India stage-managed torch relay meets protests

Around 70 sportsmen and celebrities including Bollywood film stars jogged on a roughly 1.9-mile (3-km) route, shortened due to fears of Tibetan protests after disruptions in other cities such as London, Paris and San Francisco. Across India, thousands of mainly Tibetans protested and around 100 demonstrators were detained in the capital.

At the completion of the relay, the torch left for Bangkok.

“China’s torch is a flame of shame,” read one banner.

“There cannot be any Games without Tibet. Bring Tibet to the Games,” said Tenzing Khentssin, dressed in a white “Torch Tibet” T-shirt as he marched amid chanting protesters, surrounded by hundreds of police.

But the relay took place in a rare bubble of emptiness in a city normally teeming with street sellers, noisy autorickshaws and honking traffic.

There were almost no crowds apart from some flag-waving Chinese and a few dozen school children bussed in by officials, who exchanged mini Chinese and Indian flags and T-shirts.

Surrounded by Chinese attendants, Indian security guards in tracksuits, and police and troops with automatic rifles, runners could only wave to the television cameras.

Outside the massive security cordon, dozens of Tibetans were detained for trying to protest.

The torch, which is en route to China for the Games in Beijing, arrived in a plane before dawn and was met by protests across India, where thousands of Tibetans marched with golden Buddhist prayer lamps.

A few hours before the relay, thousands of Tibetans marched through the capital in a parallel relay to demand Tibet’s independence and protest against Chinese policies in their homeland, in particular its crackdown last month on unrest.

Police also detained about two dozen Tibetan protesters when the torch arrived from Pakistan in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday. Many were dragged into police vans as they shouted anti China slogans.

In the mainly Buddhist region of Ladakh in India’s Himalayas, thousands of people, including monks clad in traditional red robes, marched to show solidarity with Tibetan protesters.

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