Siddiq Wahid, a Muslim from Ladakh, a region of India with a large ethnic Tibetan population, writes about the current and historical situation in Tibet:

Over the last ten years, I have been ‘fortunate’ to visit Tibet five times. Only the most subjective of minds can deny that Tibet, despite being so removed from the center of power, has been a beneficiary of China’s economic boom. The physical infrastructure in Tibet is more advanced and more widespread than anywhere in Southasia; the roads, the power supply and the communications systems are admirable progress. Similarly, the entire desolate stretch of alluvial fans between Gyantse and Shigaste, which used to be a trans-Himalayan desert plateau, is filled with lush green fields of barley and wheat that are watered by well-planned irrigation systems; and the markets of Lhasa, Shigatse and Gyantse are filled with department stores that are stocked with global goods. Yet the Tibetan people today have risen up as one, to say that none of it is enough. An elderly relative of mine, who lived in Lhasa before he made his escape in the late 1950s, made the same observation after visiting Tibet in the late 1990s. He tellingly added, “But nothing tastes quite the same.” Why is that so?

The Tibetan uprising of 2008 cannot be understood in the context of the simplistic paradigm of violence and non-violence in the Gandhian sense, as a friend and acute observer of political events, Maj-General (retired) Vinod Saighal, recently put it in a private communication. It is a cri de Coeur, a cry from the heart, that says, our stomachs may be full, we may have excellent roads and we may witness all the other benefits of that secular faith (I use the word advisedly) called “progress”, but our spirits must be free and we must allowed to determine our future without fearing that our way of life will become extinct by the assertion of a brutal hegemonic homogeneity; for that, we are willing to be beaten, to be tortured and to die. It is a cry that will be recognized by all today who are coerced into accepting the argument of the inevitability of that uniquely post 20th century mutation of the ideology of faith in progress and the abandonment of the cry of the body to be in tune with its spirit; to be able to recognize itself.