Samdhong Rinpoche, the head of a trust that will oversee the task of selecting the next Dalai Lama, will visit Kolkata on Saturday to attend a seminar on Tibet’s past, present and future and its impact on India.

The Tibetan Buddhist monk and politician, who also served as the Prime Minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamshala, will be the keynote speaker at the programme, reports The Telegraph.

The seminar will be organised by the Calcutta-based organisation Ganasamannay and the department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Calcutta.

“The main objective of the seminar is to create public opinion in favour of the people of Tibet.... That’s why we are getting Professor Rimpoche so that the audience in Calcutta gets to benefit from his views,” Ruby Mukherjee of Ganasamannay told the newspaper.

“The world knows that Tibet is not a part of Communist China.... But because of prolonged silence over it, people tend to forget the fact. We want to make people aware of the reality,” Mukherjee said.