Tibetan Poet, 9 Others Taken Into Preventive Custody Ahead of Chinese President's Visit

New Delhi: With Chinese president Xi Jinping set to arrive in India for an informal summit with prime minister Narendra Modi early next week, the India government has taken into preventive custody well-known Tibetan poet and pro-Independence activist Tenzin Tsundue.

According to a report

on the Tibetan Review, Tsundue was arrested on October 5 by police in Viluppuram district of Tamil Nadu and “is expected to remain in custody until the two leaders conclude their October 11-13 meeting”.

The meeting is scheduled to take place in the coastal town of Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu. Viluppuram is about 125 km from Mamallapuram.

News reports said Tamil Nadu police was alerted about his visit by the Ministry of Home Affairs. He was arrested from a hotel along with nine other pro-Independence activists. They had planned a protest to coincide with Jinping’s visit to the state.

Also read: The Modi Government Must Realise the Folly of India Playing the ‘Tibet Card’

Reports quoting police sources said he has been kept at Chennai’s Puzhal Central Jail. 

Tibetan Review said Tsundue, the 2001 winner of the Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction, has been on “a tour to speak at universities across India”. He recently visited Varanasi and then had a poetry reading session in Bengaluru before he travelled to Tamil Nadu, where he was taken into custody.

A firebrand Tibetan pro-democracy activist born of parents who fled Tibet in the 1950s for India, Tsundue has been in the news earlier too for protesting against China’s Tibet policy during the previous visits of Chinese premiers.

In 2002, he shot into international fame for hanging a ‘Free Tibet’ banner onto the scaffolding of a building across the hotel room of the then Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, in Mumbai. 

This was a move he repeated in 2005, in Bengaluru, when Wen Jiabao visited India. A Mumbai University alumnus and the writer of four books of poems, Tsundue stood on the balcony of a tower at the Indian Institute of Science, and shouted slogans against Jiabao as the latter made his visit to the institution. 

In 2006, when Chinese president Hu Jintao visited India, the government put a ravel ban on Dharamshala-based Tsundue.

Expectedly, in 2014 too, Tsundue travelled to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, coinciding his visit with that of the Chinese president Xi Jinping. The police had then taken him into preventive custody. 

Prior to his arrest on October 5, Tsundue put out a Facebook post: “Xi has invited Pak PM to Beijing for a chai on the 8th, and India’s military exercise in Arunachal will go on while Xi is on India visit. Xi hyphenates Nepal on the India tour. Too many swords drawn. What’s going on? And no official announcements still.”