Dalai Lama alone will have final say on reincarnation: CTA chief Penpa Tsering....

 Dalai Lama alone will have final say on reincarnation: CTA chief Penpa Tsering....

Penpa Tsering said, in terms of the process of selection of a reincarnation, he personally believe that the Central Tibetan Administration should not have any role in that. This is a purely spiritual and a religious process. So it’s up to the religious leader, particularly his holiness the Dalai Lama, to decide, not the administration, but once his reincarnation is recognised, then the role of the CTA comes into being.

Against the backdrop of China’s repeated efforts to portray a role for itself in the selection of the next Dalai Lama, the Sikyong or head of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), Penpa Tsering, has said the Tibetan spiritual leader alone will have the final say on his reincarnation.

n an interview, Tsering said the current impasse in the Tibetan Parliament provides a “lot of space for the Chinese government to create trouble” within the Tibetan community.

Tsering also spoke about the CTA’s plans to integrate Tibetan settlements in India to make them administratively more manageable.So in the long run, when more people move out of the settlements, then it becomes expedient on us to integrate the settlements into more compact, larger communities so that it becomes administratively more manageable for us. 

[And] at the same time, be able to preserve our language, culture, religion and way of life for what it was meant to be when we first came into exile in 1959 and the vision of his holiness, the Dalai Lama, and the successive Indian leadership that has given us so much support and help, that has reduced a lot of our existential problems. Those are the major challenges that we have to meet today.

t’s not really a refusal to take oath [by some members]. They’ve taken oath but not on the basis of the charter. 

Our democracy is quite a mix of presidential [and] parliamentary [systems] because the election of the Sikyong is more presidential in nature and the Parliament is more parliamentary in nature. 

So it’s a mix of two systems of democracy, where the delineation of the division of power between the three pillars of democracy is quite distinct and...one organ of democracy overreaching on the other, here in terms of the executive or the Kashag overreaching on the legislative and the judiciary is not mandated in the charter. 

Therefore, it’s not legally provided for the cabinet to interfere or intervene. But I did suggest that if all the 45 people who were elected...to the Parliament come to us and give us the mandate, then we promise to be fair.