Pilgrimage as diplomacy: What Doraiswamy’s Tibet visit really signals

Amid the current highs and lows of US-India bilateral relations, a story that is not attracting enough attention is the deepening thaw between India and China, almost six years after the 2020 Galwan Crisis. This week, India’s newly appointed Ambassador to China, the Mandarin-speaking career diplomat Vikram K. Doraiswamy, paid a visit to the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and met senior Tibetan officials, including Zhao Peng, Vice Chairman of TAR.

The primary purpose of this visit, his first outside Beijing during his current tenure as ambassador, was to review arrangements for the 2026 Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, where around a thousand pilgrims from India are expected to visit Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar. This pilgrimage includes an arduous trek to an altitude of around 16,000 feet, which is not only a test of endurance but also of faith, as Mount Kailash is a site of great reverence for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and even practitioners of Bon, an ancient Tibetan religion.

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Doraiswamy’s visit to TAR has come at a very interesting juncture when India and China are trying to mend their ties after almost half a decade of tensions owing to the Galwan Valley clash. Following this 2020 conflict in Ladakh, which marked one of the lowest points in their relationship in the current century, both India and China had taken several measures to restrict their bilateral ties. Both sides had deployed a heavy build-up of troops at the LAC, with India even accelerating the creation of critical border infrastructure.

The Modi government had also made ‘peace and tranquillity’ at the border the basic prerequisite for any cooperation on the bilateral front, with many economic measures such as FDI restrictions, bans on apps, and campaigns against Chinese goods imposed to prevent China from getting any further unhindered access to the Indian market. Even people-to-people ties suffered in the process, as India suspended tourist visas for Chinese nationals, further limiting cultural as well as business exchanges. Direct flights between India and China were also cancelled, along with visa denials and non-accreditation of each other’s journalists. Even the annual Kailash Mansarovar Yatra remained suspended throughout these years.

Thus, when Doraiswamy visited TAR this week to review Yatra arrangements, it was being seen not only as a symbol of shared faith but also as a sign of thaw between the two countries. The last time the Yatra took place was in 2019. It was suspended first due to the Covid-19 pandemic and later due to the clash in the Galwan Valley. It was only resumed in 2025, when Doraiswamy’s immediate predecessor, Pradeep Kumar Rawat, also visited the Tibet Autonomous Region to review preparations for Indian pilgrims. The fact that the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra is being organised consecutively for a second year after its suspension shows that relations between the two countries are finally getting back on track. This builds on the long-drawn disengagement process that concluded only in late 2024. New Delhi’s disengagement-de-escalation-normalisation model has actually worked effectively to restore India-China ties to a more stable state. In 2025, PM Modi even visited China to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, where he also met Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines.

Despite the thaw and the resumption of business as usual, it would be naïve to assume that India-China relations will only reach newer heights of cooperation from here. This is because, for all the talk of normalisation, their relations still remain fraught with some very fundamental differences, especially the boundary issue that has remained unsettled for almost eight decades now. Since the victory of the Communist Party in the civil war that led to the creation of the People’s Republic, China has resolved its historical border disputes with almost every other country except India. Besides the 3,488 km-long LAC, which is often a target for Chinese incursions and its salami-slicing tactics, cartographic and nomenclature aggression by China is another reason for friction between the two countries.

In 2023, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources released a map showing India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin regions as part of Chinese territory. Since 2017, its Ministry of Civil Affairs has also institutionalised the practice of releasing standardised Chinese names in Pinyin and Tibetan script for various locations in Arunachal Pradesh, which China officially calls Zangnan or South Tibet. This year, in April alone, it released a set of 23 names, bringing the total renaming exercise to around 100 different places. Although India continues to strongly push back against this low-intensity pressure tactic by China, it reveals the mindset of Beijing, which claims to want good neighbourly relations with India but continues to eye its territory.

In fact, this Chinese claim on Arunachal Pradesh is part of a much deeper strategy, where its constant reference to the region as Zangnan or South Tibet is intended to use it as a bargaining chip to settle the Aksai Chin dispute later. In the 1960s, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai offered India a package deal to accept the McMahon Line in the eastern sector, thereby acknowledging India’s claim over Arunachal (then NEFA), in return for India’s acknowledgement of Chinese control over Aksai Chin. However, Aksai Chin itself is part of India, which China illegally occupied during the 1962 war. Since the 2010s, a much more powerful and assertive China has started seeking more concessions even in the eastern sector, building infrastructure and setting up illegal villages.

In view of China’s expansionist mindset, India also understands that any normalisation or reset is not permanent in nature. Even Ambassador Doraiswamy’s visit to Tibet is a case in point. India’s official communication regarding his visit did not use the Chinese nomenclature for Tibet, namely Xizang; instead, it stressed the use of the term preferred by both Tibetans and India, namely TAR. In recent years, Beijing has put an overwhelming amount of effort into mainstreaming the term Xizang, which takes away from the cultural and historical distinctiveness of the region, by literally bribing journalists, academics and think-tankers, besides using it in its own official documents.

Yet, India’s refusal to adopt the term shows that it will never toe the Chinese narrative. India also continues to host the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamshala, known as the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), since 1959. The CTA has just concluded its parliamentary and leadership polls, re-electing Penpa Tsering as the Sikyong for a second term, while the Dalai Lama also remains a central figure, receiving much-needed support from India. Thus, while China may deploy an entire machinery to change the narrative on Tibet, even portraying Doraiswamy’s visit as a visit to ‘Xizang’ in its state media, India does not seem to be budging.

The understanding in New Delhi seems to be that a tactical reset with China is necessary because it exerts control over the supply chains of many critical components required for India’s manufacturing sector and for the progress of its ‘Make in India’ story. Also, maintaining relations with the non-Western bloc sends a signal to the US that India has many options and cannot be bullied. But the long game of India-China relations remains focused on Delhi building its strength and buying time for its own rise. Until then, humouring China without losing sight of core interests remains both a viable and pragmatic option.

(The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)