Every four years, the United States experiences an upheaval of sort, depending on the outcome of the presidential elections. Like earthquakes, sometimes changes are minor while sometimes they are major ones, including with subsequent tremors. This year we are going through another such upheaval with President Donald Trump having won and bringing in a new set of officials.

A blessing in disguise of a tragedy, if I can even dare say, is that it brings out the positive side of people all over. That was the experience of the Tibetan refugees in the immediate period following their escape from Tibet in and after 1959, when there was an outpouring of material and moral support from the international community.

As we come to the end of 2024, one interesting political development on Tibet was that on October 22, 2024 a “Joint statement on the human rights situation in Xinjiang and Tibet” by 15 countries was made at United Nations Third Committee session in New York evokes interest in quite a few ways. Here, I will only touch on the Tibet part of the statement as I am sure our Uyghur friends are themselves studying the more substantive East Turkestan (as Xinjiang is known to them) reference. The Third Committee is one of the committees of the UN General Assembly, the Social, Humanitarian & Cultural...