Chinese Saga of Olympic Shame Continues: Beijing's Olympic Torch Is the
Joker on the Block in Delhi -- Olympic Torch Makes Lonely Progress
Through Delhi

The New York Times
April 18, 2008

Olympic Torch Makes Lonely Progress Through Delhi

By AMELIA GENTLEMAN and HARI KUMAR

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/18/world/asia/18torch-3.450.jpg
Tibetan monks prayed next to their own "Olympic torch" in New Delhi on
Thursday before a parallel torch relay to protest against Chinese action
on Tibet.

More Photos
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/17/world/0417-TORCH_index.html

NEW DELHI ― The Olympic torch made a strange and lonely procession
through central New Delhi on Thursday, with the event so overshadowed by
fears of the anti-Chinese protests that marred its appearances in other
cities that the public was not allowed close enough to witness it.

The 70-odd Indian athletes and celebrities who carried the torch down
the widest avenue in New Delhi, the capital, were outnumbered by
thousands of members of the Indian security forces, who stamped out any
pomp and excitement, turning the occasion into a tense security operation.

The police said later that 276 protesters, largely Tibetans, had been
arrested, under preventive charges, while trying to breach the security
cordon.

The authorities sealed off much of the heart of this city of 16 million
for hours before the event, anxious to avoid the disruption that had
plagued earlier stages of the torch relay and concerned that Tibetan
exiles in India would sabotage the occasion.

India has the world’s largest population of Tibetan exiles, about
100,000, who fled their homeland after China crushed an uprising there
in the 1950s. Their presence had made Olympic organizers particularly
anxious about this stage of the torch’s journey to Beijing, where the
Olympics will begin on Aug. 8.

Demonstrations did not disturb the relay, but made many small attempts
to breach the heavy security in the streets nearby.

Just before the event, seven protesters ran toward the barricades near
India Gate before being stopped by police officers wielding sticks. The
protesters were bundled into a truck.

Officers used wooden sticks to hit the feet of two protesters who had
tried to resist detention by sitting in the road. Limping, but shouting,
“Free Tibet,” they, too, were lifted into the back of an open truck and
driven away.

As the relay began, the roads around Rajpath, the imposing avenue that
cuts through the heart of what once was British colonial Delhi, had been
cleared of cars and pedestrians, and an unusual peace descended on the
area. The singing of birds, usually drowned out by the roar of traffic,
was audible.

On Thursday morning, hundreds of Tibetan protesters marched through the
center of the city shouting, “Die for freedom.” Demonstrators lighted
their own torch at the spot where the ashes of Gandhi are buried and
mounted a parallel, peaceful torch relay. Many students and large
numbers of Tibetans who had traveled from places across India to join
the march carried banners declaring “Justice Raped in Tibet” and “Gold
Medal for China in Torture.”

The noise and excitement of the march were in stark contrast to the
scenes of highly controlled calm along the route taken by the Olympic flame.

Despite the heavy police presence, Tibetan exiles sprang small surprise
protests near the airport on Wednesday night, shortly after the torch
arrived from Pakistan, and later at the luxury hotel in central New
Delhi where the torch was kept before the relay.

The success of the demonstrators in breaching heavy security in the days
before the torch arrived embarrassed the New Delhi police and
intensified the organizers’ determination to prevent disruption of the
relay, which was shortened to slightly more than a mile from the
original distance of about five and a half miles because of security
concerns.