by Andrew Duff
It had started.
Thondup got dressed, determined to act as if nothing was going on, going down to his sitting room, where he sat for the traditional receiving of silk scarves, Hope by his side. Later in the morning, with the sound of the demonstrators rising from below, he put on his gold coronation robe and advanced down to the Royal Chapel, where Karma Topden, looking slightly shaken, read the traditional birthday message to the group of those who might be considered the extended court. Bajpai was there too, waiting expectantly for Thondup to request Indian support to protect himself from the mob below.
But Thondup received constant updates from runners who would come in to whisper in his ear, telling him that the protestors were now under control. He was determined to carry on. He could see no other way – accepting Indian support would, he feared, lead to his country’s downfall. The only solution was to play out the battle of nerves. He allowed the organisers of his birthday celebrations to cancel the afternoon sporting events but refused to countenance a cancellation of the birthday dinner in the palace grounds that evening.
With the streets of Gangtok still tense, less than half the normal number turned up for the dinner. It was a bizarre occasion. Bajpai, despite still awaiting a request for intervention from Thondup, brought Fred Vreeland and his wife, American friends from his time in San Francisco, to the dinner: Vreeland was a staffer in the US Foreign Service. Hope made a beeline for Vreeland, remembering that his mother, Diana, was the American editor of Vogue who had helped out with the fashion show the previous year. But in the heightened atmosphere she suddenly panicked that if Bajpai saw her, he might conclude that she was planning something with the Americans and hurried on to the next conversation.
That night, at around 11 p.m., after all the guests had left, the scale of the problems in south Sikkim emerged. The commissioner of police came to the palace, pleading with Thondup to do something. Without Indian support, he warned, the police were in danger of being overrun. Karma Topden, too, brought reports of more trouble in southern Sikkim, where police stations had been looted. Still desperate not to have to request Indian intervention, Thondup beckoned the Sikkim Guards into the room; Hope watched anxiously as Tenzing and his friends pulled out the guns, kept in cupboards under the stairs for years in case the family needed protection. As she retired for the night, she had every right to be paranoid: ‘We go to bed. Chogyal’s loaded gun is on the mantelpiece next to Clover’s* little statue and the painting of the Buddha.’11
Thondup woke the next day determined that, despite his son’s exuberance, he would avoid fighting violence with violence at all costs. A man of deeply held Buddhist principles, he had been distressed when he heard that the police – his police – had opened fire on the crowd the previous day.
But events were now outside his control. An incident later that day gave the leaders of the agitation ample opportunity to paint the Namgyal family as an oppressive force. Tenzing and three friends decided to leave the palace compound in a jeep to assess the situation. Nothing untoward happened on the two-hour journey to Singtam, a junction town towards the south of the state, but on their return they were stopped at a hastily assembled road block by a group of youths from the Joint Action Committee. Panicking, one of Tenzing’s companions shot his pistol into the air.
Suddenly the JAC had the evidence they needed. The Kazi and the others headed to the Residency to make a dramatic plea to Mrs Gandhi, asking her to ‘intervene quickly and fully before we are massacred’.12
Within hours, the plea was conveyed to the press. With access to information about Sikkim being carefully controlled from Delhi, there was little reason for the eager journalists to believe anything but the Indian government line – that India might have to intervene to ‘save Sikkim’.
Delhi now moved fast. Avtar Singh, a senior secretary in the External Affairs Ministry who had also been Sikkim’s political officer in the early 1960s, was sent to Gangtok to assist Bajpai in persuading Thondup that his only option was to request Indian assistance. On the 6th, Mrs Gandhi met with another Singh – Kewal, her Foreign Secretary – and other members of her inner circle to decide on the next steps .* P. N. Dhar, one of those present in the meeting with Mrs Gandhi, later wrote an account of the meeting:
Kewal Singh and I met the Prime Minister on 6 April to brief her on the situation and seek her instructions. Kewal was surprised to find that she had already made up her mind before listening to what he had to say. He guessed that the leaders of the anti-Chogyal movement had kept her informed through RAW. She was brief, and told us she would accept the Chogyal’s request for help as soon as it came. Since she was leaving for Lucknow the next morning, a meeting of the political affairs committee of the cabinet was convened the same afternoon so that the decision could be endorsed in anticipation.13
*
In Gangtok, it was down to Bajpai and Avtar Singh to ensure that such a request came – and quickly. But they were finding that harder than expected.
The protestors’ spirits were flagging. Now gathered in their thousands in the sports stadium, the Indian Central Reserve Police (CRP) distributed food, which had the effect of ensuring that they did not disperse back to their villages in despondency. Meanwhile Thondup still resolutely refused to bow to pressure and ask for Indian assistance. Time and again Bajpai presented the latest draft of a request for Thondup to sign. Time and again Thondup found reasons to object, determined that he should not have to concede any more than he absolutely had to in line with the 1950 treaty. But the noose was tightening. When Time magazine spoke to Tenzing for an interview, the young prince was adamant about what was happening. In an article entitled ‘Alarum in Cloudland’, Time reported that Tenzing had made ‘a series of oblique references to “the element outside us that has been causing problems . . . we have several times been approached by the political officer to hand over all power to the government of—”’14 at which point, Time reported, ‘the line went briefly dead’. There was no doubting the inference – communication between Gangtok and the outside world was being closely monitored.
For Hope, life in the palace felt almost surreal as she watched her husband and his eldest son searching for a response to events. ‘About thirty kids, all of them known to me, are out with Tenzing on the front lawn, practising firing on the front lawn against the embankment that leads to the upper lawn,’ she wrote. ‘Often when I am indoors and the trouble starts, I play Eric Andersen, guitarist and folk singer, really loudly on the new record player I’ve brought back from America,’ she confessed. As news of Picasso’s death and the breaking of the Watergate scandal in the US filtered through, she found herself identifying with President Nixon’s ‘encirclement’. She was now ‘living on consommé, bananas, Valium, and cigarettes . . . I lie in bed stoned most of the day and grimly continue to read. Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Balzac’s Pere Goriot, Male’s Gothic Image, anthologies of poetry.’15
By the 7th, Thondup was wilting under the pressure. It was becoming more and more difficult to ignore the continuing protests. News that Khatiawara had ‘collected another mob in Kalimpong’ and was bearing down on Singtam piled more pressure on the beleaguered ruler. The previous day he had reluctantly accepted limited Indian CRP assistance to protect threatened police stations across the south of his country. But he was still desperate to avoid asking the Indians to take complete control. He had been fighting all his life for the idea of an independent Sikkim and feared that any further Indian involvement would be irreversible. He cast around among his advisers for options, even asking if a merger with Nepal might be preferable to being ‘stuck into the dominant welter of India’.16 But he was a lone voice. Around him, almost everyone had resigned themselves to the inevitability of the situation. The small Sikkim Guards force was struggling to fulfil any meaningful role; the head of police was pleading with Hope to get her husband to see sense.
On 8 April, Thondup, worn down by sleepless nights, finally gave in.
Realising he
had been outplayed, he signed Bajpai’s document, formally requesting the Indian government to assume control in his country.
The Kazi and the JAC immediately suspended the agitation.
As Thondup signed away his powers in the palace, Ishbel Ritchie sat down to write her weekly letter to her mother from her house above the stadium. She had watched the week’s events with some dismay and realised she would have to trick the censors with her Scots if she were to get the message through.
‘At the moment there is a large and somewhat noisy crowd parked on the stadium below us,’ she wrote:
They’ve been there since yesterday evening, after having taken a long procession up the main road and along to the palace and then down through the market. We don’t know how long they’ll remain although we’re hoping they may go today.
Although I’ve heard the BBC overseas service news of course, I don’t know what you’ve been hearing at home. If it’s anything similar I’d advise a few pinches of salt – unfortunately it’s a bit hirpling* – if you see what I mean.
(You’ll realise I’ve to ca’ canny – gin this arrives there’ll have been a wheen of keeking een).’†
Four days earlier, she and a colleague from the school had been preparing excitedly for Thondup’s 50th birthday celebrations in the knowledge that she was to be awarded the Pema Dorji medal, a symbol that she had finally matched the efforts of her predecessor Martha Hamilton. Now, she told her mother, ‘I’ve a feeling those are honours we’ll never receive.’
She chose her words carefully as she wrote of what had happened over the next few days.
There were some intimations of trouble building last weekend and on the 4th . . . a fair degree of long-term planning was obvious – maybe not entirely indigenous. There’re all sorts of accusations being hurled around – many the pot calling the kettle black – and it’s difficult to see anyone the gainer in the long run. In the meantime, day-to-day life continues tho’ the high heid yins swither and there’s nae official darg.* The army are adopting a non-meddle role and so far supplies aren’t moving. We’re going to run short if they don’t soon. (Petrol is short already and I was caught short with an empty tank).
We’ve just been made very anxious about how things will shape now.
This is v obviously a watershed and things will not be the same again here.
She was right.
In Delhi, Kewal Singh, the Foreign Secretary, received the news of Thondup’s request with relief. He immediately took charge of the situation, pulling together his best team to execute the next steps, working ‘round the clock without respite’. The Indian Army units stationed throughout Sikkim took control of the administration of the country.
More importantly, now that the Indian government had an official request from Thondup for assistance, Singh needed a bureaucrat who could run Sikkim during what was sure to be an exceptionally tricky period. Bajpai was out of the question – he was a diplomat, not an administrator, and in any case it would have sent entirely the wrong message to the Sikkimese people: the political officer was too obviously India’s representative in Sikkim. What was needed was someone who could fulfil something akin to the old role of dewan – albeit this time reporting to Delhi, not the Chogyal.
The man he decided upon was B. S. Das, who he considered to combine a high level of administrative ability with the political antenna of a diplomat. Better still, Das had spent four years in Bhutan as a sort of envoy (including during the time when Bhutan had acceded to the UN); he also therefore already knew Bajpai.
As soon as he received the call from Singh on the 8th, Das was whisked to the Indian Foreign Office for a briefing. What he found astonished him:
Never before had I seen the Foreign Secretary’s office converted into an operations room. Long messages on situation reports were pouring in every half an hour, with the Foreign Secretary, Kewal Singh, dictating replies after replies to a team of stenographers. The desk officers dealing with Sikkim were walking in and out, seeking and taking instructions every hour. Kewal Singh looked as cool and composed as ever in his immaculate dress.17
Over two days, Das was given clear instructions. Naturally it was imperative, he was told, that ‘Indian interests were to be fully protected, with Delhi having an overriding say in Sikkim’s administration’. All support was to be given to the anti-Chogyal movement; Das later recalled that he was told ‘to ensure that all my actions had the support of the political leaders; thus giving a legitimacy to all our moves. The feudal character of the existing system, and the people’s revolt against it, were to be highlighted constantly.’ The Foreign Secretary made it absolutely clear that ‘if the Chogyal did not concede their demands, Delhi was prepared for a showdown’.18
When Avtar Singh, the External Affairs secretary who had once been political officer in Gangtok, returned from Gangtok on the 9th, his advice to Das was unequivocal: ‘Do not allow the Chogyal to get on top again. We will never have a second opportunity like this. 1949 should not be repeated.’19
-3-
When Das arrived in Gangtok on the 10th, he was embarrassed to be greeted like some sort of conquering hero. A car took him straight to the Residency, where he related to Bajpai the instructions he had been given by Kewal Singh: to support the anti-Chogyal forces and, if necessary, push matters to a conclusion, even if it required a final showdown with the Chogyal’s supporters.
Bajpai was apoplectic. For the past four days he had been operating under the impression that he was merely to ‘go on building support for the agitation and maintain its tempo’; if he had been told from the start that Delhi was willing to provoke a confrontation from which the Chogyal’s opponents would emerge the victors, he told Das, ‘the matter would have been resolved to Delhi’s satisfaction on the 4th itself’.20 Now there was an added problem: the demonstrators – having expected the Chogyal to give in earlier – were tired and ready to go home after nearly a week of demonstrating. It would not be an easy job to get them back into the mood to protest. Das could only sympathise.
The following day, Das started to piece together the complex picture that confronted him. He soon identified the key power-brokers who he had to deal with: ‘Kazi, the father figure of Sikkimese politics, Kazini, the brains trust, and Narbahadur [Khatiawara], the young firebrand with great organisational capacity, were the trio who dominated the scene throughout the agitation.’ He also quickly surmised that the personal animosity between the Kazi and the Chogyal – and indeed between the Kazini and Hope Cooke (who, he noted, spoke so quietly that ‘one had to beg her pardon several times before one understood her’) – were important factors in the way things had developed over the previous decade, and could prove critical in the coming months.
That day he also met Thondup for the first time. He found him in a belligerent mood. Angry and disillusioned, the Chogyal also left the newly appointed bureaucrat in no doubt as to the scale of the task. Das later reported the tirade that he received from Thondup:
Mr Das, Sikkim is not Goa that the Government of India has sent you to take over as Chief administrator. We have our separate identity and Indo-Sikkimese relations are governed by a Treaty. The so-called ‘popular leaders’ are nothing but a bunch of scoundrels propped up by outside forces. If my Police had not been disarmed and dishonoured by the Indian Army, I would have exposed each and every one of them. I shall never forgive the Indian Army for this.’21
Against this challenging background, Das and Bajpai ‘chalked out [their] plan of action’.
It was something of a baptism of fire for Das: within 48 hours of arriving in Gangtok news reached him that a mob of Bhutias, loyal to the Chogyal, had begun descending on Gangtok. Fearing that he might have a bloodbath on his hands, foreign visitors were banned from Sikkim altogether. Bajpai told Pat Moynihan, the new US Ambassador in Delhi, that this was due to ‘Indian concern over possible Chinese reaction.’ Moynihan did not entirely believe him, cabling Washington, ‘I am dubious of the alleged concern ov
er the Chinese. It seems more likely that the Indians didn’t want any foreigners around should Indian troops have had to open fire on local crowds.’22
In fact, a confrontation was only avoided by feeding both the Bhutias and the Nepali protestors, and providing free bus travel for them to return to their homes. Apart from Khatiawara – and possibly the Kazi – no one, Das noted with some surprise, seemed to have ‘the will power to sustain a prolonged profile of confrontation’.
Bajpai and Das were therefore somewhat relieved when a call came in that Kewal Singh himself would be arriving in Sikkim on the 15th.
The plan, no more than a week old, was about to change.
While Bajpai and Das had been following their orders to increase the pressure on the Chogyal in Gangtok, Kewal Singh and the Indian government had been carefully monitoring the domestic and international reaction to what they had done.
While the press at home had generally parroted the government line, there were enough dissenters to concern Singh. More worrying still was an unexpected intervention from Coocoola, in Hong Kong on a ‘week-long shopping trip’ when her brother finally asked the Indian government to intervene. The princess immediately went on the offensive. While she ‘stopped short of charging Mrs Gandhi with complicity’, she made very significant accusations. She told the press that India had financed the opposition; that many of the ‘rebels’ had come from outside Sikkim; and that she was sure that the disturbances in Sikkim had been ‘caused by “low-level Indian intelligence agents”’, although she felt that ‘Delhi was not aware of the activities of these agents from the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau.’23 On the Chinese mainland the Xinhua news agency* also reacted, charging that India’s intervention was both political and military, and said it stemmed from the ‘unequal treaty’ in 1950.
