by Andrew Duff
Thondup is, I should guess, resolved to retain control of his country’s affairs in the hands of the ethnic minority and oligarchy from which he springs. In this task he relies less on the inchoate departments of state than upon his Private Secretaries, two black-gowned white-cuffed characters called Densapa and Topden, who might have been taken straight from 16th century Florence.17
Densapa was the 42-year-old scion of an important noble family in Sikkim and a source of wise advice, but it was Karma Topden, still in his twenties, who had become a really close friend. Bright, able and good-humoured, Topden had studied economics at Manchester University after which he had attended a short police training course at a Detective College in provincial England. On his return, Thondup had asked him to set up an intelligence service for Sikkim. By 1972 Topden had become a confidant for Thondup, always staying to the end at the palace parties, when the two men could swap stories on how to cope with their respective foreign wives (Topden too had married a foreigner, from England).
This small court became a discussion forum for Thondup, but he knew that ultimately the weight of responsibility lay on his shoulders alone. During his visits to Delhi for discussions with Kaul and others about treaty revision he found that things had changed greatly since the issue had first been seriously discussed five years earlier. Then, Indira’s government had been politically weak; she had played for time, cognisant of the risk of losing Thondup’s support. Now, in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war, her government and her faction within the Congress Party were stronger than they had ever been.
There was no doubt that Indira wanted to change the treaty – she was embarrassed by the neo-colonial nature of the term ‘protectorate’ – but her proposals were now far more politically astute. In the middle of the year Kaul proposed a revised treaty wording which, while acknowledging Sikkim’s right to ‘autonomy in regard to its internal affairs’, talked of Sikkim’s ‘permanent association’ with India.
The proposal rang alarm bells in Thondup’s head. The terminology seemed to allow little room for Sikkim’s individual identity. He consulted Sir Humphrey Waldock, an eminent international lawyer in the UK, to clarify the legal implications of the proposal. Waldock confirmed that ‘permanent association’ as written in the document that Kaul had proposed would indeed emasculate Sikkim. Worse, once accepted, there would be no easy way back. The term ‘protectorate’ might be aggravating, but at least it had some form of legal basis; ‘permanent association’ was a vague and undefined term. Agreeing to the bald statement that ‘Sikkim shall be in permanent association with India’ might later be seen as meaning that Sikkim would have given up the ability to call itself an independent nation. He told Thondup to revert to Kaul, proposing a wording that expressed it as ‘Sikkim in full sovereign rights enters into a permanent association with the Government of India.’ But when Thondup approached Kaul with the new wording, he met a brick wall. India could never agree to the phrase ‘in full sovereign rights’.
It was a stalemate.
Around the same time Inder Chopra, who had been serving in Gangtok as the Indian-appointed Dewan (now referred to by the Tibetan title of ‘Sidlon’), was recalled to Delhi. Chopra’s appointment had not been a success; he was affable enough but had never really been on top of his brief. Instead of making a new appointment (Delhi realised by now that whoever they chose was likely to antagonise a section of the population), Thondup managed to argue that he himself should take over the responsibilities as Sidlon. It was an outrageous suggestion – concentrating all political power in Thondup’s hands. But India surprisingly put up no objection, perhaps calculating that such an arrangement might make Thondup aware of the challenges he faced.
The decision left only two men with any real political power in Sikkim: Thondup and K. Shankar Bajpai.
Since the publication of the article ‘Sikkim at the Crossroads’, the Kazi and Kazini had been lying lower than usual, spending the summer in Europe. But by October they were back in Kalimpong. The Kazi knew that, given he had been indicted after the article’s publication, the only way he could participate in the elections planned for late 1972 was if he issued a written apology to back up the verbal one he had given earlier in the year. Both he and the young firebrand Khatiawara offered their ‘unqualified apologies’.
The unusual threesome was back in the game.
As the rains ended in the autumn of 1972, Tikki Kaul made another attempt to persuade Thondup to accept the appellation of ‘permanent association’ for Sikkim. He offered a timetable with milestones to show that India intended to maintain Sikkim’s identity – India could offer Sikkim control over the postal system, the telegraph system; Kaul even held out the prospect of sponsored accession to some of the international bodies that Bhutan had joined during its march to UN membership. Analogies were made to Puerto Rico, Panama. But Thondup was now utterly convinced by his legal friends in London that this was a trick and that he was being asked to sign away his country with no safeguards. He proposed any number of alternatives intended to ensure that legally Sikkim’s ‘separate’ identity was maintained, even arguing that if Sikkim were recognised in the UN, India’s power would increase because Sikkim would always vote with India. All his suggestions were turned down.
Indian intransigence further convinced Thondup that there was another agenda at play. His relations with Indira Gandhi, which had always been cordial, had all but disappeared into a morass of platitudes. Karma Topden was also bringing him reports that there was ‘evidence of an Indian intelligence plot to cause widespread disturbances in Sikkim with the help of some Sikkimese Nepalis and [the] Kazi and Kazini in Kalimpong’.
According to Hope, Thondup even went as far as informing one of Henry Kissinger’s younger team members that he feared a plot against him was being formed in Sikkim.18
Kaul and Delhi dismissed these vague accusations as fantasy. The Government of India was now resolute: the Chogyal must accept their offer of ‘permanent association’.
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In October, Sir Terence Garvey, Britain’s High Commissioner in Delhi, visited Sikkim for a second time. His confidential report back to Alec Douglas-Home in London (now Foreign Secretary in Edward Heath’s Government) highlighted the extreme difficulties that Thondup now faced.
On arrival in Gangtok, Garvey was whisked up to the Nathu La by his Indian escort. As they neared the top of the pass, where Chinese troops lined the other side, the Indians swiftly removed the Union Jack pennant on the jeep. It tickled Garvey that ‘for all I know the Chinese may have taken the pale-faced visitors for Russians’. But what struck him most was the proximity of the Chinese Army: ‘Indian and Chinese troops face one another divided by a no-man’s-land not much wider than a cricket pitch . . . in a mountain wilderness at 14,420 feet.’* It was this military and geopolitical reality that suffused Garvey’s report. ‘If Sikkim today is more than a geographical expression, the causes are mainly accidental,’ he opined, due solely to the Chumbi Valley being ‘the least impossible route to Lhasa’.
Staying with Political Officer Bajpai in the Gangtok Residency, he started to witness something of palace life – and how Bajpai interacted with it. Nothing he saw gave him much confidence in Sikkim’s future prospects:
The palace . . . is not an entirely happy ship. There is the silly business of the title. The ruler dislikes being called Highness (his due as a Maharaja) aspiring to be a Majesty like his cousin of Bhutan. Since the Indians will not have it, he is called nothing, being addressed simply as ‘Chogyal’ (in the vocative). To this is added resentment, which members of the court are keen to make known, that Sikkim should be in an inferior position to Bhutan, now a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations.
The whole business, Garvey noted, was taking an immense toll on Thondup:
The Chogyal is too intelligent to be a mere musical comedy princeling and periodically feels futile. When the sense of futility envelops him he seeks anodyne in the bottle, which, combined wi
th an awkward retroflex sniff, gives him a somewhat blurred and absent manner. He was reckoned when we were there to be moving back on to the hard stuff after a relatively dry period.
Garvey’s views on Hope Cooke (referred to as the Gyalmo), and the Palace scene were equally morose:
The present Gyalmo . . . assorts oddly with the Tibetan ladies of court and, perhaps wishing to banish any taint of transatlantic stridency, has adopted a tone of voice which verges on the inaudible. I should guess that the strains of sustaining this synthetic personality may tell on her with the passage of time. Though she now makes a rather dim impression (she has three subjects – education, handicrafts and gardens) I can conceive of her proving a bit of a nuisance later on in the I suppose not unlikely, event of her ending up as Queen stepmother. Whether by the Gyalmo’s contrivance, or through her husband’s wish to gratify her, guests drawn from Western café society are invited, or invite themselves, in large numbers to Gangtok. Ten such (six from France, two from the United States and two from Britain) were staying at the palace during our visit. They are naturally receptive to anti-Indian tittle-tattle, which no doubt offers some relief to the Royal Family but is unlikely to endear them or their hosts to the Government of India.*
His conclusion, no doubt influenced by his host Bajpai, was imbued with a pessimistic realism:
It would be rash, on two days’ acquaintance, to predict Sikkim’s eventual disposal. China, the ravisher of Tibet and the suppressor of the Khampa revolt, offers no pole of counter-attraction and geography is heavily on India’s side. Moreover the requirements of defence must, in the absence of a fundamental change in Sino-Indian relations, oblige India to ensure that Sikkim’s territory is at India’s disposal. It would be much tidier if Sikkim became part of India, adding one more to the growing number of tribal Himalayan states, but it would probably not be easy at this late stage, in the absence of some external or internal convulsion, to bring this about. And the example of neighbouring Bhutan, now enjoying a form of pseudo-independence as a member of the United Nations has, I should judge, made absorption appreciably more difficult. As noted, parity of treatment with Bhutan has become an aspiration and if it were adopted by the Nepali majority as a platform for popular enfranchisement the Indian Government might not find it easy in the longer run to stand in the way. For the Indians, the abiding requirement is the maintenance of their military position and any eventual political arrangements will have to conform to this. The only prediction which one can with reasonable certainty make is that the Chogyal and his successors will have to make some pretty radical adjustments if they are to stay in business.
There were many in India who shared Garvey’s analysis that time was running out for the Namgyal dynasty – and that it ‘would be much tidier if Sikkim were part of India’. Thondup, however, was most assuredly not among them. He refused to give up hope. He knew that Sikkim needed some sort of relationship with India, but was equally adamant that Sikkim must maintain its separate status.
In late 1972, he made another attempt to break the logjam with Tikki Kaul and to put the kingdom on a new footing. He would accept India’s ‘permanent association’ draft, but only if a rider were added explicitly acknowledging that the countries were ‘separate’ and stating that the association between the two countries would be ‘within the framework of the purposes and principles of the United Nations’. Kaul refused; accepting the request would have been tantamount to accepting that Sikkim was a separate nation and that was now far from Delhi’s mind.
Towards the end of November, Thondup tried again, travelling to Darjeeling to meet with Mrs Gandhi and plead his case. He told her he was certain that the intelligence bureau in Calcutta was planning something, possibly independently of Delhi’s knowledge. Supporting the Nepali cause, he told her, would be tantamount to ‘playing with fire’. If the Kazi and his supporters were able to win in Sikkim, he warned, it would only make it easier for the Darjeeling Nepalis to call for autonomy and bring the prospect of a ‘Greater Nepal’ stretching across the Himalayas that much closer.19 Mrs Gandhi did not need much convincing of the challenge that Darjeeling posed: she had to be helicoptered out of Darjeeling because of Nepali demonstrators shouting ‘randi Gandhi’ [‘prostitute Gandhi’]. Nevertheless she told Thondup she had no intention of changing her government’s position on Sikkim. Thondup returned to Gangtok muttering that the Indian government were in danger of forgetting who their real friends in the region were.20
But at the very moment that her husband was in Darjeeling meeting with Mrs Gandhi, Hope was putting on a play at Thatongchen school that indicated a different attitude to the relationship with the Indians. The subject matter, Ishbel Ritchie recalled, was ‘a theme of mankind as puppets and centuries of oppression and final liberation . . . (the Gyalmo, as always there, was the leading inspiration)’. The choice of such an obvious political analogy was just one example of what Tikki Kaul would later call the ‘pin-pricks to India on matters big and small’; others, mostly initiated by Hope, were intended as practical jokes. On one occasion a pack of mules appeared on the lawn of Bajpai’s residence; on another invitations were sent out to guests for a non-existent party at India House.
Bajpai found it hard to laugh.
In December, as the political parties in Sikkim prepared for the elections planned for early 1973, Thondup, Hope and the five children left Sikkim for their annual trip to London and New York. In London, the news that Yangchen, Thondup’s daughter from his first marriage, had an incurable kidney disease only added to the intense pressures on their relationship. After spending Christmas in New York, Thondup returned to Sikkim. Hope, back in the city that was closest to a place she could call home, somehow found the time to start a brief affair with an old friend.
On the way home, in Zurich airport, she felt torn between two cultures more than ever before. She did not know where to turn.
* Congress (Requisition) and Congress (Organisation).
* For the jute industry (in which my grandfather was employed), the impact was particularly deleterious, with the mills of West Bengal separated from the jute fields of East Pakistan.
* During the 1960s the Communist International had brought an annual resolution at the UN, organised and led by Albania’s Enver Hoxha, to recognise the PRC as the rightful representative of the Chinese people. Every year the US had successfully mobilised the UN to block it.
* The CIA did continue support of sorts, which included enlisting Kellogg Company to develop a special version of the Tibetan tsampa (a kind of hardened porridge) loaded with special nutrients and vitamins that could be packed into small packages and air-dropped, if necessary, to Tibetan fighters.
* Ratu Ngawang, who had been a bodyguard to the Dalai Lama on his 1959 flight from Tibet, fought with the SFF in Chittagong. I interviewed him in the Tibetan colony in Delhi in 2012. He recalled watching colleagues die ‘not for our cause, not for our independence’. The experience was ‘terrible’. Carrying 35 kilos in poorly designed rucksacks through thick jungle, the Tibetans developed terrible sores; to treat them they scrubbed them till they bled, and then used weapon oil to clean them before dressing them with weapon cleaning cloths.
* In an interview with Khatiawara in 2011, he proudly claimed co-authorship of the article. Neither had he lost his rhetorical touch, as he demonstrated with his own view on the events of the 1970s: ‘If you shut the door on a cat and chase it around the room, it will eventually turn on you.’
* I. S. Chopra was the (Indian-appointed) Principal Administrative Officer (previously known as Dewan) at this time. His close relationship with those in the Palace faction was a contributing factor to his removal from the post later in 1972.
* They were close enough for Garvey to note that ‘the Chinese People’s Army, in their soft caps and padded jackets, looked much the same as when I last saw them on leaving China in 1965’. After retreating a short way from the front, Garvey lunched with the 1/2 Punjabi Regiment, celebrating the 211th anni
versary of their raising.
* How far the FCO’s attitudes to Hope Cooke were driven by general British attitudes towards Americans is a moot point. Another official wrote an equally dismissive description of her a couple of months later: ‘the Gyalmo, in spite of her affectations, has all the do-gooder intensity of the well-born American female and has devoted herself to securing a sensible education for her step-children’.
CHAPTER SIX
A Raw Deal
1973
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Thondup hoped 1973 would offer the chance of a new start – for Sikkim and for himself. In April he would turn 50; he hoped the occasion might provide another chance for a celebration of the country to which his life had been dedicated.
But by the end of January, he was faced with further political problems sparked by the elections in Sikkim. As the results were counted, it became clear that the pro-Palace National Party might win a majority. Buoyed by the possibility of electoral success, the National Party leader made a deliberately provocative statement, accusing the Kazi of seeking Sikkim’s ‘disintegration’. Confident of a National Party electoral mandate, he also sent a message to the Indians, saying he hoped Sikkim could ‘feel confident that the Government of India will not lag behind in fulfilling the ambitions of our people in enabling us to enjoy the status like that of Nepal and Bhutan’.
Immediately the Kazi’s SNC and a new party, Janata Congress (more nakedly pro-Nepali), responded, alleging that the presiding officer had rigged the election in favour of the National Party. The allegation veiled the underlying problem: that the voting system was weighted in favour of the Bhutia-Lepchas and therefore against the Nepalis. When the results were announced, the National Party emerged triumphant, with 11 out of 18 seats, most of which were from those reserved for the Bhutia-Lepcha community, emphasising the communal divisions.1
