“Bhoe Gyalo!” shouted Tenzin Tsundue as he was carried away by police in the Indian district of Kangra recently: “Victory to Tibet!” He was one of about 100 protesters detained and given two weeks’ custody by police in the Himachal Pradesh district, on a march from Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, to Tibet itself. It was a protest against Chinese encroachment in the region.

Tibetan protest in India is not new. Since Nehru first took the monumental decision – bowing to huge popular and parliamentary pressure – to admit refugees who were following the Dalai Lama into exile from Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1959, the Tibetan community has maintained its vociferousness, even while it has bedded down in India. During the early 1980s protests were especially frequent, as resurgent Chinese repression caused outrage among the exiled community in India. This was not least because of the swelling of its ranks with thousands of new arrivals, thanks to India’s largely ‘open door’ policy towards Tibetans.

Such protests have been treated with wariness, but a remarkable degree of tolerance, by Indian authorities. They have generally been dispersed with a minimum of violence - even when the threat of factional feuding surfaced on the arrival of the head of Tibetan Buddhism’s second most important sect, the Karmapa Lama, in India in 2001.

This has largely been because Tibetan protesters themselves have rarely been violent. This month’s protests, initiated to mark the 49th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, were overwhelmingly peaceful: the marchers responded to police attempts to arrest by sitting down in the road, linking arms and chanting prayers, according to one BBC report.

The detention of 100 protesters at once, however, has very little precedent, and speaks more of parallel events in Nepal, where Kathmandu riot police ‘clashed’ with up to 3000 protesters who were trying to march to the city’s Chinese embassy. 80 were arrested.

In Nepal, there has historically been a much more frosty ‘welcome’ for Tibetans. Most of those fleeing from Tibet first cross into Nepal, and the country - much less able to accommodate them and much less willing than India to aggravate the Sino-tiger perching on its northern shoulder – has largely functioned as a holding bay for Tibetans on their way to settlement in India. Those who do stay in Nepal find the authorities much less amenable to their cause. Tibetans were accorded more rights and tolerance in India than in Nepal, even during India’s short-lived war against China in 1962.

That first decision by Nehru was the result of a campaign in the Indian parliament, as well as a widespread public sentiment, in favour of unlimited hospitality towards Tibetans, and the rhetoric of shared culture eventually won the support of India’s first prime minister. The kinship felt by many Indians with their Buddhist neighbours held much weight- the symbol of the fifth century BCE Buddhist emperor Ashoka, who ruled large parts of Tibet and northern India, appears on the Indian flag – and continues to do so. Throughout the twists and turns of India’s complex relations with China, Tibetans were admitted and settled using Indian government money, resulting in a population of over 120,000 today. Although they still live largely separately in most of the areas they have been settled, there has been relatively little tension between Tibetan and native Indian communities, especially in a state so ravaged by ‘communal strife’.

Despite the minor blotch that this month’s arrests make on the wider scene of India’s communal troubles, therefore, they do suggest a downward trend in tolerance towards Tibetans. Many reasons for this emerge. The rise of Hindu nationalism, especially in Himachal Pradesh where the BJP secured a landslide election victory in 2007, may be influencing a more broad-brush suspicion of non-Indian or non-Hindu groups. The rising noise about the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the parallel rise of the Dalai Lama to international fame and regard over the past two decades, may have made India more aware of the wider implications of such protests, in its desire to stay on the right side of Asia’s new economic superpower. The Dalai Lama’s hard-hitting remarks on human rights violations in Tibet, coinciding with but not explicitly endorsing the protest march, will not have helped the Indian authorities to turn a blind eye, as they have done occasionally in the past.

Early in the new millennium, a movement emerged among a group of ‘Eminent Persons’ -mostly judges- in India demanding a standardised refugee law, which is something India has so far done without, and which the government might argue continues to be superfluous. The treatment of refugees in India since independence has been resolutely idiosyncratic, and piecemeal, with each separate group accorded different statuses – ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’. This totally ignores international proclamations that all refugees are equal, and is somewhat hypocritical, as India felt that the international community ignored one of the largest refugee crises in history: partition.

In India, some refugees are far more equal than others. Tibetans have historically been firmly on the fortunate end of the scale, treated as ‘guests’ and provided with documents and homes, while many other nationalities are routinely arrested under the Foreigners Act and deported. If the clamour for a national refugee law is victorious, they could see their treatment deteriorate further than it already has under that clamour’s attitude-changing effects. As a new system creaks under the weight of its responsibility to treat all refugees equally, the raising up of some will inevitably mean the erosion of good treatment for others.

Luckily for Tibetans, perhaps, this seems unlikely to go ahead with any great urgency. Since the Eminent Persons introduced to the Indian Parliament a Model Refugee Law in 2002, various ministers have uniformly responded to questions regarding the law along the lines of “it is being considered.” They appear to have spent the last six years passing it around various ministries and committees. In the grand tradition of Indian, and, indeed, subcontinental government, politicians do not seem to consider it worth relaying any real information to the public, and so the true progress of the law through the legislative process is as opaque now as it has ever been.

The recent detentions, though, may indicate that despite this lack of tangible progress, India is tightening up on Tibetans, seeing them as a ‘refugee community’ rather than as ‘guests’, as ran the original rhetoric. Rumours prevalent in the Border States of Tibetans being arrested as Chinese spies – unfounded according to local jurists – suggest that Tibetans are being linked to ‘national security’ with a directness not seen before, but one which is characteristic of other immigrant and refugee groups, such as Sri Lankan Tamils, Pakistanis, and Afghans.

It is ironic that this new perception has so far manifested most publicly in preventing the ‘outsiders’ from leaving the country, rather than in working towards deportation ,as has mostly been the case for, for example, Afghans. India has forcibly returned very few Tibetan refugees since 1959, and this is one trend that seems permanent. Given the number of Tibetans already present in the country and the rate of new arrivals, it is unlikely that refoulement will ever form part of India’s Tibetan policy. It is Tibetans’ potential to add a small yet sharply audible note to the symphony of communal violence in the country that may prompt Indian politicians to keep the law enforcement agencies’ eye more firmly trained on the Tibetans.