Although the Nepal government has been restating her support for One-China policy, she has not been able to halt the year-round infiltration of Tibetans through the Himalayan points. The Dalai Lama supporters have apparently been using Nepal as the major transit point for going to India and the USA. Especially during King Mahendra’s period, about 30,000 Tibetans were accepted as refugees in Nepal, say informal sources. However, the Nepal government has not been able to produce reliable official data regarding the Tibetans settled in Nepal. Most of them have been running carpet industries and relevant markets in Nepal.
After the collapse of the partyless autocratic Panchayat regime, some Tibetan refugees began to raise voices of Tibetan independence with the help of some pro-Nepali Congress human rights activists, journalists and some other international human rights organizations. Yet, no big struggles on behalf of the Tibetans have been noticed in Nepal.
Some Tibetans openly admit that they can buy citizenship certificate for NRs.5000.00. It shows that Nepal’s district administration is very loose. But the district administration says that they distribute citizenship certificate to people only after they get recommendations from political representatives from Village Development Committees since village representatives clearly know who was born there and who was not.
Tibetans look like the Mangolian Nepalis who live in the Himalayan region.
As nationality researcher Saddhya Bahadur Bhandari has time and again spoken to Nepal’s national media and categorically said that corrupt political representatives in different districts in Nepal have sold citizenship certificates to almost three million Indians, this possibility cannot be ruled out also in the context of pro-independence Tibetans, who may have preferred to make Nepal a homework place.
In the meantime, the Nepal government has claimed it has tightened its security systems in the Nepal-China border. Perhaps it was just responding to the Tibetan protests in front of the UN Office in Kathmandu on 17 March.
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