Several hundred Tibetans gathered on Saturday April 22 in Paris in support of the Dalai Lama, violently attacked on social networks and in the media after a video that created controversy. “Stop defaming his holiness!” “, shouted the demonstrators, gathered in front of the premises of France Télévisions, to denounce “media and television channels which did not do their job as journalists and relayed Chinese propaganda”, according to the words, at the microphone, of a spokesperson for the Tibetan community.
The crowd, estimated at several hundred people – many of them children – by a journalist from Agence France-Presse (AFP), waved Tibetan flags and many participants showed portraits of the Dalai Lama.
Six associations of the Tibetan community had called for this demonstration, in support of the spiritual leader of Tibet, after the dissemination of a video on social networks in recent days, which aroused a host of hostile reactions. This video, relayed more than a month after the events (February 28), shows the Dalai Lama in audience near Dharamsala (in northern India, where he lives in exile), with a young Indian boy accompanied from his mother. The 87-year-old Dalai Lama sticks his tongue out at the obviously taken aback child, just after asking, “Can you suck my tongue?” “, triggering the hilarity of the assembly.
“Misinterpretation of the video”
The spiritual leader later “apologized” to the boy and his family in a statement posted to his Twitter account. “Her holiness often teases the people she meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and in front of the cameras. [She] regrets this incident,” the statement read.
For the Tibetan community in France, the hostile reactions are “a misinterpretation of the video”. She regrets that “decontextualized facts are circulating” in some French media, she said in a statement. “This has deeply saddened and hurt the Tibetan community, in France and around the world.”
“It is indeed a tease of the Dalai Lama,” Françoise Robin, university professor at Inalco (National Institute of Oriental Languages ??and Civilizations) told AFP. “Among the Tibetans, there is an expression – ‘eat my tongue’ – which derives from a game between children and their elders: when the former asks for a little money or a candy from the latter, and the latter do not have nothing left to give, they say ‘eat my tongue’”. “It is very difficult to measure the pain that this manipulation has inflicted on the Tibetans”, adds Ms. Robin, while the Dalai Lama is “their hope and their pride”.
In 2019, the Dalai Lama had already issued a public apology for saying that if a woman were to succeed him, she would have to be “attractive”. These remarks, made during an interview on the BBC, had also caused controversy.
