Description
This paper on Buddhist Diplomacy contributes to the argument that context and culture are central to understanding geopolitics and strategy. The past decade has witnessed a rapid increase in various states using Buddhism as a diplomatic tool. In this paper, we begin by explaining the rise of "Buddhist Diplomacy" and highlight the rationales that are conventionally attributed to be drivers of this surge in its use by countries such as India and China. Against this background, we then focus specifically on the Indian Himalayan region that forms the border between India and China, and is seen as a marginalised periphery. In contrast to work that focuses exclusively on the statist perspectives (Indian or Chinese) and great power competition to understand Buddhist diplomacy as initiatives originating from specific leaders and governments, or as form of soft power projection, we are interested in understanding the impact of such Buddhist diplomatic endeavours on the physical, symbolic, and communal geographies of the Indian Himalayan region. In so doing, we adopt an approach of 'subalternising geopolitics' (Kaul, 2023) and rather than looking at Buddhist diplomatic initiatives in a 'top-down' way from the statist perspectives of India and China, we read these initiatives from a 'bottom up' way, to understand how such Buddhist diplomatic initiatives involve and impact the local dynamics of the Indian Himalayan region in institutional, infrastructural, and individual ways. Here, we examine the ways in which Buddhist diplomacy has led to changes in this region in terms of popular culture, festivals, pilgrimage, tourist circuits, and people-to-people exchanges. In the final section of the paper, we discuss the future implications of these practices of regional remaking. To wit, while much of the Indian Himalayan region as a stronghold of Buddhist religion and culture is indispensable for India’s narrative of Buddhist Diplomacy, our examples also indicate that this relies upon creating an inherently fragile framing in terms of an overarching 'Buddhism' -- in a particular and palatable Hinduised form -- that glosses over the complex sectarian divides of various Buddhist sects (for instance, Mahayana Buddhism) and their competing interests in the regional societal and political contexts.
