Lobsang Sangay (Pic: www.kalontripafortibet.org)
The emergence of 42-year-old Lobsang Sangay as Prime Minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile marks a significant departure for Tibetans in exile. He is the first Tibetan prime minister to have been elected by some 83,000 Tibetans in exile in India and around the world after the Dalai Lama renounced his political role.
The contest essentially boiled down to between two Ivy Leaguers. While Sangay was a research fellow at Harvard Law School, his immediate rival Tethong Tenzin Namgyal was a 62-year-old Stanford scholar. The third contestant was Tashi Wangdi,64, who was the Dalai Lama’s representative in the European Union.
In choosing Sangay the exiles are putting their faith in someone closer to their generation in the hope that he would understand their aspirations better. Unlike the kalon tripa of the past, Sangay brings stellar secular academic weight to the position. As a Fulbright Scholar in 1996, he obtained Masters degree and followed it up with a Doctorate in Law from Harvard Law School in 2004. He was the first Tibetan to receive this degree.
His Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Democracy and History of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile from 1959-2004’ almost seemed to have been chosen with a future career in mind.
It is tempting to overstate the power and influence of the prime minister-in-exile’s office when it comes to the resolution of the more than six-decade-old Tibetan issue. But at the very least Dr. Sangay’s presence at the helm of the political life of the exile community creates an interesting interface for the Chinese government to deal with.
Of course, the Dalai Lama will remain the preeminent force when it comes to any potential resolution of the Tibetan question. What Dr. Sangay’s leadership will hopefully do is create the much-needed a second tier of young leadership, something the Dalai Lama has been pushing for for decades.
The next five years, which constitute his term as prime minister, are bound to offer Dr. Sangay extraordinary opportunities to play a role in resolving a conflict that the world has so conveniently pushed aside.
