Dai , Menon

New Delhi, Nov. 26: Yesterday’s sudden postponement of the November 27-28 India-China boundary talks here apparently owes to a refusal by New Delhi, rare in recent times, to bend on the issue of the Dalai Lama.

China was unhappy because the talks would have coincided with a November 27-30 world congregation of Buddhists in the city, where the Tibetan spiritual leader is to deliver the valedictory address, South Block sources said.

They said Beijing wanted the congregation, being held to mark 2,600 years of the Buddha’s enlightenment, cancelled if its “special representative” Dai Bingguo was to come and talk with national security adviser Shivshankar Menon.

But India said that being a democracy, it could not possibly cancel the conference and assured Beijing that the event, being organised by the Buddhist society Ashoka Mission, was religious and not political.

Beijing then demanded that the Dalai Lama be prevented from attending, which India turned down as “unreasonable”, the sources said. The two sides then decided to “postpone” the talks till “mutually convenient dates”.

This is the first time that the special representative-level boundary talks have been postponed since they began in 2003, with the Tibetan question again casting a shadow on bilateral relations.

The sources said Beijing was also upset because of its “misperception” that the Indian foreign ministry’s public diplomacy division was co-sponsoring the event, to be attended by thousands of Buddhist theologians, monks and scholars from 32 countries, including China and Taiwan. But Indian officials say the division is only supporting three side events: a book fair, a film festival and the launch of a coffee-table book.

Beijing’s problem is that the conference, to be held barely 1km from where Menon and Dai would have held talks, has official sanction. President Pratibha Patil will inaugurate it and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be the guest of honour.

India has generally been wary of annoying China over the Dalai Lama and has kept him out of its plans to revive the Nalanda University though the Nalanda tradition of Buddhism has deep links with Tibetan Buddhism.

Still, China not only seems to have pulled out of the Nalanda University project, for which it was to provide some funds, but is developing a rival Buddhist university at the Buddha’s birthplace of Lumbini, Nepal.

India fears the project is aimed at weakening the Dalai Lama’s hold over Tibetan Buddhists and checkmating India’s use of Buddhism as the lynchpin of its Look East policy for greater engagement with Southeast Asian nations.

Lumbini is the only major site linked to the Buddha’s life outside India, which is home to the other three: Sarnath, Kushinagar and Bodhgaya. Beijing has loosened its purse strings to make Lumbini a Buddhist tourist attraction.

Maoist leader Prachanda, who was Nepal’s Prime Minister for a while in 2008 and worked for closer ties with Beijing, heads the Lumbini Development Council.