by Andrew Duff
Bajpai also observed how effective Thondup and Hope’s partnership appeared. While Thondup was the ‘driving force’ behind the demands for treaty revision, he could see that it was Hope that brought a vital ‘intellectual cast to his ambition’. Bajpai recognised the marital tensions, but he also observed the importance of Hope’s American connection, which gave Thondup a feeling of international context for Sikkim, a place in the world for his country.
One thing Bajpai was certain of was that life in the palace was in danger of becoming a caricature of itself. He could sense that something needed to change. He knew from his time in San Francisco that the royal couple’s life was hardly jetset in the way that the Kazini tried to paint it, but he realised that there were plenty of people in Sikkim who saw Thondup and Hope as unnecessarily extravagant, with their cars and their twice yearly foreign flights. Delhi needed to make up its mind about what it was going to do with Sikkim before it was made up for it.
But, for Delhi, events in East Pakistan were about to become all-consuming – events that would eventually have a significant bearing on Sikkim’s fate.
* This was probably another ‘grey area’ for the CIA. Although there is no evidence that the institute was directly involved with the Agency, Ken Conboy in his book The CIA in Tibet mentions one of the CIA officers involved with the Tibetan project at the time as having taken English lessons there.
* On another occasion, Indian-born journalist Ved Mehta (during a visit to Gangtok) recalled Hope’s plea: ‘When you get back to America, please, please, please, send me some Sara Lee frozen cheesecake. If you send it on a plane that has a freezer, we’ll have the cheesecakes bailed out in Calcutta.’
* It was an uncanny echo of events seven decades earlier when the first British Political Officer, Claude White, erected pillars on the same spot only to have them torn down by the Tibetans.
† The exact extent of the subsequent confrontation has never been fully clarified by either side, but there were certainly some casualties.
‡ Desai also believed that drinking his own urine cured his piles, something that he explained in 1978 (when he was prime minister) to a bemused Dan Rather and the American nation on CBS 60 Minutes: urine therapy was, he believed, the ‘perfect’ medical solution for the millions of Indians unable to afford medical treatment.
* To the south and west of Nepal.
* Geoge Griffin, at the US Consulate in Calcutta, recalled that Hope ‘had learned a tradition that says one may not speak loudly in the presence of the king, so she whispered. I couldn’t hear her very well, and had the worst time trying to figure out what she was talking about. It was made worse by the fact that she would whisper behind her hand.’
* In 1971 Greenhill became famous as the PUS instructed by Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home to inform the Soviet embassy in London that 90 Russian diplomats and officials were to be expelled for spying.
* While this was not a major concern in the 1970s, it was a prescient identification of a problem that has continued to dog the region since.
† The exchanges did not always work; in an interview with Bajpai, he noted ‘Hope was very fond of the pop-singers of the day . . . I was more into classical music.’
CHAPTER FIVE
The Bigger Picture
1970–3
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After the wake-up call of the 1967 election result, Mrs Gandhi had slowly strengthened her grip on power across India. In doing so, she had demonstrated her remarkable ability to connect with Indian voters; but her direct and occasionally autocratic manner in parliament had also split the Congress Party. Not everyone believed that Indira was the right person to lead the party forward. Pro- and anti- Indira factions emerged; by 1969, Congress was split wide open into two distinct groups: Congress (R) comprising Indira’s supporters; and Congress (O), those opposed to her.*
In early 1971 she called a snap election to resolve matters. Events soon turned ugly. Congress (O) and the other opposition parties campaigned on a slogan of ‘Indira Hatao’ (Remove Indira). Indira and her Congress (R) supporters retorted with a slogan that suggested she was above the personality game: ‘Garibi Hatao’ (Remove Poverty). It was a characteristically populist move and generated the political support she needed.1 In February 1971, she swept back into power in the ‘biggest democratic poll in history: 150 million people voted in 520 constituencies’.2
For five years Indira Gandhi had operated without a clear mandate from the Indian people. Now that she finally had one, she intended to use it. Almost immediately an opportunity arose to consolidate her electoral victory: the rapidly worsening situation in East Pakistan.
The geographically divided state of Pakistan was one of the oddest and most contentious legacies left by the British after 1947. In an effort to deal with the competing demands of the two largest religious communities – the Hindus and the Muslims – two separate homelands for the Muslims had been created: West Pakistan (now Pakistan) nudging up against Afghanistan, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Despite the fact that these two geographical territories were separated by a vast swathe of India, in 1947 they had been formed into a single unitary state.
The new East Pakistan – which lay directly below Sikkim, across a narrow band of Indian land – had been created by splitting the ancient state of Bengal. Despite the fact that this was an idea that had been tried by Lord Curzon in 1905 but rejected as unworkable only six years later, the imperial bureaucrats had decided to try again in 1947, seeing a partition of Bengal as the only feasible answer to increasingly violent communal strife. West Bengal, predominantly Hindu, remained a part of India; East Bengal, which was overwhelmingly Muslim, became East Pakistan.* It was an exceedingly odd geographical solution, which meant that overnight the East Bengalis became East Pakistanis. Worse, they were yoked together with West Pakistan – a remote and completely unknown land to most of them – on the basis of little more than religious affiliation.
Two decades of political instability followed. The 1965 Indo-Pakistani war only served to accentuate the lack of any geographical coherence; the conflict – fought over the border between India and West Pakistan – barely touched East Pakistan, whose reluctance to get involved in the war was resented by their western counterparts.
In December 1970, Pakistan (both East and West) finally held its first elections based on full adult suffrage. The results reflected the geographical split. There were completely separate but equally strong majorities in the two split halves of Pakistan: the greater population in East Pakistan meant the Awami League, dominant there, had an overall majority in terms of both votes and seats; West Pakistan, therefore, faced, for the first time, the prospect of a Bengali prime minister for all Pakistan. It was a recipe for further trouble.
The Pakistani President Yahya Khan (who had replaced Ayub Khan two years previously in yet another military coup) refused to acknowledge the election result. A non-cooperation movement in East Pakistan quickly turned into an active challenge to the government forces, which were mainly from West Pakistan. Yahya Khan cracked down fiercely on the dissent. Soon India’s neighbouring West Bengal became a de facto base for the liberation movement.
Indira Gandhi immediately recognised the importance of these events: the questions they raised about the territorial integrity of West Bengal, and the opportunity they provided for her to further consolidate her position, both in West Bengal (where the Congress had lost badly in 1967) and across India. She was also very aware, like others, of the potential threat that instability in the region might have on the narrow chicken-neck of land between East Pakistan and Sikkim that linked the main part of India to its volatile north-eastern states. The creation of this ‘Siliguri corridor’ (named after the largest town in the area) had become far more politically sensitive after the invasion of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China in 1950. If things got out of hand, there was a risk that the Chinese could break through the Chumbi Valley and link up with a sympathetic East Pakistan – or ind
eed with the Maoist rebels who had congregated around the town of Naxalbari – cutting off the fertile plains of Assam. The turmoil in 1971 raised all this as a possible scenario in Indira Gandhi’s mind – one with devastating consequences.3
In March, the Indian parliament therefore passed a resolution expressing ‘profound sympathy and solidarity with the people of East Bengal for a democratic way of life’. The use of ‘East Bengal’ rather than ‘East Pakistan’ to describe the territory in question was particularly loaded. The following month a provisional government of Bangladesh (Nation of Bengal) was established in exile in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal.
Six years after the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, India and Pakistan were once again on the brink of conflict, one that could drag in the Chinese – and therefore spread into the Himalayas.
Naturally, this raised the profile of Sikkim.
The events in East Pakistan were not happening in isolation. Across Asia 1971 was a critical year, not least in the fiendish complexity of the shifting alignments of the big powers with interests in the region – the USA, China, India and the USSR.
The Americans had never forgiven Indira Gandhi for denouncing the Vietnam War after accepting American aid in 1966. Indira’s slow drift to the left had only worsened matters. By 1970, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Kissinger, had decided that, given strengthening relations between the USSR and India, it made strategic sense to start secret talks with the Chinese, aimed at forming a working relationship that would help the USA to maintain stability in Asia. Hints at what was going on emerged in April 1971 when two US table-tennis players received and accepted a last-minute invitation to participate in a tournament in China; this infamous ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ was, in fact, the culmination of months of backstage negotiations by Kissinger and Nixon. A few months later the US lifted the trade embargo on China, a further public symbol of the rapid thaw in US–China relations.
Against this background, Henry Kissinger passed through Delhi, supposedly as part of an ‘extended tour of Asia’. In fact, he was heading to China to prepare the ground for further détente with Mao. If Indira had any doubts that a shift was taking place, they disappeared in a meeting with Kissinger in the Indian capital: Kissinger made it clear that the US would not be prepared to side with India in a war over East Pakistan.
Partly in response (and partly to get her hands on Soviet armaments) Indira signed a Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union in August. The Soviets had been wooing her for some time, but the treaty was a major strategic coup, the latest step in what Oleg Kalugin, a retired major-general in the KGB, described as ‘a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government.’ New Delhi was made into a ‘main residency’ for the Soviet intelligence arm, which now had ‘scores of sources throughout the Indian Government – in intelligence, counterintelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police’.4
If anything, the Indo-Soviet Treaty increased the pace of US–Chinese rapprochement. The biggest change of all came in October 1971, when the People’s Republic of China finally took its seat at the United Nations. Since the formation of the United Nations in 1945 it had been Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in Taiwan (the only viable government at the time) who had held the Chinese seat at the UN, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Mao had always seen this as an injustice; now the Americans – who for years had resisted Mao’s calls for a UN seat – had switched their allegiance overnight.*
Indira Gandhi was understandably furious. India had always felt slighted by not having a permanent seat on the UN Security Council; now the Americans had secretly negotiated to give the seat instead to the Chinese – who she perceived as an aggressive neighbour.
Within the course of a few months, the geopolitical alignment in Asia had changed radically. Although not explicit yet, the lines were becoming clearer: if the USA were siding with China, Indira would happily side with the USSR.
Meanwhile, as the repression continued in East Pakistan, the refugee crisis worsened: up to 150,000 people were flooding across the border to West Bengal each day. The cost of supporting such an influx only exacerbated India’s financial crisis. Under intense pressure, Indira embarked on a major tour of the Western world to try and galvanise international opinion that something had to be done.
She reached Washington in early November to meet with Nixon and Kissinger. The meeting was a disaster. America was knee-deep in the quagmire of the Vietnam War; for the president and his national security advisor, Indira’s actions in East Pakistan just complicated matters further. Besides, Nixon liked to do diplomacy on personality. He had formed a strong personal relationship with the straight-talking President Yahya in Pakistan, but he took an instant dislike to Indira Gandhi. ‘Nixon’s comments after meetings with her were not always printable,’ Kissinger would later write, adding that the two ‘were not intended by fate to be personally congenial. Her assumption of almost hereditary moral superiority and her moody silences brought out all of Nixon’s latent insecurities.’5 Kissinger himself later referred to her as a ‘bitch’. Indira left empty-handed.
As the situation in East Pakistan deteriorated, the Pakistani Air Force made pre-emptive strikes against Indian forces in West Bengal on 3 December. On 5 December Mrs Gandhi struck back – hard. In Washington, Nixon denounced the Indian ‘aggression’; nine years after the USS Enterprise had been sent to the Bay of Bengal by Kennedy in support of the Indians during the Sino-Indian conflict, Nixon ordered the same ship back into the area at the head of a task force – this time to send a message to Indira Gandhi. With Russian ships in the area, it looked for a brief moment as if the conflict could take on a wider international dimension. But in a short, sharp one-sided war, Indian firepower (to which West Pakistan had no answer) quickly forced a ceasefire. East Pakistan was removed from the map; in its place Bangladesh – ‘Free Bengal’ – emerged, a brand new nation. Just as it had in 1962, the USS Enterprise turned tail and left.
Indira Gandhi walked taller than ever.
India’s involvement in what would become known as Bangladesh’s Liberation War had taken a sizeable military effort. The Indian Air Force had provided the main thrust of the attack from bases in West Bengal, supported by Indian Army soldiers on the ground, who benefitted from the local knowledge of the infamous Mukti Bahini, the East Pakistan resistance movement. But in the far eastern side of India, in the state of Mizoram, it was not Indians but Tibetans – including some of those who had fled through Sikkim in the years after 1959 – who had fought for the liberation of Bangladesh.
It was nearly a decade since the Special Frontier Force (also known as Establishment 22) had been formed from Tibetan exiles during the days of closer US–Indian cooperation. As US support for Tibetan independence had evaporated,* General Uban Singh, maverick Sikh commander, had fought hard to keep the force alive. While Singh found work for his Tibetan force busy patrolling in Ladakh and NEFA (and occasionally conducting covert incursions back into Tibet), the group steadily expanded, recruiting Gurkhas as well as Tibetans, and by 1971 numbered over 3,000.
When the trouble in East Pakistan started in 1971, Singh immediately proposed that his highly trained (and under utilised) guerrilla force should also be used in the conflict. The Tibetans were initially reluctant, pointing out that the SFF had been formed to support the cause of Tibetan independence; they failed to see what the remote East Pakistani war had to do with them. The matter was referred to the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, the town in Himachal Pradesh that had become the home of the unofficial Tibetan government-in-exile. Wary of offending their hosts, the Tibetan leaders quietly approved the mission.
So, in October 1971, well over 2,000 troops, most of them Tibetans, were airlifted from the SFF base in Chakrata (north of Delhi) into remote Mizoram province, the narrow strip of Indian land that snaked down to the east of Bangladesh. Facing the fierce heat of the jungle and equipped with Bulgarian AK47s to allow deniability, the Tib
etans advanced through the Chittagong hill tracts into East Pakistan, tying down elements of the elite Pakistan Special Services Group who had amassed on the other side of the border. Enduring terrible deprivations, they fought their way bravely through the jungle.* General Uban Singh, their commander, remembers them as ‘unstoppable’.
By the time the ceasefire was declared the Tibetans had reached Chittagong, looking out over the Bay of Bengal. Their reputation in the Indian Army was secured; but it had come at a high cost. The Tibetans had lost 49 men; another 160 had been injured.
It was ironic, some of the Tibetan survivors pointed out, that after struggling for their own cause for so long their compatriots ‘had paid with their lives for the birth of a nation not their own’.6
India’s military had also received support from another source: India’s new external intelligence services, the Research and Analysis Wing – known as RAW – formed in 1968.
Rameshwar Kao, the tall Kashmiri with piercing eyes who had run the Aviation Research Centre with the Americans in 1963, had long advocated a specialised external intelligence agency in India. After the 1965 conflict with Pakistan, Kao pulled together plans for a formalised split of the Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) to accommodate a new organisation focused solely on external intelligence. With Indira’s backing, he formed the RAW on 21 September 1968, with a ready-made staff – 250 colleagues from the China and Pakistan desks in the IB were immediately transferred into his new organisation.7
