Sikkim
Page 13
The problem was that the British, prior to their departure in 1947, had sometimes found fuzzy borders to their advantage. The Indians were initially less concerned with this ambiguity than Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai; the latter sought to settle both issues in 1960 with a proposal to recognise the nebulous McMahon Line in the Tawang region (which the Chinese argued they had never officially agreed in 1914) in exchange for recognition of China’s claim to the Aksai Chin.* But the ageing Nehru was now under considerable pressure to stand up to the Chinese after their actions in Tibet. He refused their offer.
Instead, an increasingly confident India moved onto the front foot, deploying what they called a ‘Forward Policy’ (ironically the same name given to the policy adopted by Younghusband and his successors in 1904) during the second half of 1961 and the first half of 1962. In an article entitled ‘The Himalayas: Struggle for the Roof of the World’, Time magazine reported an Indian as saying: ‘Tibet is the palm of the hand, and the Chinese have it. Now they want the five fingers without which the palm is useless.’ The five fingers were identified as Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA). ‘To the Chinese, all five stick out like sore thumbs,’ the article said, mixing metaphors.
The Indian Forward Policy involved establishing military outposts to the north of existing Chinese positions, particularly in the Aksai Chin region. At first, China did not respond, being faced with monumental challenges elsewhere. Internally the country was recovering from the disaster of the Great Leap Forward: on its eastern seaboard there was still the possibility that Taiwan might become the base for an attack on the mainland; and in Laos, a proxy conflict with the United States was just getting under way. But by the middle of 1962, Mao and Zhou decided it was time to act. During the 1950s Mao had characterised the era of Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai as one of ‘armed coexistence’ in the border areas with India. But India’s Forward Policy, Mao now argued, had put paid to that idea. Not only were the Indians occupying the strategically important Aksai Chin, they were also actively challenging China’s interpretation of the McMahon Line in Tawang.
By the autumn of 1962, both sides began to prepare for war. The main conflict developed in Tawang. The Indians occupied a position just inside territory that the Chinese claimed. The Chinese responded by taking dominant positions around it. On 9 September, the Indians countered with an attempt to evict the Chinese. In the high altitudes and unforgiving terrain neither side had much chance of success. But for the Indian commander, General Kaul, it was now a matter of pride. Reinforcements were called in and an attack was planned for October.
By now the numbers of well-trained Chinese troops, battle-hardened from Tibet, had increased substantially. A tense stand-off resulted, but when a rumour reached Beijing that the Indians were planning a more direct assault than previously (the Forward Policy had thus far been concerned with outflanking and encircling rather than confrontation), the Chinese leadership decided to discuss the matter with its counterparts in Moscow.
Involving the Kremlin was a calculated escalation. Although relations between the USSR and China were characterised more by competition than cooperation, events on the other side of the world – where the Cuban Missile Crisis was rapidly developing – were rapidly shifting the pieces on the international chessboard.
On 13–14 October, Khrushchev gave Peking his tacit approval, stating that he ‘understood’ the need for China to take appropriate countermeasures. With the necessary geopolitical support in place, the Chinese troops took swift and decisive action, launching military strikes in both sectors on 20 October 1962 and thus turning the Indian Forward Policy backwards at great speed.
The timing gave conspiracy theorists in search of an anti-communist plot a field day. On the other side of the world, US President John F. Kennedy had just detected – and was in the midst of dealing with – the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba, one of the most serious crises of the Cold War. Having failed dismally with his planned invasion of the Bay of Pigs the previous year, the president could not afford another climb-down and made it clear that he saw Cuba as a completely unacceptable front line between the communist and capitalist spheres of orbit.
It was just as he faced up to the greatest crisis of his presidency right on his doorstep that the Chinese were making their incursions into the disputed regions in the Himalayas. The American president had to perform a double act. As he confronted Khrushchev over Cuba, he also dispatched an American aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal.27 It was not inconceivable that the long-awaited confrontation between democratic America and the world’s communist powers could now open on not one but two fronts.
After 13 days of high drama, the Cuban crisis was resolved when the Russians backed down from the brink of Armageddon by withdrawing from Cuba on 28 October 1962. In the Himalayas, however, the Chinese were not in the habit of being denied what they wanted. Their aim was nothing less than to see the Indian Forward Policy, which they felt had been designed to antagonise them, in tatters. Despite an Indian counterattack on Nehru’s birthday, 14 November, the Chinese continued to push forward. After 31 days the ‘war’ was all but over. By 21 November neither side was willing to admit defeat, but it was undoubtedly the Chinese that were in the stronger position. It was they who felt confident enough to declare a unilateral ceasefire and, in early December, to withdraw from the disputed areas, saying they had achieved their policy objectives of securing borders in Aksai Chin in the west.
Kennedy’s aircraft carrier, therefore, turned tail no sooner than it had arrived. But with the Russian threat contained in Cuba, the Americans sought to increase their influence in the Asian sphere in late 1962. Within days of the Chinese withdrawal from Tawang, a ‘KC-135 jet tanker converted for passenger use’ had set off for New Delhi stuffed with yet more CIA agents.28 Despite Nehru’s continued misgivings, he accepted $120 million of aid from the Americans to resupply the Indian military.
The worldwide arms race to equip less developed countries was well under way. Within a year, the Soviets would also be supplying MIG fighters to the Indians.
Just as the Tawang crisis was developing in September 1962, Thondup had flown with Hope Cooke to New York after her summer break. All too aware of the possible impact of a Sino-Indian conflict on Sikkim, he wanted to ‘see the UN in action’ and to explore what it would take to achieve international recognition. When the UN was set up in 1945, Nepal had been recognised with a seat, but Bhutan and Sikkim had not, leaving both countries without the international protection afforded to others.
By early October Thondup had returned to Sikkim, leaving Hope alone in New York. From her apartment, she read the front-page news reports with some concern, terrified by the ‘tiny New York Times border map [which] showed Sikkim hardly a hairbreadth away from the clashes in NEFA’.
In fact, there had never been any serious threat to the Sikkimese section of the border from the Chinese side. The reason was a curious one: the Chinese maintained that both Sikkim and Bhutan were actually independent states and that there was no special relationship between India and Sikkim or Bhutan. A military attack would have challenged this logic. But, even if there was no physical threat, there was no let-up on the threatening rhetoric: Beijing now talked of Sikkim, Bhutan, Darjeeling and Kalimpong as ‘fingers on the hand of China’ and complained bitterly of the spies in all four being ‘lice in China’s clothing’.29
For the Indian Army and the growing political class, Sikkim had now taken on an even greater importance. They were on the lookout for any hint of pro-Chinese leanings in the Himalayan border states. Some even suggested that Crown Prince Thondup had been suspiciously slow to declare a state of emergency in Sikkim in the run-up to the crisis. Once he did so, Martha Hamilton’s recollection was of a rapid and significant build-up of Indian troops. In a letter home just before the major Chinese offensives, she wrote that:
I really hadn’t thought about the Chinese attacks worrying anyone as when I went to the distri
ct they were very minor. It was not till I returned that I found the army pouring in and nothing but war furore on every side.30
The army had arrived in numbers to honour its commitment to safeguard the Sikkimese nation as embodied in the 1950 agreement. As is often the way with military deployments, they would never really leave.
-7-
Towards the end of 1962 and in the shadow of the Sino-Indian conflict, the build-up to the royal wedding started in earnest.
Once the powerful Buddhist priests had accepted that there was little they could do to prevent the wedding taking place, they identified an auspicious date for the nuptials in late March 1963. While Gangtok mobilised its scant resources for the expected influx of dignitaries, the newspapers in America had a field day. The press corps were eager for a re-run of Grace Kelly’s famous wedding in Monaco: Time declared that Hope was ‘the first American girl to wed royalty since the daughter of a former Philadelphia bricklayer married Monaco’s Prince Rainier in 1956’. Alternately portrayed as a ‘Cinderella orphan’ and a ‘New York debutante’, she became a source of great fascination for the press, even in the pages of the fashionable Paris Match. It was deemed irrelevant that – with her slightly strained, earnest looks – she neither resembled nor wanted to resemble the effortlessly beautiful actress. This was the period when the American Dream reached its apogee, when reveries almost became reality. The marriage of an all-American girl into a secretive Buddhist kingdom had all the ingredients of great copy.
In fact, as all this was going on Hope Cooke was in New York – and was increasingly frazzled. As if the geopolitical tensions weren’t enough, she still harboured suspicions about her future husband’s infidelities. It hardly mattered whether they were real or imagined.
Meanwhile attempts to trace her genealogy for the ceremonies turned up ‘lowly’ origins (her father’s ‘Irishness’ led to her realising she was ‘not entirely top drawer’), which only increased her feelings of social vulnerability. During a Christmas visit to Sikkim she found Princess Coocoola ‘increasingly haughty . . . going on about the unsuitability, the rawness of people who have no roots, no background’. Things got even worse when she contracted a dose of hepatitis, with the wedding only weeks away. Thondup flew to New York to be by her side; when she confessed her fears about his commitment, she was furious that he responded by having a ‘physical attack’ with ‘drenching sweat, constant tremors, fevers and chill by turn’. She felt as if he was trying to trump her own illness, even though she knew that it was a flare-up of the malaria he’d caught as a child. Three days later, when he left for Gangtok to cope with the ‘intricate logistics’ of the wedding, she felt bitterly alone once more in New York.
None of that, of course, was known to the American press, who, as the day of the wedding approached, tripped over each other to write the most effusive words about the romance of the improbable love match. National Geographic ran a 31-page feature on Sikkim in March 1963, cataloguing the mystical and beautiful sides of the land. The author, Desmond Doig, was a former Ghurkha officer who had stayed on with a Calcutta newspaper. As he toured the country with Thondup, he recalled sitting
with the Crown Prince, watching a storm approach. ‘That’s hail,’ he remarked, pointing to the swollen bruise-blue belly of an advancing cloud bank. Sure enough, hail soon ricocheted off the tin roof of the palace and bounced like table-tennis balls on the lawn. As suddenly as the cloudburst came it passed, climbing over the valleys to the Northern ranges.
The Crown Prince watched its direction. ‘Good,’ he said at last. ‘It missed my cardamoms.’ For a moment the country’s next ruler was no more than a Lepcha farmer. Then he called for champagne.31
It was a telling image of the contrasts and contradictions in the Chogyal’s life, and just the sort of thing that aggravated the brooding Kazini of Chakung. As the palace sent out invitations across the world, the Kazini mulled over the events about to take place in the garden of her husband’s political ambitions. She had refused to renounce her British passport and become a ‘Sikkim Subject’ under Thondup’s new regulations; she and the Kazi had therefore settled in Kalimpong instead of in Sikkim, but all her venomous energy was squarely focused on the country’s situation. She came under suspicion for meddling when in early 1963 an article appeared in a UK newspaper with the headline, ‘Sikkim Crown Prince’s Wedding Opposed’. The article bore all the hallmarks of the Kazini, reporting that the Sikkim National Congress was ‘feeling aggrieved and apprehensive’, and describing the marriage as ‘against the best traditions and customs of Sikkim, a small state in the Himalayas. [The party] declares that it was incorrect to say that the marriage had the approval of the people of Sikkim.’
Hope Cooke finally flew back to India with the wedding only a week away. Accompanied by her aunt Mary, she carried no less than 26 suitcases and 12 umbrellas and parasols. On a stopover in Karachi she changed effortlessly from her Western frock into long Sikkimese clothing, a pale-yellow blouse and a tea-colour robe brocaded with chrysanthemums. ‘Never again will I wear a Western Gown!’ she declared in a magazine article a few months later. She was determined to shed her American background and start a new life, including becoming a Sikkimese citizen because ‘dual citizenships, permitted in many countries but often abused as profit-making conveniences, are forbidden in my new country’.
Despite the Kazini’s efforts there was genuine excitement and anticipation across Sikkim at Hope Cooke’s arrival and the forthcoming wedding: at the border Hope was greeted by the bagpipe band playing ‘The Skye Boat Song’. (Presumably this Sikkimese band had not ‘murdered’ the song in the way that Martha Hamilton had heard in December 1959.) As she made her way back up to Gangtok she could see Kalimpong from the jeep. She noticed a glow of fires in the distance, convinced for a moment that it was the demonstration that the Kazini was rumoured to have arranged. The police commissioner travelling with her tried his best to reassure her that they were part of the celebrations.
In Gangtok, the reception from Coocoola confused her even further:
Sometimes she is overwhelmingly kind and generous. Sometimes as well as being obviously cruel (she introduced Grace [who Hope suspected of having an affair with Thondup] to the Maharaj Kumar) I think she is practicing downright voodoo on me, or at least on my relationship with her brother . . .32
For Hope, the highly charged atmosphere was almost too much. She chose her wedding day as the first time to try out a half pill of Valium that one of the guests offered her to control her nerves.
On the wedding day itself it was the understated opulence of the event that made the biggest impression on Martha Hamilton:
The maharaja was sitting on his throne in gorgeous gold brocade, ambassadors all down one side and Sikkim officials the other and general guests elsewhere. It was all very Sikkimese. The bridegroom arrived and Dewan and then the bride looking really lovely with, thank heaven, her hair done properly for once . . .
The Polish hairdresser, imported from Calcutta for the wedding, spent a considerable time lacquering Hope’s hair into a ‘boxlike shape’ while Coocoola fussed over the wraparound Lepcha dress that had been chosen for the bride. Time fawned over the ‘frost-white brocade silk mokey, held in at the waist by a gold belt, from which hung a small dagger’. Hope, ‘feeling that a pageant was in progress and I was merely a spectator’, tried to embrace the Sikkimese customs. She pressed a small piece of dough into her hand, designed to ward off evil spirits, and recalled the double rainbow that she had seen the first time she had arrived at the palace nearly two years earlier, a deeply auspicious omen, according to Buddhist beliefs.
Two Buddhist lamas led her to the chapel to ‘a fanfare of trumpeting, 10 ft-long Himalayan horns, braying conch shells, and booming bass drums’, where Hope sat on a throne slightly lower than that of Thondup, who in turn was seated lower than his father, Tashi. For the marriage itself, a red-robed lama invoked the blessings of Sikkim’s deities, while the couple exchanged 12-foot-lon
g white silk scarves, hanging them around each other’s neck to seal the marriage contract.
Once the simple ceremony was complete, the guests repaired to a ‘great sapphire-blue-and-white sharmian tent, at least two stories high’, built on the palace lawn and surrounded by white Tibetan prayer flags on tall bamboo poles, while the palace fluttered with red, white and green pennants. The ambassadors of nine nations attended, among them John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist who Kennedy had appointed as US ambassador in Delhi. Hope Cooke’s uncle, Selden Chapin, who was unable to travel to the wedding due to a heart condition, had asked Galbraith to act as witness to the wedding on his behalf.
But it was the appearance of Coocoola that made the greatest impression on Martha Hamilton: ‘Most dramatic prostration to the floor by Coo Coo la in a gold lamé dress. People were alternately fascinated and repelled . . .’33
Coocoola had planned this fashion statement carefully – before the wedding she had reportedly written to all the guests asking them not to wear gold. A large gaggle of press photographers caught the moment as they struggled gamely on against odds that were rumoured to be outwith their control: ‘quite a few of the professionals had trouble with their cameras – lamas voodoo was the professional opinion’.34
The Kazini, meanwhile, attended the wedding parties dressed all in black.* In one of the more extraordinary stories from what was a bizarre event, a poem was posted under the door of each member of the international press corps.35 Hope Cooke was in no doubt that the Kazini, who was taking ‘every opportunity to talk down Sikkim to reporters’36, was responsible for the verse and it’s vicious satire directed towards her:
I am Hope, the New York Lepcha,
Oh, yes I really am
Though I’m marrying a Shamgyal