New Delhi, April 17
External affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee was a relieved man when the India run of the Olympic torch relay ended peacefully this evening.
Having assured China that India would do everything possible to ensure the peaceful passage of the torch in Delhi, Mukherjee personally monitored the progress of the relay at every step of the way. The external affairs ministry’s control room was on high alert to track the movement of the torch and the protesting Tibetans.
Mukherjee, who was in his Parliament House office through the day, had issued special instructions to the ministry officials to keep him informed about the progress of the relay. Foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon gave him a blow-by-blow account of the programme from his South Block office. He also kept the minister informed about the protests by the Tibetans and how these were being tackled by the security agencies.
“My job was to make sure that the torch was safe and the relay
conducted smoothly,” Mukherjee is learnt to have told his officials when the programme ended peacefully.
After the disruption of the torch relay in London and Paris, India was under tremendous pressure from China to make sure that similar scenes were not repeated on the Delhi leg of the relay, especially since there are an estimated 100,000 Tibetan refugees in India. It was feared that angry over the Chinese police crackdown in Lhasa last month, the Tibetan activists would try to disrupt the relay as they had even managed to breach the security around the Chinese embassy compound.
India has been doing a tight-rope walk on this issue from the beginning. It had to ensure an incident-free relay as any disruption could have damaged relations between the two countries. On the other hand, India could not deny the Tibetan refugees their space to protest as it would have reflected poorly on its democratic credentials. New Delhi, therefore, turned down a Chinese request to ban protest rallies by the Tibetans as it believes it is their democratic right to protest peacefully.
The Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi had telephoned Pranab Mukherjee to discuss the security arrangements while a team of Chinese security persons held a series of meetings with the security agencies here to review the arrangements for today’s event. The Chinese state councillor Dai Bingguo had also spoken to National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan in this connection.
With China leaning hard on India, Mukherjee had reiterated that India continues to maintain that the Tibet Autonomous Region as an integral part of China. The minister had also asked the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama not to do anything which would hurt India’s ties with China.
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