by Andrew Duff
There were other worrying developments. Karma Topden, the Sikkimese Head of Intelligence for so long, and a close friend, had been wooed away by the new Indian authorities with the offer of a job in Calcutta heading up the Sikkim Trading Corporation. Meanwhile the Hindustan Standard reported that the Kazi was seeking the ‘externment (from Sikkim) of all Tibetan refugees’, including Thondup’s sister, Princess Coocoola, who acted as president of the Refugee Resettlement Board. It was clear that the Kazi was determined to destroy the edifice of the Namgyal dynasty, bit by bit.
Despite these threats to his and his family’s position, the reality was that Thondup remained – officially – Chogyal of Sikkim. The tripartite agreement of 8 May 1973 had not simplified things. Under international pressure, the Indians had backed off pushing through with their original plan to topple Thondup. They had failed to heed Avtar Singh’s warning not to miss the opportunity to settle matters that should have been concluded in 1949 once and for all. That failure left Thondup’s position in Sikkim entirely unclear, and gave him fresh hope that he could somehow still manage to rescue a level of independence from India for his country.
The US Embassy, however, was certain that Thondup’s days were numbered. They could not see how he would find a way back from the emasculation of the tripartite agreement. In the summer of 1973, one of their officers made a dry assessment of the avenues now open to Thondup:
It remains to be seen how the Chogyal will accommodate himself to his now permanent position of virtual impotence (which radicals within Sikkim will almost certainly try to intensify and emphasise in the near future). His options are few: to abdicate, to leave the country and spend most of his time elsewhere while not formally abdicating, to play out his role of “constitutional monarch” in good faith, or to attempt to organize clandestine opposition from among loyal members of the Lepcha or Bhutia community. At this point, prospects for the long-term survival of the Royal House do not look good.1
In early August 1973, just before Hope left, Thondup gave a good indication of the route he intended to go down when he decided to reach out to King Birendra in Nepal. Educated at Eton and Harvard, Birendra was 27 and had succeeded his father the previous year. Like Thondup, he faced a difficult set of political challenges.
Nepal’s independent status had never been in doubt in 1947 when India won its independence from Britain. The country had a strong, warlike past and had coexisted with the Empire as an equal, never a subordinate. It was also three times the size of Bhutan – and 20 times the size of tiny Sikkim. But since 1947 Nepal’s relationship with India had been just as testy as Sikkim’s. Birendra’s father had introduced democracy in the late 1950s, but had promptly banned political parties in 1960, when the experiment had turned out to be not quite what he had expected. Nehru had not been impressed. The Indians had always felt an affinity with the Nepali people, and Nehru felt that the return to autocracy was a backward step. It also troubled both Nehru and his daughter Indira that the Nepali ruling family continued to cultivate as strong a relationship with the Tibetans and the Chinese as with the Indian government. During the 1960s, India had sought to maintain some leverage over events in Nepal by turning a blind eye to the Nepal Congress Party (the main opposition to the royal family) using India as its base.
At around the same time the Americans had also begun to take an increased interest in Nepal. During the 1950s the US had appointed a single ambassador for both India and Nepal, but in 1960 they appointed a dedicated ambassador to the Nepali kingdom. The Indians had been wary of this move, particularly in light of the monarchy’s avowed position as a ‘bridge’ between India and Chinese Tibet. By the early 1970s, as the US–China rapprochement took root, the Indians were keeping a very close eye on the US relationship with Nepal.
For his part, Birendra attached ‘great importance’ to the US presence in the region, particularly during a period of uncertainty in South Asian relations. In May 1973, he told the retiring US Ambassador, Carol Laise, that he was convinced the Indians were ‘seeking dominance in Nepal’. Birendra’s foreign affairs adviser also told Laise he was certain the Government of India had deliberately introduced the agitators at the time of the trouble in Sikkim in April. Worse, he was sure they were ‘“lower echelon” adherents in India of the banned Nepali Congress Party’. Given that the NCP were opposed to Birendra’s rule, this troubled Birendra and his advisers greatly.
All of this meant that there was some natural affinity between the Sikkimese and the Nepali monarchies, united by what they both perceived as the threat of increased Indian involvement in their own affairs. In the wake of the events of April 1973 (and given the possibility that the two kingdoms might be facing similar threats), Thondup sought to open up communications with Birendra in August. The man he chose to do so was the most trusted of his Sikkim Guards, Lieutenant Sonam Yongda.*
Yongda was in his early thirties. From an early age, his life had been bound up with that of the Chogyal. As a boy he had been selected for preferment, taken out of his local school and educated at St Joseph’s College in Darjeeling. His father was an important figure in Pemayangtse, the monastery in the west of Sikkim; Yongda himself had undergone training as a monk, identified early on as exceptionally bright. In his late twenties, he had been sent to the military academy in Dehradun, a town north of Delhi, to train as an officer for the Sikkim Guards, which he joined when he returned to Sikkim in 1971. He had been out of Sikkim on another military training course at the time of the disturbances in April 1973, but on his return had soon become one of Thondup’s closest confidants, a sort of aide-de-camp who could help with Thondup’s religious duties as well as act as a bodyguard. As a scion of one of the leading families in Sikkim, he shared Thondup’s deep and abiding belief in the legitimacy of the unusual theocratic state, and felt strongly that Sikkim must maintain its identity distinct from India. He was also not afraid of saying so.
The official purpose of Yongda’s visit to Nepal was for Yangchen (Thondup’s daughter, who travelled with Yongda) to spend time with the daughter of the British Ambassador, Terence O’Brien, but it did not take long for O’Brien to realise that Yongda was on a mission. The monk-soldier, he wrote back to London, was ‘certainly no diplomat’, causing the perplexed O’Brien considerable trouble, as he recorded in a slightly farcical memo:
Within five minutes Yongda had breathed such venomously anti-Indian sentiments that I thought it prudent to find him a bed in the Snowview Hotel nearby. As I rather expected, he has taken the opportunity to pursue various Sikkimese interests (undoubtedly on instruction) rather than to trail around with Princess Yangchen. His first request was that he should use my telephone to ring up Prince Tenzing, at Cambridge, and tell him that he was needed back in Gangtok, since his father had now ceased to exercise any power at all. I had no wish to have his call traced back to my number by the Indians and told him that it might be better if he rang from elsewhere. Subsequently I discovered that Lt Yongda had had two lengthy discussions with the Foreign Secretary, General Khatri, no doubt to give him the Sikkimese story and possibly to use the Nepalese wireless link to summon Prince Tenzing back to Sikkim.2
Nothing significant came from Yongda’s efforts, but the very act of making contact with Nepal was an astute political move by Thondup. Birendra looked like an excellent ally: someone who was as determined as Thondup himself to assert his independent status, and who had excellent contacts with the wider diplomatic world. Thondup also knew that events in Sikkim had only served to emphasise the strategic worth – and vulnerability – of the whole Himalayan belt. The rapprochement with Nepal also came at a time when relations with Bhutan had deteriorated – Thondup had been slightly put out when Bhutan’s royal family, which included his own relatives, had managed to secure UN membership in 1971, when Sikkim had not. As a result he began to see as much value in an association with Birendra and the royal family of Nepal as with his cousins in Bhutan.
Thondup’s shift towards Nepal did not esca
pe the notice of the Indians. From their point of view, Nepal’s continued insistence on maintaining strong relations with China was troubling. The development in recent years of two additional border routes from Tibet into Nepal had particularly spooked them – if China were to gain traction in Nepal, it opened up the possibility of a Chinese threat to India’s Gangetic Plain. The American interest in Nepal only increased Indian anxieties, given their links with China.
In fact, the American approach to the whole of Asia was undergoing a fundamental shift following the withdrawal of the last combat soldiers from Vietnam, which had taken place just as Thondup had come under siege in his palace in Gangtok. The US, led by the Ambassador in New Delhi, Pat Moynihan, was well aware of the delicate balancing act that they had to play across the region.
In an effort to help his counterparts in the countries bordering India to understand the position in India and more widely in South Asia, US Ambassador Moynihan sent out a long note entitled ‘India and its smaller neighbours’ to embassies and consulates in the region in late August.* ‘All the smaller neighbors suspect India really wants hegemony, and indeed it may,’ he wrote. As a result, he foresaw a battle for influence in the countries on India’s periphery, all of whom were seeking reassurance from either the US, or from one of the other two major world powers: the USSR and (increasingly) China. The US had no choice but to engage with India’s smaller neighbours (if nothing else to keep the Soviets out), but Moynihan recognised that such strengthened relations would almost certainly worry the Indian government:
While we can argue that such relations help India by reducing the super-sensitivity and increasing the economic viability of its neighbors, they also decrease Indian leverage over these countries. This is an ambiguity we must live with. We have made clear that we are not going to give India a veto over our relations with these countries. The most we can do is to try to avoid creating unnecessary suspicions, and to set the Indians straight swiftly and frankly if they begin acting as though we are poaching on their turf.3
Moynihan felt it was essential to control what he saw as India’s ‘hegemonic’ tendencies in South Asia. He saw, for instance, Birendra’s assertion that Nepal was ‘not part of the subcontinent; it is that part of Asia which touches both China and India’ as admirably pragmatic – and as good a way as any of maintaining stability in the region.
Such analysis struck a chord with Nixon and Kissinger, who continued to favour the largest of India’s ‘smaller neighbours’, Pakistan, over India. Nixon had struck up an excellent relationship with Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, just as he had with Yahya Khan. His relations with Indira Gandhi, on the other hand, had never recovered from the terrible meeting in Washington in 1971. Nixon was unable to divorce personality from politics – and he had always like Bhutto. He therefore naturally lent towards Pakistan and away from India (a country with which, he told Bhutto with unconcealed distaste when they met in September 1973, the American liberal establishment was conducting a ‘love affair’). Bhutto lapped it up, happily putting Sikkim in a box with Pakistan, China, Burma and Nepal as countries that had ‘suffered’ at the hands of India. ‘Living in peace with India does not mean Indian hegemony in South Asia,’ he told President Nixon.*
From Thondup’s point of view, it would do Sikkim’s chances of survival no harm if it were to be seen as firmly in the ‘anti-hegemonist’ camp.
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While Sikkim was being tossed about casually in discussions between the leaders of the USA and Pakistan, Thondup went to Delhi for talks with Indira Gandhi. Given the pressures she was under, he felt confident he might be able to salvage something from the ashes of the disturbances in April and the subsequent 8 May Agreement.
The year had not gone as planned for the Indian prime minister. Her government was besieged by problems: the monsoon had failed for the second time in two years, bringing another poor harvest; she was under political pressure over the appointment of a political ally as Chief Justice to the Supreme Court; she was also facing accusations that her fast-living son Sanjay’s Maruti Suzuki car project was propped up only by shady deals and cheap government loans. Territorially, too, she felt under pressure. Sikkim was far less pressing than the two major genuinely separatist headaches on her northern periphery: Kashmir and Nagaland. Nevertheless, perhaps thinking of her father’s fondness for Sikkim, she squeezed a meeting with Thondup into her busy schedule.
For Thondup, the meeting held great significance. The very fact that it was he and not the Kazi who was meeting Mrs Gandhi also bolstered his own standing and felt like a triumph. After the events of April, he despised the Kazi more than ever. More importantly he still had faith in the goodwill of the Indian prime minister, who he had known since childhood. He felt sure she would continue to listen to his pleas on behalf of his people.
In preparation for the meeting, he checked legal opinion on Sikkim’s situation and his own position. A crucial strength, the lawyers told him, was the existence of the 1950 treaty. A treaty by definition could only be between the leaders of two sovereign nations. Both parties would need to agree to any renegotiation. He should portray the 8 May Agreement as a ‘working arrangement’ only, the lawyers advised him, designed to restore order after the disturbances and allow for fresh elections. When they met, Thondup therefore emphasised to Mrs Gandhi that his main aim was to maintain some protection for the Bhutia-Lepchas in the planned elections. Mrs Gandhi listened patiently, consumed by thoughts of the many other problems she faced across India. Sikkim was not high on her agenda.
After the meeting ended, Thondup held a press conference to highlight the fact that he had met with Mrs Gandhi. He was trying to be constructive, he told the waiting journalists, and wanted to correct some of the wilder rumours doing the rounds in the newspapers. He had ‘faith and trust in India’; criticism that he had been ‘looking more to the West and the US than to India’ for guidance was ‘absolute nonsense’. As for the agitation in April, he said it had not been ‘inspired by China or Nepal’, as some irresponsible newspapers had suggested. But neither had it been a ‘spontaneous’ uprising. Instead it had been ‘Communist Party of India (Marxist) and other demonstrators . . . from Darjeeling and Kalimpong that had caused the trouble’. It was clever politics – painting himself as the India-friendly bulwark against the Naxalites and their associated supporters.
But it was in response to press articles making dark suggestions about his recently departed wife’s role in Sikkim that he was most vehement: Thondup told journalists that ‘the Gyalmo [Hope Cooke] had not been involved in politics; her departure was not prompted by political considerations or family misunderstandings; and he planned to join her in New York at Christmas’.4
On the specifics of the future relations between India and Sikkim, he stuck rigidly to his lawyers’ advice. The 8 May Agreement, he told the press, must not be allowed to supersede the bilateral 1950 treaty, ‘which continued to govern the relations between India and Sikkim’. The vital thing was to protect Sikkim’s diversity. To that end, he would work with India’s chief election commissioner to ‘reconcile the one-man one-vote principle of the May 8 Agreement and the “parity” of different ethnic groups’.
All this was carefully minuted in a cable from a US embassy diplomat, who thought Thondup’s press conference to be a Machiavellian Indian ploy. They suspected that ‘the Chogyal’s trip and the publicity the Indians permitted him [were] further evidence of the Government of India’s desire to preserve his figurehead status in Sikkim’. Nevertheless, they concluded, there was little doubt that ‘the Government of India will remain in effective authority in Sikkim’.5
For Thondup the idea of ceding even greater political control to India in return for preserving his own position would have been a deal with the devil.
He was now more determined than ever to assert Sikkim’s right to independent political control within Sikkim, and was convinced that could only be achieved with preservation of the monarchy in Sikkim.
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When Thondup returned to Gangtok, he found Chief Executive B. S. Das trying his best to cope with the fallout of the 8 May Agreement. Das knew it was completely deficient; he also knew that Thondup did not believe in the validity of the agreement. Worst of all he realised that the new politicians, who had never exercised real power before, were largely incompetent and deeply faction-driven. As a result he found himself effectively running a ‘one-man’ administration.6
Das’s main task was to arrange for elections, which involved getting all parties to agree on a format. It was an extremely delicate task, balancing the different interests in Sikkim and seeking concessions from all sides. He persuaded Thondup to concede that the election commissioner would not be Sikkimese; instead, oversight of the election would be in the hands of ‘a senior officer from India who would function directly under the chief election commissioner’. Meanwhile he won a major concession from the Kazi and the politicians: that the parity formula should continue, with 15 seats reserved for candidates from the Bhutia-Lepcha ethnic group and 15 for those of Sikkimese Nepali origin. (There were also two additional seats: one to represent the monks of Sikkim, and one for the so-called ‘scheduled castes’.)
While Das put in place these arrangements, Thondup began to take a more active approach to saving the country.* Hope’s return to New York had resulted in Princess Coocoola resuming a more prominent role in her brother’s life, becoming his principal adviser. Frustrated by what she saw as her brother’s lack of appetite for the coming electoral fight, Coocoola sought to reinvigorate the campaign for Sikkim’s independence. In Delhi she redecorated Sikkim House (the residence that the Namgyals maintained there). It soon became ‘the most impressive building in the whole diplomatic enclave’, Ishbel Ritchie reported after visiting it. ‘This is Sikkim’s “embassy” to all intents and purposes I suppose.’ Meanwhile, in an effort to revitalise the flagging National Party, Coocoola’s daughter Sodenla set up a youth wing called the Sikkim Youth Pioneers, whose members quickly gained a reputation for aggressive campaigning for a return to the status quo ante.
