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New World Order Title: Tibetan’s Self-Immolation Casts Shadow over BRICS Summit The build-up to conclaves like the BRICS summit underway now in New Delhi usually generates lofty rhetoric about the shifting of global power and the emergence of a new world order. The geo-political grouping, which brings together Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, represents more than a third of humanity and the worlds most important emerging economies. These are nations marching at the forefront of the history of the 21st century. Yet this summit will be forever in the shadow of something far simpler and more elemental: the image of one man on fire. Jhampel Yeshi, a 27-year-old Tibetan living in exile in India, set himself aflame at a protest this week against the imminent arrival of Chinese President Hu Jintao. Its at least the 26th time a Tibetan has self-immolated this year alone, a shocking statistic by any metric. The act was followed days later by a 20-year-old Tibetan monk in Chinas Sichuan province. But since Yeshis fiery protest took place in India rather than in Tibetan areas of China, where most of the immolations have occurred it was captured in full, horrifying detail by the press. His clothes and skin doused with kerosene, Yeshi ran some 50 meters streaming flames until collapsing in a gruesome heap. Yeshi died from his injuries Wednesday morning, prompting more demonstrations by Tibetans in India against what they deem the brutal Chinese occupation of their homeland. The Indian government, nervous about upsetting China, engaged in a full-on crackdown, arresting close to 300 Tibetans on an archaic colonial law that wards against such dissent. Its not unlike the lock-down placed upon the Indian capital when Tibetan activists and their allies threatened to upset a torch relay ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On March 27, when Indian authorities arrested Tenzin Tsundue, a prominent Tibetan writer, as he was about to give a speech, Tsundue is reported to have said the following either with irony or with depressing grace: India gives us our strength, our confidence India is our guru. India is host to some 100,000 Tibetans, but, like neighboring Nepal, keeps a tight watch on the community in order to placate China, a budding Asian hegemon and vital trade partner. The BRICS summit went on, with the five heads of state expected to announce agreements boosting credit to their own local currencies, a shot across the bow in the ongoing battle to wean the global monetary system away from the U.S. dollar. Talk will return to the growing plurality of what is inescapably a post-American world and the need to refashion international institutions according to these new realities. But this will do little to dispel the sense among some analysts that the BRICS alliance is a tenuous, theatrical charade. Dreamed up a decade ago then, it was just BRIC by a British economist at Goldman Sachs, this was never going to be the reincarnation of Third World Solidarity. The BRICS idea is, at best, a statement of geo-political ambition and intent; at worst, a sales gimmick parroted by Davos men and fund managers. The main problem with the BRICS is that theres little real common ground between its members. If not separated by geography and history, they are riven by contrasting political systems and culture. In China and Russia, the grouping is host to two of the worlds most prominent authoritarian states; with India and South Africa, it boasts two of the worlds most multi-cultural, pluralistic democracies. Amid conflicting priorities and agendas, and competing interests, its hard to see how the grouping can evolve into anything more than a talk shop. Parag Khanna, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and well-regarded geo-strategist, spells it out: Of the many differences simmering between India and China, the plight of Tibetan exiles and dissidents is hardly paramount. But the sheer anguish that Yeshis self-immolation conveys and how it echoes among thousands of Tibetans elsewhere brings the shallow backslapping of the BRICS summit into stark relief. Some of the more hawkish Indian commentators are already pressing New Delhi to abandon its decades of suspicion of the once imperialist West, considering it harbors greater common interests these days with Washington than Beijing. India, writes Sadanand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, ought to stand for something altogether different from China. Thats an argument echoed by Kapil Komireddi in Forbes: For Yeshi, that promise rung hollow. And no summitry in cloistered hotels, protected by phalanxes of police, will redeem it.
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