Yesterday, a 43-year-old Harvard graduate and legal academic became the first non-monastic, directly elected prime minister of Tibet’s exiled government.
The swearing in of Tibetan Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, not only ended more than 350 years of political leadership by the lineage of the Dalai Lamas over the Tibetan polity, it also capped a half-century of the secular maturation of Tibet’s democratically elected government-in-exile.
Most of what the world knows about Tibet has come through the 14th Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959. During more than 50 years in exile, the Dalai Lama has been recognized around the world for his tireless devotion to peace and non--violence and in 1989 he received the Nobel Peace Prize.