The troubles just seem to be mounting for the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). For several hours on 8th December 2017 (Friday), the official website of the CTA (Tibetan leadership in Dharamsala, North India) went down and all of its pages were rendered totally inaccessible.
Observers noted that in the time since the website first went down, its status was inconsistent. The outage was first noticed at around 2:10pm (GMT) when it was noted that the layout of the website had been altered, in particular the disappearance of the right column. This is the section of the website that advertises standard information that the CTA finds most significant, including information against the practice of Dorje Shugden. During this time, it was also noted that although the front page looked almost standard (with the exception of the missing right column), none of the links on the website worked. Clicking on any of them would lead to a standard announcement about an error.
Less than an hour later after this initial outage, a maintenance notice appeared on the website, trying to dismiss the technical issues as regularly scheduled maintenance. It should be noted that this announcement has rarely, if ever, been reported before.
Over the several hours that the website was down for, the status of the site kept changing from a stock template, to an announcement of regularly scheduled maintenance, before reverting back to the CTA’s website template but containing totally unaccessible links. Click to enlarge.
Approximately three hours later, it was noted that the entire website’s customizations had disappeared and their layout had reverted to the original WordPress template. There was even a link inviting people to log in to the administrative area of the site, as well as dummy text on their homepage (see video below).
Without any website defacement or any hacking group leaving their tag to claim responsibility for this state of affairs, it seems logical to conclude that the CTA’s website going down is the result of incompetence, “performance deficit” and “dereliction of duty” (as per what they accused Penpa Tsering of). This conclusion is also supported by the fact the website’s status keeps changing. It indicates the technical team is aware there is an error but no one can figure out where the error lies, or how to fix it. Each solution they have attempted to implement has not been successful in resolving the problem.
The CTA’s website with Lorem ipsum dummy text in the place of real copy. Click to enlarge.
The irony of this situation, and its karmic links has not gone unnoticed. The CTA has an extensive history of using online platforms to cause division and schism in Tibetan society, and to spread misinformation and lies about people who refuse to toe the party line. For example, they are well known to use social media channels like WeChat, Facebook and YouTube as platforms for their propaganda against the Kagyus, the Jonangpas as well as their political opponents such as Lukar Jam and rangzen supporters. They have also previously funded anti-Dorje Shugden websites to direct hatred, harm and discrimination towards Shugden practitioners. They have used social media to publicize lists of Dorje Shugden practitioners to falsely label them as ‘anti-Dalai Lama’ and thus identify them as deserving targets of violence.
For the many communities who have been victimized by the Tibetan leadership for the last six decades, the outage of their website offered slight, if any, respite from the abuse they have suffered for decades. For a few hours, the CTA’s instrument of vitriol and hatred, sadly disguised as ‘democracy‘ and ‘freedom of speech‘, was not functioning to spread lies around the world.
Will the CTA learn any lessons from this, or will they continue to abuse the tenets of free speech to oppress those who do not share their same views? Given their track record, it seems highly unlikely this will be a lesson that sticks. But one can always hope as we see more and more instances of a government that is finally having to face the consequences of exploiting the goodwill of the world. It is all the Tibetan people can do, as they start to uncover all of the lies that have been sold to them by their very own leadership for the last 60 years.
The CTA’s website with a stock WordPress template and banner. Clearly someone was trying to fix the error but was unsuccessful. Click to enlarge.
Thanks to a technical error, login page to the administrative area of the CTA’s official website became exposed. Click to enlarge.
The ownership details of a now-defunct anti-Dorje Shugden website that was paid for by the Tibetan leadership. Click to enlarge.
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