DHARAMSALA, India — In this Himalayan hill town, where Tibetan prayer flags flutter and red-robed monks study Buddha’s call for forbearance, talk is brewing of kicking off the world’s next separatist movement.

Posters around town advertise the word “rangzen” — Tibetan for “independence.” Not in years has it been heard so much in the streets here, falling from the lips of members of the Tibetan diaspora whose frustration runs as deep as the mountain ravines of their homeland. Decades of dialogue with the Chinese government, they say, have failed.

“Support for independence will definitely increase,” Dhondup Dorjee, 30, said, as he took a break from heated discussion with fellow exiles to grab lunch in the cafeteria of the Tibetan medicine hospital. “What are the pressures we can put on the Chinese? The pressures will come in any form.”

The Tibetan exile movement, so long associated with the Dalai Lama and his “middle way,” has reached a crossroads. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, has called hundreds of representatives from the world’s 150,000 Tibetan exiles to a crisis meeting here this week.

“It’s completely useless,” Dorjee said of negotiating with the Chinese. “There’s no point. We have been played.”

It is time to adopt desperate measures, some Tibetans here say. At the conclusion of this week’s meeting, a majority of the 581 delegates could very well recommend to the Dalai Lama and the government in exile that they should start a formal independence movement — a scenario that would alarm Chinese leaders while also confirming their long-held suspicions that exiled Tibetan leaders would never settle for anything but separation from China.

China crackdown reported in Tibet

China has further tightened control in its ethnic Tibetan region in recent weeks, exile groups say.

Stepped-up patrols and increased paramilitary presence in Lhasa, the regional capital, and along major arteries coincide with a strategy meeting attended by exiles in northern India this week, members of exile groups say.

— Los Angeles Times