Amanda Gentleman & Hari Kumar | New Delhi | April 17

NYT - The Olympic torch made a strange and lonely procession through central Delhi on Thursday, with the event so overshadowed by fears of the anti-Chinese protests that marred its appearances in other cities that no members of the public were allowed close enough to witness it.

The 70-odd Indian athletes and celebrities who carried the torch down Delhi’s widest avenue were outnumbered by thousands of watchful members of India’s security forces, who managed to stamp out any pomp and excitement, transforming the occasion into a tense security operation.

India has the world’s largest population of exiled Tibetans, about 100,000, who fled their homeland after China crushed an uprising there in the 1950s, and their presence had made Olympic organizers particularly anxious about this stage of the torch’s journey to Beijing, where the Games will begin on Aug. 8.