The Income Tax Department last week had conducted a series of raids around the capital city that unearthed several Chinese individuals and their Indian associates who were involved in money laundering and hawala transactions through shell entities. However, a sensational twist to the case has come into the light which states that the Chinese were unscrupulously spying on the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama and his associates by bribing the Lamas around Majnu-ka-Tila (A colony of Tibetan refugee camp in Delhi).
According to news reports, a 42-year-old Chinese national named Charlie Peng aka Luao Sang has landed into the net of I-T officers who is being dubbed as the lynchpin of Rs 1,000 crore cross-border money laundering racket. Peng was reportedly using the hawala money to bribe some of the ‘lamas’ (Buddhist spiritual monk) in Delhi’s Majnu ka Tila to gather information on Dalai Lama and his associate.
According to officials, Peng used to handover nearly Rs 3 lakh in cash to the ‘lamas’. Some men working with Peng confessed to the I-T department that they used to give money in packets to the people concerned.
The sinister modus-operandi was communicated and planned on the banned Chinese espionage app ‘WeChat’. It is also being alleged that Peng got a fake Indian passport from Manipur after marrying a woman from that state.
China and its hatred for Tibetans and its spiritual leader
Tibet has been China’s Achilles heel and Beijing tries to posture the landlocked country as a part of its own territory. But the majority of Tibetans does not accept the Chinese and have been protesting against it.
Dalai Lama is the face of resistance for the Tibetans and him along with the Tibetan government in exile have taken asylum in India.
China accuses the Dalai Lama of fomenting “separatism” in TAR and has called him a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” in the past. Many covert attempts have been made for Dalai Lama’s life and China, as expected, has denied all of them.
India and America starting to recognize Tibet
Recently, American lawmaker, Scott Perry introduced a bill in the Senate which seeks to recognize Tibet as an independent country. US Representative Scott Perry tabled a bill in the US Congress which seeks to “authorise the President to recognize Tibet– the Autonomous Region of the Republic of China– as a separate, independent country”.
A move which further irked China, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had recently given a grant of almost $1 million to the Central Tibetan Administration operating out of India, to “strengthen the financial and cultural resilience of the Tibetan people and contribute towards a sustained resilience of the Tibetan people’s economic and cultural identity.”
India has also gradually started to recognize Tibet as Prasar Bharati, the state-run public broadcaster in June posted had started broadcasting Tibetan World Service offered by All India Radio (AIR)
Listen to All India Radio's Tibetan World Service for authentic news and programmes for and from Tibet. @AkashvaniAIR pic.twitter.com/JMFp8wypKo
— Prasar Bharati प्रसार भारती (@prasarbharati) June 17, 2020
Even Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu in a tweet recently had referred to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) as the ‘Indo-Tibet border’ therefore legitimizing the status of the country which has been illegally annexed by China.
