Sikkim
Page 29
But Clause 30 had been worded in a deliberately vague way so as to make it almost an ‘enabling’ document. If the Assembly made a request to India, so the clause suggested, then India had something close to an obligation to allow ‘participation and representation for the people of Sikkim in the political institutions of India’. The only thing they required was the request.
And, for that, they had a willing accomplice in the Kazi.
In theory the act provided for the Chogyal to be kept informed of any further constitutional developments or changes. But this too had been cleverly worded: the act said that ‘important matters’ should be submitted to the Chogyal ‘for his information and for his approval of the action proposed to be taken’.2 What ‘important matters’ constituted was wide open to interpretation.
In any case over the next six weeks, theory counted for nothing. Pragmatism took over. No further Assembly resolutions were deemed necessary, despite this also being a requirement under the act. Instead a hasty direct request from the Kazi and four other newly appointed ‘ministers’ to activate Clause 30 arrived on Das’s desk towards the end of July. Das forwarded the request to the Indian government; he also sent it to Thondup, who immediately challenged it. Under the 8 May Agreement, Thondup pointed out, his approval was still required for any matters which involved Indo-Sikkim relations. He received no answer from Das. On 29 July, Thondup wrote separately to Mrs Gandhi, expressing his ‘strong objections to any step that might damage Sikkim’s international identity and affect relations with India’3 It was not until 28 August – a full month later – that he received an answer to this letter, and then only from the Foreign Minister, Swaran Singh. Singh’s letter was dated 22 August; in it he said that the Indian government was ‘looking into the legal and constitutional implications’ of the Kazi’s letter, adding that ‘if it is found feasible to respond, we shall be happy to do so’. There was no mention of the 1950 treaty.4
On 29 August, the day after Thondup received Swaran Singh’s letter, the reason for these delays and obfuscations became clear. Listening to a late-night news bulletin on All India Radio, Thondup and his adviser Jigdal Densapa could hardly believe their ears.5 The report stated that Mrs Gandhi intended to introduce an ‘Amendment Bill’ to the Indian constitution in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of the Indian parliament, with the aim of converting Sikkim into what was being termed an ‘associate state’. Thondup was stunned. It seemed he was expected to believe that, only six short days after Swaran Singh had said they were looking into ‘the legal and constitutional implications’, a draft bill had been prepared and parliamentary time had been found for it to be discussed.
It was not only Thondup who was caught by surprise. If the Indian government thought that they could slip the bill through without any adverse reaction, they were mistaken. The popular Hindustan Times was vehement in its criticism of the government’s actions. A leading article, entitled ‘Kanchenjungha, Here We Come’ (referencing the Sikkimese mountain), was accompanied by a cartoon entitled ‘The Autumn Collection!’ that depicted Indira Gandhi sashaying in an elaborate, long Himalayan dress emblazoned with the word ‘Sikkim’.6 The accompanying article was no less harsh:
If it is not outright annexation, it comes close to it. To suggest anything else would be self-deception and compound dishonesty with folly . . . The worst suspicions about the manner in which the protector has seduced its helpless and inoffensive ward, with some genuine and much synthetic drama, will not find confirmation. No country or people voluntarily choose self-effacement, and the Indian Government is not going to be able to persuade the world that Sikkim’s ‘annexation’ to India represents the will of the Sikkimese people. Indeed this issue has never been placed before them.7
But even the timing of the All India Radio announcement had been carefully planned, made late on a Thursday, leaving only one day before the weekend. First thing on Monday morning the bill was formally introduced in the Indian parliament. Foreign Minister Swaran Singh’s opening statement left the MPs in no doubt about the nature of the action. The bill was, he said, ‘a political matter and not a question of legal niceties’. But the growing opposition in the Lok Sabha to Indira Gandhi’s autocratic government would not be silenced; MP after MP pointed out that, political matter or not, the bill opened up a constitutional can of worms: the Congress (O) accused the government of outright ‘procedural and constitutional impropriety’, calling the new status a ‘disparate marriage between a republic and a monarchy’8; the Jana Sangh , a Hindu nationalist opposition party, criticised the bill for not going far enough, creating an unworkable and meaningless halfway house of ‘associate state’. And, others asked, if the people had voted for this new status (the government was arguing that the 1974 elections were a vote for accession to the union), did that imply that they could later reverse it and leave the union by a further vote against it?
Awkward questions were asked about the wider impact, too. What were the implications for other troublesome border states: could the bill encourage separatist tendencies in other areas? What was to stop Nagaland, Mizoram or even Kashmir arguing that they too should qualify for this nebulous new ‘associate’ status within the union? What about the impact on relations with neighbouring countries? The CPM berated the government for not considering the inevitable adverse reaction from China; Mrs Gandhi’s own MPs even expressed concern over the potential Nepali reaction.
All were valid questions – but all were brushed aside. Congress (R)’s substantial parliamentary majority ensured that the bill was pushed through that same day in the Lok Sabha; by Friday it had also passed the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the Indian parliament.9
An editorial in the Hindustan Times was one of the few that directly criticised the action in strong terms: ‘Only the most blind or cynical will derive any satisfaction over the sorry progression of the Indian presence in Sikkim from that of friend to master.’10
Even as the parliament was making decisions on the future of his country, Thondup sought another meeting with Mrs Gandhi. This time she flatly refused to see him.
Depressed and worn down, Thondup flew to Calcutta instead to hold a press conference. He was well aware that the attention Mrs Gandhi’s actions were receiving from the international press gave him an opportunity. Choosing his words carefully, he painted Sikkim as an innocent victim without the resources to adequately challenge the unilateral Indian action. ‘Ours is a protectorate of India, a very small state,’ he was reported as telling journalists. ‘How can we fight with India?’ To resolve the matter he would rely on India’s ‘sense of justice’ rather than pursuing things ‘at an International level’.
But many other Sikkimese felt that India’s ‘sense of justice’ had now been casually cast aside. As the reality of what the bill meant seeped through into Sikkim, people began to realise how momentous the bill was and how it threatened the country’s separate identity. What had started as a movement for democratic change within Sikkim had been hijacked and now threatened the very existence of Sikkim itself.
It was also now impossible for anyone to suggest that the opposition to Sikkim’s new status as an associate state was solely from the Palace and the Chogyal’s Bhutia community. It was a Nepali schoolmaster from Sikkim, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, who led a brave delegation to the Indian capital to meet with Mrs Gandhi. The angry delegates told her that they were vehemently opposed to the speed and the manner of events taking place in Delhi. But Mrs Gandhi reassured Bhandari and his ten colleagues that Sikkim’s ‘distinct personality’ would be respected under the new legislation. Besides, she was able to point out, the act was merely a response to a request from the leader of a legitimate democratically elected Assembly.
There was very little Bhandari could say to that. The Indians had done their preparation well.
-2-
In Gangtok, Das and Bajpai were understandably concerned by what was now evidently the growing potential for violent confrontations.
Af
ter the troubles in June they decided they could take no chances. Security was tightened; they could not risk further protests. Indian Central Reserve Police suddenly became a prominent feature on the streets. Ishbel Ritchie, travelling to Darjeeling, found that the CRP were ‘stopping all vehicles and are inclined to whack a piece of luggage when demanding to know what is in it’.
The febrile atmosphere even extended to her classroom:
The local students, mostly the Boys’ School, and, I’m sorry to say, ours have been conducting an agitation of their own since Thurs. because they are upset about Sikkim’s new status & are v confused and upset without really understanding why. They’ve got themselves well on the wrong side of the authorities (and I fear have probably cooked the school’s goose well and truly thereby). They have not been helped by a lack of understanding in other quarters and the whole thing has fermented in a way that could probably have been avoided with more tact.
Everything came to a head a few days later, when the police visited the school and interrogated Ritchie herself:
I feel as though I’ve been through a mangle . . . I personally was accused of ‘engaging in political activities’ and ‘allowing my political sensitivities to influence the admin of the school.’ (This presumably would mean, if it means anything, that I am encouraging a hotbed of Scottish nationalism! But it is not, I think, what it is intended to mean.) The evidence for this seems to be some vague answer of some of the children to loaded questions put to them about what they are taught in school, but I have not been able to get any direct answer on this.
Despite the press being kept out of Gangtok, US Ambassador Moynihan in Delhi had managed to stay on top of events in Sikkim. From his desk in Delhi, he and his team catalogued in meticulous detail what they could glean from their network of agents about events, recording the international reaction for digestion by Kissinger and the State Department in Washington. Since the nuclear test in May, Moynihan had redoubled his efforts to repair relations between the two countries, efforts that were to culminate in a visit by Kissinger himself to Delhi at the end of October. An ugly dispute over tiny Sikkim, Moynihan and Washington agreed, was in nobody’s interest.
In case of awkward press enquiries, on 11 September Washington sent out to its embassies across South Asia a set of prepared questions and evasive answers. The Q&A demonstrated the extreme sensitivity that Washington attached to the matter – particularly the possibility of criticisms of double standards through comparisons with the American involvement in Vietnam:
Q. Do you have anything to say about India taking over Sikkim, which is, apparently, a sovereign state of its own?
A: No, I don’t have anything to say. That is one problem that we are not involved in.
Q. What about the principle, though, of a larger country taking over a smaller one?
A. I don’t wish to comment on the affair between Sikkim and India here.
Q: Are you saying in effect we are not concerned when a large country takes over a small one?
A: This is a very complicated parliamentary question that is being taken up in New Delhi, and I don’t wish to comment on the merits of it – nor on the deliberations of the National Assembly of Sikkim. I think you can read some of the details of that yourself.
END QUOTE. KISSINGER UNQUOTE. KISSINGER.11
If it was a calculated move to improve relations between the US and India, it had the desired effect. Two days later N. B. Menon from External Affairs wrote to the embassy ‘to express appreciation of the sensitivity of the US Government to Government of India concerns on this issue’.12
Washington had also realised that their implicit recognition of India’s rights to control Sikkim’s affairs might be a useful bargaining chip in their broader relations with the Government of India. For some time, the Chinese had been pressurising the US to recognise their de facto control in the Himalayan border area of Aksai Chin, to the west of Nepal (that had been fought over in 1962), which, they noted, US government maps still showed as disputed territory, with competing Indian and Chinese claims.13 Given that it was, in fact, standard US government policy to show ‘de facto lines of control’ rather than competing claims, Washington spotted an opportunity for some diplomatic manoeuvring.
They flew a kite past the embassies in Delhi, Kathmandu and Dhaka. To persuade the Indians to give up their notional claims to Aksai Chin (and thus allow the map change that the Chinese were seeking), Washington suggested it might be willing to consider that the ‘dotted border and separate identification of Sikkim might (rpt might) also be eliminated’. The changes could be made after Kissinger’s proposed visit. How did the embassies think their host countries might react?
Moynihan was cautious – the Aksai Chin change would ‘annoy the Government of India and generate a continuing hum in our dealings’, although he acknowledged that the Sikkim trade-off ‘should help’. The Nepali ambassador’s reply was quite different – and illustrated the competing agendas in the region. The Government of Nepal, he reported back, would have ‘no problem’ with US recognition of Aksai Chin per se; but they felt that ‘US Government acknowledgement of the new Indo-Sikkimese relationship’ would not only be ‘unnecessary’, but would also be ‘likely to add to Nepali apprehensions and could resurrect past concerns, which over the years we have tried to dispel, that we see India’s relations with its neighbours through Indian eyes’.
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the Indian action in Sikkim, recognition of the country’s right to exist had now become a commodity to be traded within the larger context of Asian politics.
The years when Thondup assisted the CIA in the 1950s by running their messages to Lhasa counted for nothing.
Meanwhile, across the key Asian countries there was a vociferous reaction to India’s action in making Sikkim an associate state.
In Pakistan, President Bhutto was quick to put his own spin on the events in Sikkim. The Indian government’s actions were, he said publicly,
simply the latest demonstration of their psychosis – a craze to dominate, to spread their wings . . . we stand vindicated in our analysis. They marched into Goa and took that. They have gone nuclear. And now they have swallowed up Sikkim . . . Dr Kissinger ought to consider Sikkim when he comes here. But this must be something he does on his own. We can’t keep telling him what India’s intentions are, showing the maps.14
Unless someone confronted India, Bhutto added, Bhutan would be next.* Privately, he was even more vehement; when he met with Kissinger during the latter’s tour of the subcontinent at the end of the month, he again put Sikkim in a category with Bangladesh as providing clear evidence of India’s hegemonistic desire in Asia. Kissinger agreed – he thought India ‘had their eyes on Nepal’ – but told Bhutto he still could not understand the rationale for what had taken place in Sikkim. ‘Why did they do it?’ Kissinger asked Bhutto. ‘Didn’t they already control the foreign policy of Sikkim?’ Bhutto’s reply put Sikkim firmly into his own grand narrative of the region. The Indians, he said, ‘continue to get more arrogant. It’s outside the scope of logic. They lie. It is the history of the Sub-Continent.’*
Reaction in Nepal to what had happened in Sikkim was far more visceral. Within days of the announcement of the constitutional amendment bill, there had been mass student demonstrations on the streets of Nepal against the Indian action. Government troops had to prevent protestors wielding banners with slogans such as ‘Indira Gandhi stay home’ and ‘Indians out of Sikkim’ from marching on the Indian compound.
But it was the Chinese press that attacked India most aggressively. On 4 September, within a couple of days of the introduction of the bill, the Chinese People’s Daily condemned this ‘despicable act of the Indian government’ as a ‘grave incident’, an attempt to reduce Sikkim to a ‘colony’ which would shatter Sino-Indian relations. The Lok Sabha debate showed, they asserted, that the ‘clumsy trick is crystal clear even to the Indians’. The blame lay fairly and squarely at the door of the Indian prim
e minister: ‘Nehru and his daughter have always acted this way and Indira Gandhi has gone further.’†
They also issued a stark warning that ‘India’s expansionist and aggressive ambition is not limited to Sikkim’ and were quick to make accusations of Indo-Soviet collusion:
Facts have shown once again that Soviet revisionist social-imperialism and Indian expansionism constitute a serious threat to the independence and sovereignty of the South Asian Countries and are the main cause of the unstable situation in the South Asian sub-continent.15
The Indian expansionists and their Soviet protectors were ‘blind men and fools’.
A few days later the Chinese Foreign Ministry went further by suggesting that India had ‘inherited the mantle of imperialism’ and had ‘always pursued a colonialist policy towards Sikkim’. They reiterated their view that Soviet revisionist social-imperialism was ‘the boss behind the scene as well as the abettor of Indian expansionism’.16
The accusations of imperialism in particular severely aggravated Mrs Gandhi – the idea that she was in some way an inheritor of the worst excesses of the British colonial tradition was one that annoyed her intensely.
But the Chinese showed no intention of letting up. They were determined to use events in Sikkim to demonstrate the ‘danger’ that India – supported by the Soviet Union – posed to the region. On 3 October they went as far as to raise the matter at the UN.