Fog over Kalimpong

In trying to cover the Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet, 15 foreign and 200 Indian correspondents in New Delhi faced bigger obstacles than Tibet's snow-capped mountains. For one thing, Tibet would let no foreign newsmen in. For another, no news was coming out: the last radio link with Tibet's capital was cut two weeks ago when the wireless operated by India's mission in Lhasa went silent.

A Golden Caravan. But there was still one possibility. Many of India's first-rate newsmen rushed to the frontier city of Kalimpong in the hope of getting inside dope from a seven-man Tibetan delegation stranded there on its way to Peking for negotiations with the Chinese Reds. The delegation proved inscrutable, uncommunicative and apparently as uninformed as the newsmen themselves. But from Kalimpong the correspondents began wiring dispatches full of details of battle, and placing the invaders everywhere from 250 miles to 50 miles from Lhasa.

United Press Correspondent P. D. Sharma, however, managed to scoop them all without even leaving New Delhi. "The Dalai Lama, 16-year-old boy ruler of Tibet, has fled from Lhasa," he cabled last week. "He made the decision to flee after four of his cabinet ministers were killed in battle."

Sharma could not keep such a good story to himself. London's Sunday Dispatch and Sunday Times bloomed with graphic accounts of the Lama's tearful departure. India's newspapers added that he left at the head of a yak caravan, laden with fabulous stores of gold and diamonds. Soberly, the New York Times's careful Robert Trumbull relayed deadpan accounts from the Indian papers.

A Leaking Roof. At week's end, India's mission in Lhasa went back on the air. The reason for its silence: nothing new to report. There had been no flight, the Lama was still in Lhasa. "The Tibetan government," formally announced India's Ministry of External Affairs, "is greatly distressed by the wild rumors emanating from Kalimpong. The military situation as depicted from Kalimpong has no, repeat no, relation to the facts." Caught at their crystal-gazing, U.P.'s Sharma and others hastily reported that the Lama's "attempted flight" had been "prevented." But the Times of India did the neatest job of explaining: "A thick, almost impenetrable fog of rumor and fiction hangs over events transpiring on the Roof of the World."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.