Sikkim

by Andrew Duff

  In Gangtok, too, the international nature of their marriage, combined with the fact that English was almost a first language for Thondup as much as it was for Hope, brought a solid stream of foreign visitors. Some were Hope’s friends, some were acquaintances, many had diplomatic connections – and not all were complimentary about the couple’s increasingly anti-Indian stance. William Andreas Brown, a US Foreign Service officer in the embassy in New Delhi (who would go on to become ambassador to Thailand), recalled that in the late 1960s Hope ‘was always sarcastically knifing the Indians in our presence’; Raymond Hare, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from 1965 to 1966, remembered Hope and Thondup as ‘a strange couple. He was very outgoing, liked a good time, and he drank with gusto. His wife, the American girl, used to sit with her head bowed and her hands folded like she thought a demure little Nepali should, I guess. It was a bit ludicrous.’ Another American diplomat, Anthony Quainton, recalled that Hope ‘had quite a following in the United States and constantly stirred up American domestic opinion about the plight of the Sikkimese under India’.29 Sometimes the conversation would take bizarre turns. When General Westmoreland, who was a key player in the Vietnam conflict, visited, he recollected that ‘the leader of the opposition party urged me to initiate steps for the United States to take over protectorate responsibilities of his country from India; so absurd was the request that I may have been abrupt in my reply’.30

  By 1969, the couple were also travelling to New York and London twice a year. Tenzing was now at school in Harrow in London and, despite a small number of close friends in Sikkim, Hope’s social circle was still deeply embedded in New York. London also presented the opportunity to stock up on luxury foods for transportation back to the palace in Gangtok. There was a wider implication behind these overseas visits, too. Hope and Thondup knew that membership of international bodies was critical as a sign of international status; by meeting diplomats and politicians around the world, they felt they were building support for Sikkim’s international status.

  This globetrotting and nation-building did not go down well with everyone back in India and Sikkim. In New Delhi, some suggested that just holding overseas press conferences could be interpreted as ‘external relations’, one of the three activities specifically assigned to India in the 1950 treaty. In Kalimpong, the Kazini too continued to make comparisons between the extravagance of the royal couple’s lifestyle and that of the average (Nepali) worker in Sikkim, mocking the coverage that Hope and Thondup got in the US. It was easy to lampoon articles such as the one that appeared in Time magazine in 1969, entitled ‘Sikkim: A Queen Revisited’, describing the lifestyle of ‘America’s only working queen’.

  The article gave details of Hope’s daily routine: rising at 8 a.m., breakfasting on ‘tea and fruit’, browsing the ‘foreign newspapers and magazines’ until her secretary arrived for four hours of ‘writing letters, devising menus and supervising the palaces 15 servants’. After social work and perhaps ‘a set of tennis’ in the afternoon, evenings were ‘usually filled with official functions, or private parties’, Hope ‘confiding’ to the magazine that she liked ‘a Scotch and soda before dinner – or “even after dinner”.’

  In the reports of progress made in Sikkim since the coronation (an increase in literacy rates from 25 per cent to 40 per cent, quadrupling the number of children in school, average per-capita income of $100 – up a third), there was no mention of the continued heavy reliance on Indian aid. Instead, the focus was on the export-led revival of ‘Sikkim’s long-dormant cottage industry’, the evidence of which was two ‘chic Manhattan stores’ that carried ‘deep-pile rugs and silver jewellery painstakingly made by native craftsmen’.

  The final section, entitled ‘No Great Splendour’, portrayed Hope as having found peace and happiness in the simplicity of Sikkim.

  At home, she dresses informally in the kho, the traditional Sikkimese costume, which is an ankle-length jumper that wraps around the waist and is worn over a blouse of contrasting color – cotton or wool for the daytime and silk in the evening. She uses cosmetics only occasionally and does her own hair – though she admits that she is encouraging a romance between a Sikkimese youth and a Calcutta hairdresser in the hope of importing the kingdom’s first coiffeuse. She describes her home as ‘a poorish palace but a palace.’ It is a 64-year-old, two-story white stucco building with five bedrooms and a tin roof. In Gangtok, the family gets around in a white Mercedes convertible. On foreign trips, however, they make a point of flying economy class and often stay with friends. ‘It’s no great Oriental splendor we live in,’ Hope observes.

  The Gyalmo and Chogyal travel in the West for about two months a year, which helps to overcome any surge of homesickness, but Hope admits that she sometimes misses ‘cheese, the Sunday New York Times and the sea.’ Still, those are hardly important. Hope says: ‘My happiest times are right here in Sikkim. Being a queen is nice because it gives you a whole fabric, a structure, and because there is so much we need to do. I feel accepted, very comfortable, very inspired and completely happy.’31

  If articles such as this were intended to advance the cause of Sikkim’s drive for independence, they were almost certainly counterproductive. It was public opinion in India – and inside Sikkim itself – that Hope and Thondup needed to convince of the rightness of their cause, not in America.

  Despite what she had told Time magazine, Hope was not happy in every area of her life. She believed her husband capable of more affairs. In London she sometimes found herself ‘so jealous I don’t dare let him leave without me’.32

  Back in Sikkim the reality of her emotional isolation sometimes plunged her into a depression. However much she pretended to be satisfied with the role of Sikkimese wife and mother, she needed more than that. She felt intellectually isolated too, writing that finding a ‘book of substance’ among the shelves of Agatha Christie in the palace library was a challenge.

  Her relationship with Coocoola also continued to deteriorate. She found herself questioning her sister-in-law’s continual presence in the palace, convinced that from the moment she had arrived in Sikkim Coocoola had ‘thought I’d disappear fairly soon and is in a fury that I haven’t’.

  To assuage the feelings of loneliness, she spent an increasing amount of time in Thatongchen, at the school that had been developed as a model for education in the state. There she formed a close friendship with a young Sikkimese student at the school, Norbu, who taught her the basics of the Lepcha language and helped her to understand the folklore of Sikkim: ‘Sometimes we just sit listening to records – Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Judy Collins. Occasionally he plays a flute he made himself from bamboo . . .’33

  Her relationship with Thondup, never simple, was also coming under pressure. One evening, when Thondup decided to stay up late playing mah-jongg with friends, she deliberately turned her music up to its highest volume. Thondup stormed upstairs and threw her record player, which he knew she regarded as her ‘lifeline’, out of the window in a rage. She lashed a kick out at him in response. At 2 a.m. Thondup called his friend Karma Topden, often the fixer in such situations, who calmed the situation, getting treatment for Hope’s damaged foot.

  In a post-mortem the following morning, Topden, also married to a Western woman, gently reminded Thondup that both their wives might have every reason to feel lonely.

  ‘You think I’m not lonely, too?’ Thondup flashed back.

  -5-

  In May 1969, six months after Tikki Kaul had warned him that the chances of an independent Sikkim were rapidly receding, Thondup had a more positive meeting with India’s External Affairs Minister, Dinesh Singh. Singh made encouraging noises about a status for Sikkim something similar to Monaco. It was an interesting analogy – Monaco, a principality, had a ‘special relationship’ with France whereby the latter was responsible for its defence only, but also agreed to pursue policies in their mutual interest. But by now Thondup was fixated on something more akin to compl
ete independence. Monaco, Thondup pointed out, had only ‘observer’ status at the UN, countering Singh’s informal suggestion by comparing Sikkim to Luxembourg, the landlocked European state of similar size to Sikkim.

  Thondup was making a subtle point, and one that was not lost on Singh: far from having only ‘observer’ status, Luxembourg had been a founder member of the UN from 1946. He was setting his sights higher than Monaco.

  While articles about the royal couple were appearing in the world’s press and Thondup was having esoteric arguments about which European country Sikkim resembled, the Indian Political Officer in Gangtok, N. B. Menon, was noticing a distinct change in mood in the capital. He was also tired.

  When he had taken up the post in 1967, Menon had made a speech invoking the spirit of former British Political Officers Sir Charles Bell and Colonel Bailey. From the magnificent Residency that the first Political Officer, Claude White, had so deliberately built to look down over the palace and the rest of Gangtok, it had seemed natural to link the pre-1947 past to the happy post-coronation glow in Sikkim. But over the next three years Menon’s gentle paternalism had ebbed away amid anti-Indian demonstrations and the Sikkim Study Forum’s increasingly belligerent calls for treaty revision.

  In early 1970 Menon watched wearily as elections in Sikkim heightened the divisions between the pro-palace contingent, who demanded greater autonomy for Sikkim, and the growing political movement coalescing around the disenfranchised Nepali minority, led by the Kazi’s SNC. When the political system, still heavily biased in favour of the Bhutia-Lepcha constituency, left the pro-palace National Party as the largest party, the Kazini ridiculed the result as yet another example of why the political system had to change. She mocked the National Party for their anti-Indian stance, suggesting that a withdrawal of Indian armed forces would be an open invitation for the Chinese to walk into Sikkim. The Study Forum (seen by some as allied to the National Party) responded by criticising the SNC for failing to raise its voice against ‘Indian Imperialism’.

  Menon was disappointed by these continuing tensions. He was, therefore, greatly relieved when bad weather forced the cancellation of the proposed visit by the President of India, V. V. Giri, in 1970. He had heard rumours that the president might have been welcomed by a ‘black flag’ demonstration and banners demanding that India leave Sikkim, and even that the Chogyal might not have welcome the president’s visit. He had no desire to be caught up in that kind of political dilemma.34

  In May 1970, an exhausted Menon left Gangtok for the last time in a car bedecked in flowers. In his final speech, he spoke to the Indian business community about the need for accepting change.

  The problem was that no one really knew what kind of change, if any, would satisfy the increasingly divided communities within Sikkim.

  The Indian President, V. V. Giri, had been in neighbouring Bhutan when he cancelled the visit to Gangtok. The warm relations between India and Bhutan could not have been more different from the tense relationship between India and Sikkim. Bhutan’s leaders had been assiduous in staying close to the Indians and making Delhi feel comfortable with their desire for greater autonomy. Bhutan also had the advantage of a looser relationship with India. The Indo-Bhutanese treaty had been negotiated in 1949, a few months before the first Chinese incursions into Tibet; crucially, Sikkim’s had been negotiated more than a year later, when the political environment looked quite different. But the Bhutanese had also been careful to avoid developing a confrontational relationship with India. They saw the Indian president’s 1970 visit as another step on the road towards that ultimate goal of UN membership, something that they were ruthlessly focused on. Bhutan’s co-operative approach was a far cry from the casual belligerence displayed towards India by the Palace in Gangtok and bodies such as Sikkim’s Study Forum.

  In London’s Foreign Office, they were also staying abreast of developments in Sikkim and Bhutan.35 Despite Britain’s steady withdrawal from empire in the post-war period, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office maintained an active interest in all the former colonial possessions. Sikkim and Bhutan, with their interesting ‘esoteric complications’, were no exception.

  In July 1970 an FCO official was asked to express an opinion on whether the UK could support the Bhutanese application to join the UN. In general the FCO was careful about expressing support for new nation applications, but the FCO considered Bhutan’s case to be a good one. The question had arisen after an informal approach by Apa Pant, the former Political Officer to Sikkim and Bhutan in the late 1950s, and now the Indian High Commissioner in London. But when Pant suggested that ‘he thought in due course there would have to be similar developments in Sikkim’, the FCO baulked at the prospect. The Sikkim treaty, they concluded, would not only be inconsistent with UN membership, it would also be inconsistent with ‘most specialised agencies’ that recognised sovereign status.

  Not that the Foreign Office was dropping support for Sikkim completely. The British imperial connection still counted for something. In June 1970, a note from H. C. Easterling, the admissions tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, arrived on the desk of Sir Denis Greenhill, the Permanent Under Secretary at the FCO.* Easterling had become aware that Prince Tenzing, the eldest of Thondup’s children at Harrow, wanted to attend Cambridge. ‘By our normal academic standards,’ he wrote, ‘he is not a very promising candidate, but we might be able to stretch a point if asked to do so by the FCO.’

  Greenhill, perhaps consulting his files and recalling that an earlier British government had had no hesitation in ‘stretching a point’ in 1907, when a former Chogyal, Sidkeong, had attended Oxford University, wrote back:

  I am most grateful to you for consulting me in your letter of 2 June about the possible admission to your college of the Crown Prince Tenzing Namgyal, the son of the Chogyal of Sikkim. I have no hesitation in saying that I consider it important that the Prince should be able to complete his education at Cambridge. Sikkim’s geographical position on the Indo-Chinese border gives it considerable political significance, and it is therefore in our interests not only to meet the wishes of the present Chogyal with regard to the education of his son but, more important, also to enable the future Chogyal to benefit from all the good influences which would be brought to bear on him at your college. I therefore very much hope that, despite the heavy pressure for admission you must face, you will find it possible to make a place available for the Crown Prince. I know the boy’s parents quite well. Thank you for consulting me.

  Some things, it was clear, had not changed.

  In August 1970, Delhi sent a new political officer to Sikkim.

  Forty-two-year-old K. Shankar Bajpai was one of a new breed of young up-and-coming diplomats in the Indian Foreign Service – sharp, polished and urbane, and with impeccable credentials. His father, Sir Girija Bajpai, had served as Indian agent-general to the USA in the 1940s before becoming a leading foreign policy adviser to Nehru as secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs after independence; K. Shankar Bajpai’s own education had been in Washington and then at Merton College, Oxford. Joining the Indian Foreign Service had been a foregone conclusion. By the time he was appointed to Gangtok he had already made his mark, first in two prestigious postings in Pakistan at the height of the tensions there and then for three years as the Indian consul-general in the USA.

  Bajpai knew that Tikki Kaul, who had handpicked him for the job in Gangtok, was committed to revising India’s relations with Bhutan and was also keen to resolve the question of the future of Sikkim. But it did not take Bajpai long to assess that there were critical differences between the situations in the two countries. For a start, the military presence in Sikkim was far greater than that in Bhutan. There were the best part of two divisions of the Indian Army stationed in Sikkim. Then there was the administration – almost entirely peopled by Indians, far more so than Bhutan.

  He also thought that Delhi was underestimating another important factor in the problem in Sikkim. The geograp
hy of the area was particularly sensitive. To the south in Darjeeling, the strong and vibrant Nepali community was increasingly identifying with its ethnic cousins – both in Nepal itself and in Sikkim. A change in the status of Sikkim, Bajpai mused, might be an encouragement to the formation of a Gurkha or Nepali state across the Himalayas, encompassing Sikkim, Kalimpong and Darjeeling.* Trouble in the chicken-neck of the Sikiguri corridor – the area where the Maoist Naxalites had their base and which included both Kalimpong and Darjeeling – could even cut the north-east states off from the rest of the country. The Naxalite terror campaign had already spread beyond West Bengal, reaching as far as Calcutta, where the insurgent Maoists and the state government were engaged in murderous combat. Although there were no signs yet that the Naxalite violence was spreading to Sikkim, the potential for a spread of Maoism in the region sent shivers up the spines of the politicians in Delhi.

  Gangtok, Bajpai realised, was quite a posting.

  With his suave and sophisticated manner, Bajpai was soon invited to the palace. His intelligence and intellect immediately struck a chord with Hope Cooke; they had the US in common (his last posting had been in San Francisco) and were soon exchanging gramophone records.† But right from the outset, Bajpai noticed that Thondup seemed uncomfortable with him. He wondered idly if this might be because the Namgyal family was less comfortable with the idea of an Indian holding the post of political officer than they had been with a British person doing so.