim or path to citizenship. The paper argues that these voting rights are simultaneously contested and embraced by the Tibetan exile community. Responses of the exile community to voting rights are produced by the interaction between (a) the lived experience of statelessness and (b) complex constructions of cultural, political and legal identity. Both these factors are fundamentally informed by the liminal space that the exile community inhabits in India.

This article analyses strategies of minority education currently in place in Xinjiang in the context of the second generation ethnic policy debate in China. The article argues that the 2009 ethnic riots in Xinjiang coupled with the change of leadership in China has significantly hardened the state's approach to aggressively promoting Putonghua (standard Chinese). This policy is facing significant structural and political challenges in its implementation and acceptance in Xinjiang. The policy to universalise Putonghua in all Xinjiang schools is likely to produce more resistance to the statist agenda rather than resulting in the intended outcome of integration.

Tibetan settlements in India house the largest population of Tibetan exiles and are crucial repositories of Tibetan culture and nationalism in the political struggle for Tibet. The settlements privilege the moral narrative of statelessness as an integral part of the Tibetan struggle. However, given the precarity of land tenure, these settlements are steadily hollowing out, with an increasing number of Tibetans choosing to migrate out of India. In response, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) and the Indian government have jointly framed the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy (TRP) to consolidate the Tibetan population in India. The TRP functions as a disciplinary regime that is delivered through a centralised process for creating secure land tenure for Tibetan settlements, and aims to retain the Tibetans as a stateless population in India. Using three case studies of Tibetan settlements across India, we demonstrate that Tibetans are resisting this moral injunction of statelessness by opting out of the disciplinary logic of the TRP. This resistance includes processes of outmigration and pursuing citizen-like claims in India. These forms of resistance reflect the fragmentation within the exile community over the political value of statelessness, with many Tibetans exploring new ways to imagine their struggle as rooted in citizenship claims.