Pempa Tsering is new Sikyong of Tibet’s exile parliament

INDIA REPORTER TODAY

DHARAMSHALA : Arvind Sharma

Senior State Correspondent

Penpa Tsering, former speaker of Tibet’s exile parliament, becomes the new president of the central Tibetan administration of Tibetan government-in-exile. Wins Sikyong’s (political leader) of Tibet’s Dharamsala, India-based exile government the Central Tibetan Administration in election 2021. Penpa Tsering secured 34324 votes whereas Kalsang Dorjee Aukatsang secured 28907 votes. Chief election commissioner Wangdu Tsering Pesur announced the results of Sikyong and 45 members of Tibetan parliament-in-exile in Dharamshala during an online press briefing here on Friday.

More than 83,000 Tibetans living in 26 countries around the world went to the polls on April 11 to cast their ballots in the third and final round of voting for Sikyong.

The details are awaited.

Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard-trained scholar of law, has served two consecutive five-year terms as Sikyong, an office filled by candidates elected since 2011 by popular vote, and will now leave that post.

Today’s election results will also seat 45 members of the exile Tibetan parliament in its new, seventeenth session, with 10 candidates representing each of Tibet’s three traditional provinces—U-tsang, Kham, and Amdo—and two representatives from each of Tibet’s four major schools of Buddhism and the pre-Buddhist Bon religion.

Two members will also be voted in to represent each of the exile Tibetan communities in North and South America and Europe, and one from Australia and Asia, excluding India, Nepal, and Bhutan.

The Tibetan diaspora is estimated to include about 150,000 people living in 40 countries, mainly India, Nepal, North America, and in Europe.

The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) and the Dalai Lama have instead adopted a policy approach called the Middle Way, which accepts Tibet’s status as a part of China but urges greater cultural and religious freedom, including strengthened language rights, for Tibetans living under Beijing’s rule.

Both Tsering and Aukatsang support the Middle Way.