by Andrew Duff
Finally, Thondup had the UN debate that he had sought for so long. The Chinese UN representative, Qiao Guanghua, explicitly called the action in Sikkim an ‘annexation’ (echoing the headline from the Hindustan Times a month earlier), adding that it was ‘another naked act of expansionism perpetrated by the Indian Government after dismembering Pakistan by armed force’. Perhaps the most remarkable accusation, though, was reserved for the Soviet Union. Qiao raised the spectre that the action in Sikkim might be a new imperialist thrust by Soviet Russia. Reiterating the claim that the Soviets were ‘the boss behind the scenes of Indian expansionism’, he suggested that they were spurred by ‘dreams of opening a corridor to the Indian Ocean’, precisely the charge that had been levelled at the Russians a century before during an earlier period of intrigue. Events in Sikkim showed, Qiao was suggesting, that the Great Game was still alive and well in the Himalayas.17
In reality, the Chinese comments had little to do with compassion for the fate of Thondup and Sikkim, and far more to do with labyrinthine geopolitical manoeuvring. Moynihan’s number two, David T. Schneider, was sure that the Chinese portrayal of the Soviets was simply part of a wider strategy to highlight Soviet influence in New Delhi. Not that he thought the Soviets would mind that – they would be ‘almost certainly pleased at the blow-up over Sikkim which serves Soviet interests in arousing Indian concerns over Chinese intentions, and thus revives in many minds here the importance of the Indo-Soviet treaty link.’18
The Soviet ‘information (or disinformation) mills’, he added, had been ‘operating full blast’ to ensure that the Himalayas remained ‘a wedge between the two Asian neighbors’, going as far as to place newspaper stories that ‘China was deploying nuclear rockets in Tibet “which would hurtle over Indian territory in test launchings.”’
Schneider’s boss Ambassador Moynihan noted that this complex dance between the Chinese and the Soviets left the Indians ‘caught in a cleft stick’. The Sikkim issue, he pointed out in a broad assessment of the Asian scene in early October, was intricately bound up with India’s economic crisis and with the question of arms supplies in the region:
[The Indians] do need Moscow. Chinese posturing over Sikkim, even if only that, has again raised the problem of the Chinese threat which precipitated the signing of the Friendship treaty in 1971. Soviet prices for military goods are high and the equipment not always what the Indian military wants. But it is available for rupees and European equipment is not. The trade relationship [with the Soviets] is not indispensable, but does pay the bills for military equipment and modest imports of badly needed commodities. Nor does Delhi want to risk Moscow’s turning to woo Pakistan with cakes and missiles . . .19
The Americans were right: Asia had turned into a swirling mass of competing priorities, as countries emerging from the emasculation of the colonial era sought to reassert themselves. The Chinese attempt to raise Sikkim as an issue in the United Nations – which, unsurprisingly, came to nothing – was as much a test of the limits or otherwise of the newfound power of the People’s Republic of China in the UN (only theirs since 1971) as it was a show of support for the tiny Himalayan kingdom.
But behind the Chinese bluster over Sikkim, the country’s leader was in fact just as puzzled as everyone else over why India had moved so suddenly to convert Sikkim into an untried and untested status as an associate state. In a meeting between new Chinese Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping and Kissinger in November, Deng admitted that he was mystified by Indian policy in general, and by the Indian action in Sikkim in particular. If it was prompted by fears of a conflict between India and China in the Himalaya, he said, that was plainly ludicrous: he knew that his own troops hated the Tibetan plateau and he found it hard to believe that India could have any strategic interest in such a forbidding place. It was an extraordinary exchange – and a demonstration of just how easy the relationship between the top echelons in the US and in China had now become:
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘There is something very peculiar about Indian policy. For example, that little kingdom of Sikkim. They had pretty good control of Sikkim. Why did they have to annex it?’
Secretary Kissinger: ‘It is a good thing India is pacifist. I hate to think [of what they would do] if they weren’t.’ [Laughter]
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘Sikkim was entirely under the military control of India.’
Secretary Kissinger: ‘I haven’t understood Sikkim. It is incomprehensible.’
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘After the military annexation, their military position was in no way strengthened.’
Secretary Kissinger: ‘They had troops there already.’
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘And they haven’t increased their troops there. We published a statement about it. We just spoke up for the sake of justice.’
Secretary Kissinger: ‘Is it true that you have set up loudspeakers to broadcast to the Indian troops on the border? It makes them very tense.’ [Laughter]
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘We have done nothing new along the borders, and frankly we don’t fear that India will attack our borders. We don’t think they have the capability of attacking our borders. There was some very queer talk, some said that the reason why the Chinese Government issued that statement about Sikkim was that the Chinese were afraid after Sikkim that India would complete the encirclement of China. Well, in the first place, we never feel things like isolation or encirclement can ever matter very much with us. And particularly with India, it is not possible that India can do any encirclement of China. The most they can do is enter Chinese territory as far as the autonomous Republic of Tibet, Lhasa. And Lhasa can be of no strategic importance to India. The particular characteristic of Lhasa is it has no air – because the altitude is more than 3,000 meters. During the Long March we did cross the region of Tibet.’
Secretary Kissinger: ‘Really.’
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘Not the Lhasa area, but the southern part. Our experience was that when we wanted to take one step further, we couldn’t.’
Secretary Kissinger: ‘It is a very dangerous area for drinking mao tai.’* [Laughter]
Vice-Premier Deng: ‘Frankly, if Indian troops were able to reach Lhasa, we wouldn’t be able to supply them enough air.’ [Laughter]20
Deng was able to dismiss the idea of any Indian threat to Lhasa so breezily because China was now fully confident that it had complete control of Tibet. In October 1974, two months before Deng and Kissinger’s friendly exchange, they had also put an end once and for all to the Tibetan guerrilla base in the Mustang Valley.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s had seen a brutal crackdown on any resistance to Chinese rule. They had stripped the remnants of the Buddhist theocratic order of any pretence to autonomy. At the same time the people suffered a terrible famine. Internal resistance to the Chinese presence in Tibet had ended. But one pocket of active resistance had survived high up in the Mustang Valley on the Tibet–Nepal border. While the Americans and the Indians had long ago dropped their practical assistance for the Mustang Valley Tibetans,† Birendra’s Nepali government, by turning a blind eye to their activities, had effectively continued to support them. This had understandably aggravated the Chinese. In December 1973 Chairman Mao had told Birendra bluntly that he could not tolerate this any longer. Birendra, who, in the wake of the events in Sikkim, wanted to keep China onside, agreed.
It was no coincidence, therefore, that it had been shortly after the Indians had forced through the Sikkim Government Bill in late June 1974 that the Nepali government finally issued a deadline of 26 July for the Khampa force to give up their weapons. When word reached the beleaguered guerrilla fighters, they were hopelessly split – some wanted to confront the Nepalis, who they felt had betrayed them; others were persuaded by a dramatic last-minute taped appeal from the Dalai Lama (who saw that continued resistance could only lead to bloodshed) to lay down their arms and accept the Nepali ultimatum. Two companies refused to surrender and fled in a daring march west towards the India
n border, hopping back and forth between Nepal and Tibet. Pursued, harassed and tricked by the Nepali Army, most of these either surrendered or were captured in late August.
By the second week of September, just 40 guerrillas on horseback were left. As the bedraggled group approached the 5,394-metre Tinkar Pass from western Nepal into India, the Nepali Army were waiting, ordered to prevent their escape to India. A sharp-eyed Nepali sergeant spotted them, shooting and killing two (including the infamous leader Wangdu) and wounding another. The rest made a frantic final dash across the border, clambering up a recess that hid them from view of the Nepali. On the Indian side, the American embassy later reported, ‘600 Indians had their toes on the border waiting to greet the Khampas’. Some reports said that Indian jets had violated Nepali airspace to provide air cover.21
The Khampas’ two decades fighting for Tibet’s freedom from the Mustang Valley were over. But these events also had other ramifications in the region. When combined with the riots in Kathmandu in early September, the whole episode reinforced the antagonism that had been developing between Indira Gandhi and the Nepali king, Birendra, and his royalist followers. Reports suggesting that some Khampas had also fled into Sikkim to support the Chogyal only exacerbated the situation.
It was hardly a surprise when Washington received a cable from the US embassy in Kathmandu in early October painting a dire picture of the prospects for the region:
In the aftermath of the Indian squeeze on Sikkim, the Nepalese are beginning to ask themselves whether Nepal is next on India’s list. It would therefore be prudent for us to ask ourselves whether Indo-Nepalese relations are taking on a fundamentally new shape which could shatter the tenuous Pax Himalaya which has obtained over the past decade.22
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Back in Gangtok, few had thoughts for anything beyond the immediate. While Sikkim was discussed in Peking and Kathmandu, the reality on the streets was of continuing violence, and consequent repression.
Ishbel Ritchie continued to get some news out, despite the persistent attentions of the censors, whose efforts made sending letters to her mother a bit like ‘shooting off arrows without knowing where or whether they will land’. To confuse the censors, she reverted to broad Scots again: ‘Aiblins the fowk wi the lang nebs hae been owre eident,’ she wrote, no doubt chuckling in the absolute certainty that no minor Indian official would have access to a Scots – let alone an Ulster Scots – dictionary.* Despite the ‘lang nebs’, she still found ways to communicate the facts to her mother: some of the disturbances were turning ugly, with stones and ‘petrol-soaked sacks’ being ‘flung sporadically from a higher road’. The students at the school were continuing to conduct agitations, she wrote, resulting in attendances slipping to 20 per cent at one point.
The escalating violence left Thondup more and more depressed, ‘clearly dejected that his kingdom has been “sold down the river”,’ an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review noted. He blamed himself for his country’s woes, but he was also caught off-guard by Indian actions and was unsure how to react to such blatant disregard for the law. As the Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent wrote, even the protests were being wilfully misrepresented: there was a ‘hollowness’ to
official Indian statements about ‘popular movements in Sikkim for greater independence in India’. During two weeks here, the only ‘popular movements’ this correspondent witnessed were demonstrations against the Indian incorporation of Sikkim, which the Indian police ensured were brief and not to be repeated.23
Thondup still, however, refused to believe that Mrs Gandhi was responsible for what had happened. He was certain that in the final analysis it could not have been her that let him down, and that her actions over the previous months had been ‘the result of the incorrect advice she has been fed’. Kewal Singh, the Indian Foreign Secretary, was Thondup’s prime suspect. He was convinced that Singh had led a conspiracy against him, orchestrating everything. In a long, accusatory legal letter, a copy of which found its way into the British Foreign Office’s secret files (released in 2005 under the 30-year rule), he wrote bitterly to Singh that the peaceful Sikkimese demonstrators on 20 June (at the time of the Government of Sikkim Bill) had been ‘brutally stoned, beaten and teargassed by the CRP [Central Reserve Police]’; that the Indian foreign ministry had consistently ‘either ignored or have been completely misled on the true position in Sikkim’; and that members of the Sikkim Assembly were ‘openly indulging in daylight kidnapping of opposition leaders, students and others even in the presence of the CRP’. But what Thondup resented most was the accusation that his family had been involved in creating and promoting a poster campaign against Mrs Gandhi herself:
It is alleged that vulgar and obscene posters attacking Mrs Gandhi have been printed under the instigation and supervision of my sister, Princess Coocoola, in her house. To attribute such behaviour to our family is utterly repulsive and shocks our conscience particularly in view of the position we hold in Sikkim. Whatever our faults may be, it must be conceded that we have not as yet found it necessary to indulge in vulgarity or obscenities to express our differences of opinion against anybody least of all the Prime Minister of India. I can only state that these allegations against my family and myself are being made with the ulterior and malicious motive to give events in Sikkim an anti-Indian colour, so that vested interests can somehow force the Government of India to take an overt anti-Chogyal stand.24
Singh knew perfectly well whom Thondup meant when he referred to the ‘vested interests’ accused of taking an ‘anti-Chogyal stand’: the Kazi and his foster son, Khatiawara. Thondup was sure that the bogus poster campaign was just another of the radical positions that the 25-year-old Khatiawara was taking in his thirst for power, funded by carefully distributed piles of cash.
But many who saw the posters on the walls of buildings around Sikkim were convinced that the posters had, in fact, been produced by sources linked to and funded by Indian intelligence – and therefore to the Indian government itself – in an effort to discredit Thondup.
Within two weeks of the passing of the constitutional amendment, K. Shankar Bajpai and B. S. Das had been shipped out of Sikkim. Bajpai had arrived in Sikkim in 1970, expecting a two-year posting – in the event, he had served four. By the time he left, his health was suffering; he was more than ready to go. Das was easily lured away by an offer to become chairman of the International Airports Authority of India.*
Their replacements underlined the seriousness with which Delhi now took Sikkim. Bajpai’s successor was Gurbachan Singh, a man with strong connections with the Research and Analysis Wing of Indian intelligence. Das was replaced as chief executive by a wily and experienced professional administrator, B. B. Lal, a man of far greater stature than any of the Indian-appointed dewans, principal administrative officers, sidlons or chief executives that had come before him.† The advent of these two men – both known for their ruthless streak – was a clear sign of India’s intentions.
The change in tone was immediately apparent.
Lal wasted no time in making sweeping changes throughout Sikkim. He started with the Namgyal family powerbase. Some of the actions were petty and seemed calculated to cause offence: the family’s name was removed wherever it occurred. The Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, opened by the Dalai Lama and promoted by Nehru, became simply the ‘Institute of Tibetology’; the Palden Thondup Institute became the ‘Cottage Industries Institute’; Thondup was replaced by the Kazi as chairman of the Tashi Namgyal Academy, the school set up in honour of Thondup’s own father. Other actions were aimed at stripping the family of their financial base: the palace budget was slashed by 75 per cent; none of the money that had traditionally been allotted to the Sikkim Guards was released; the family money set aside for educating the children now in New York was refused.
These arrows aimed at Thondup’s personal situation were nothing compared with the determined way in which Lal set about trying to change the way the law worked in Sikkim. Thond
up knew that the judicial system was something that he had to defend with all his might – a vital symbol that would allow him, as long as it was independent of Indian law, to argue for Sikkim’s distinct identity. Lal saw this too, and was just as determined to bring Sikkim’s law within the ambit of New Delhi. The battle for the judicial system became a proxy for the two men’s personal antipathy.
Thondup took advantage of the fact that the events of 1973 and 1974 had left the situation regarding Sikkim’s legal system hopelessly confused. At the time of the disturbances in April 1973 Thondup had been in the midst of making major reforms to the judicial set-up, seeking to abolish an outdated and irregular system where four highly independent area judges operated their own fiefdoms to one where there was a centralised judiciary with a guaranteed independence from the executive. Some of the reforms had later been implemented, but the overall situation remained extremely confused. The agreement of 8 May 1973 offered one view of how justice should work; the Government of Sikkim Act of June 1974 offered another, completely different. How both were affected by Sikkim becoming an associate state of the union was completely unclear. Did Indian law apply? If so, in what cases? Lal’s solution – that, as he was chief executive of Sikkim (and Sikkim was an associate state), the judiciary should report directly to him – was easy for Thondup to attack as a subversion of the fundamental building block of any functioning democracy: that executive and judicial powers should be separate. Thondup also argued that if the Indians were serious about him continuing as some form of ‘constitutional monarch’ then that should include a role as the apolitical head of the legal system.
But while Thondup searched for ways to challenge Lal’s actions, an increasingly dark side to the new arrangements in Sikkim emerged. A demonstration by the Sikkim Students Association was broken up with a level of violence clearly designed to ensure there would be no reoccurrence. The Kazi claimed Thondup was involved in subversive activities against the state, accusing him and his son Tenzing of ‘instigating and supporting anti-social and anti-democratic elements’. The palace was increasingly ‘depicted as the nerve-centre of murderous activities’. In December, when explosives were found on a road in southern Sikkim on which the Kazi and Kazini had recently travelled, a whispering campaign suggested that it had been Thondup and Tenzing who had been plotting to kill them.
