by Andrew Duff
It had also dawned on the Kazini that she had not quite got what she bargained for. Far from her husband becoming head of a democratic government of Sikkim as she had expected, Sikkim had merely swapped the Chogyal for Lal, a monarch for a chief executive. She had expected a role as the power behind the Kazi as the leader of a small Himalayan state; in fact, she found that her husband had little real grasp on power in Sikkim. It was not at all what she had anticipated, and the events in Rangpo convinced her that unless she were careful, her husband would be forever beholden to Mrs Gandhi and the Indian government, something which she did not believe would be in Sikkim’s – or her own – interest.
Like her husband’s colleagues in the Assembly, she was starting to realise that something had to be done urgently to ensure that Sikkim retained some measure of individuality. When she heard that Lal refused to countenance the idea of an elected head of state, she realised the implications. She had spent years lampooning Thondup from Kalimpong, but retaining him as Chogyal might be the only safeguard to ensure that her husband remained a big fish in the small Sikkimese pond.
Far better that, she thought, than a small one in the vast ocean of Indian politics.
Crown Prince Tenzing, Thondup’s son, who was also in Gangtok, back from Cambridge, was also certain that his father was the key to Sikkim retaining its distinct identity. He was determined to rescue what he knew had become a desperate situation by trying to reconcile his father with the Kazi and restore Sikkim to equilibrium before it was too late. On 10 March he, therefore, took the extraordinarily bold step of heading to the Kazi’s bungalow to try and discuss the deteriorating situation with the Chief Minister. The Kazi, recognising the complexity of the situation and feeling somewhat isolated, agreed to talk to Tenzing.
That afternoon the Kazini brokered the meeting. For three hours the two men talked, while she cajoled and encouraged her husband to listen to Tenzing. The Kazi took it all in, calculating his options. He was nothing if not a pragmatist, and had already sensed that the tide of opinion might be turning in Sikkim. He also knew that two legal challenges had been mounted against the September 1974 amendment to the Constitution Act – one in Sikkim and one in Delhi – threatening the validity of Sikkim’s position as an associate state in India. If he did not come to some form of reconciliation with the Palace, he knew he was in danger of losing power altogether.
The Kazi offered Tenzing a deal. He laid down three conditions: if the Chogyal a) explicitly accepted the 1974 elections, b) recognised that the Sikkim Congress should, therefore, be the party in power, and c) confirmed the Kazi himself in office, then – and only then – could the two men work together. He would accept the Chogyal had a continued role as a – limited – constitutional monarch. If Tenzing could agree, the Kazi said he would approach New Delhi to get them to rethink the situation.
Tenzing, relieved, told the Kazi that he would return the following night once he’d had time to speak to his father, who he was sure would accept the conditions.
It was a remarkable turnaround.
In Gangtok it was hard to keep anything secret. Within hours, news of the clandestine meeting somehow reached Political Officer Gurbachan Singh. He exploded. The following day he summoned the Kazi to the Residency, accusing him of ‘deceit and treachery’. He could not countenance such intrigue, Singh told the Kazi. He refused to let him leave and demanded that the Kazini should also be brought to the Residency to explain herself. When the Kazini, not used to taking orders from anyone, point-blank refused, Singh demanded that the CRP guard on the bungalow be increased to prevent Tenzing from visiting again.
Tenzing, meanwhile, unaware of the Kazi’s dressing-down from Singh, returned to the Kazi and Kazini’s bungalow in his jeep in the evening. He was in a buoyant mood – his father was willing to compromise. He was surprised to find the gate guarded by Central Reserve Policemen who would not open the gate to let him in.
The Kazini refused to be cowed. When she heard the jeep pull up, she bustled out, telling Tenzing to ignore the guards and vault the gate. When Tenzing did so, he found half-a-dozen rifles pointed at him. The Kazini, alive as ever to the drama of the situation, flung her arms round Tenzing to protect him. Seeing this sign of apparent affection, the guards were understandably perplexed, wondering who they were protecting from whom. They dropped their rifles.9
The Kazini explained what was happening to Tenzing. The Crown Prince left to update his father.
Meanwhile, the Kazi was given permission by Singh to return to his house.
If other Assembly members had been in any doubt about Indian intentions to tighten their grip on Sikkim and to prevent a reconciliation between the Palace and the politicians, the events of 10 and 11 March put those doubts to rest. K. C. Pradhan, one of the Kazi’s inner cabinet members*, now decided that something had to be done – urgently – to reverse the unsustainable ‘associate state’ situation and create a new future for Sikkim. He approached the beleaguered Kazi (now back in the bungalow) to let him know the strength of opinion on the matter. Retaining Sikkim’s individuality was vital, he told the Kazi. Many of the other Assembly members agreed. If the Chogyal needed to be retained as a symbol of that individuality, so be it.
The Kazi realised he had no option but to agree that, given the strength of opinion, resolutions should be drawn up stating what the Assembly wanted.
They quickly put together a document outlining their new position. The thrust was clear: the chief executive was to be merely an adviser to Sikkim; Indian appointments to the Sikkim civil service were to be limited; the judicial system needed an overhaul; and – crucially – the Assembly welcomed the Chogyal’s desire for ‘a dialogue with the Chief Minister’. The drafters agreed that, once the other Assembly members had signed the new resolutions, they should be sent directly to the Indian prime minister herself, with a covering letter. This should come to her via the Kazi as chief minister, Lal as chief executive and Gurbachan Singh as political officer.
Eighteen of the Assembly members signed that afternoon – four copies were typed to be taken to the remaining 11 signatories needed.
But it was not just the Assembly members who were preparing for confrontation. That same day, Political Officer Singh fired a letter off to the Chogyal with an extraordinary set of accusations – and a clear warning:
It has been brought to my notice that, as Maharajkumar Tenzing was leaving the chief minister’s residence at about 9pm on 11 March, an object dropped from his baku which was picked up by the chief minister’s bodyguard. The object could conceivably be a type of explosive device. There have, as you know, been two earlier occasions when explosives have been found buried in roads along which the chief minister was expected to travel.
This incident, especially following upon the earlier two, is indeed most serious, and I cannot express strongly enough my concern and, needless to add, disapproval of this evident resort to violence as a method to overcome political problems.
Public opinion in the state is incensed enough, particularly over the Rangpo incident last week. Now we have a direct indication of your son’s intentions which will, if remaining unchecked, most certainly lead to consequences which the government of India does not desire. Nor, I am sure, does the government of Sikkim and, I should sincerely like to hope, that it is not your desire either . . .
A further very disturbing report came to me last night which, again, concerns a visit to the chief minister’s residence by the Maharajkumar. He is reported to have been accompanied by three vehicles containing personnel of the Sikkim Guards. As I have pointed out earlier, both in conversation and in writing, the function of the Sikkim Guards is essentially for palace duties. They are not meant to be used as a show of strength on any occasion that your son chooses to go visiting around town. Even if it were considered necessary for him to be accompanied by a bodyguard, surely one person would suffice. Three vehicle-loads can hardly be termed a bodyguard.
The path you appear to have chosen
to follow is a path which, I fear, will surely lead to a collision. In this case, the sole responsibility for the serious consequences which would inevitably result would be yours. I say this in all earnestness and with all emphasis at my command.
I regret to have to write this letter but developments over the last several days leave me no option and I should be failing in my duty if I were not to communicate to you my grave concern and serious misgivings.10
The allegations were not hard to dismiss as fabricated: Tenzing had been wearing jeans, not the Sikkimese kho, as alleged; the ‘explosive device’ was a felt-tip pen that the Crown Prince had lost, which he now realised he must have dropped in the grounds of the Kazi’s house; there had been one jeep with three guards, not ‘three vehicle-loads’. They were certainly serious allegations, Thondup accepted in a reply immediately sent back to the political officer, but that did not change the fact that they were also farcical and untrue. So much so that he would have ignored them ‘if it were not for the fact that I am now convinced that a plot is being laid to somehow remove the Chogyal from Sikkim, and what could be a better excuse than to somehow involve me or the Crown Prince in an attempt to do away with the Chief Minister’.11
The following day, the extent of the control that Lal now had in Gangtok became clear. One of the copies of the letter that the Assembly members were trying to collect signatures for before sending to Mrs Gandhi somehow fell into his hands. No one knew who had given it to him, but Lal acted immediately: once again the Kazi was summoned to one of the government offices.
This time Lal went further than before. The kind of machinations suggested by the letter could not be tolerated.
The Kazi should remember from where his authority came. If he did not sort things out soon, Lal warned, his very job was at stake.
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Mrs Gandhi knew nothing of the petty detail of what was going on in Gangtok. She was, however, highly irritated by the reports emerging from Sikkim. She felt that Thondup was refusing to face up to the reality of the situation.
Her irritation did not stem out of the events in Sikkim itself, but rather from the knowledge that the question of the Himalayan state’s future only added to her mounting domestic problems. For months, she had been under severe political pressure. J. P. Narayan, the leader of the malcontents, had united all the factions railing against Indira (for many disparate reasons) under a single banner. Among JP’s charges was that she wanted to establish ‘a Soviet-backed dictatorship’ in India. Indira countered with an accusation that Narayan himself was financed by the CIA. The ‘JP movement’ was no minor political irritant: by the early months of 1975, Narayan was attracting huge crowds wherever he went, portraying himself as the messiah of a new age true to the values of Mahatma Gandhi, calling for a ‘total revolution – political, economic, social, educational, moral and cultural’ throughout the country.
Indira’s sense of persecution only increased. She was convinced that JP was involved in a plot against her, somehow financed and backed by the Americans. Other events were seen in this context. At the end of February the new US President, Gerald Ford, completely lifted the embargo on arms sales to South Asia, a move designed to boost President Bhutto (whose need for a source of arms to compete in the South Asian arms race would ensure a brisk trade) while also challenging the Indians to decide if they wanted to continue receiving all their arms from the Soviets. Mrs Gandhi immediately held a press conference: the US decision ‘reopened old wounds’, she said, and was plainly anti-Indian. Relations between India and the US plumbed new depths, as anti-American feeling ran riot. Bill Saxbe, appointed to replace Pat Moynihan as US Ambassador, had to delay his arrival by a week; his first journey into Delhi on 2 March was far from the grand entrance he had imagined, being smuggled in under cover of night as a precaution against rioting.12 He was shocked to see anti-CIA banners, sponsored by the Congress Party.*
But if Indira’s relations with the US were poor, those with China were worse, exacerbated by a series of outbursts in the Chinese press regarding events in Sikkim. On 12 March, an article appeared that threw a new level of vitriol at the Indian government. Charging the ‘Indian expansionists’ with turning ‘questions of international affairs into “internal affairs”’, the article cited the ‘annexation of Sikkim’, the 1971 ‘dismemberment of Pakistan’, and the Government of India’s continuing assistance to ‘Nepalese anti-national elements’ and to ‘Chinese Tibetan rebels’ as evidence. ‘In short,’ the Xinhua news agency railed, ‘the Indian expansionists will take any place by force whenever they can. The robber has the cheek to say the spoils belong to him. This is purely the gangster’s logic.’13
The timing of the article was, some in Delhi remarked, suspicious. The Chinese had splashed the issue on their front pages just as the Sikkim Assembly’s loyalties seemed to be moving towards defending the Chogyal’s position – and only days after the Chogyal had met with the Chinese while at Birendra’s coronation in Kathmandu. Indira went on the counter-attack. In a newspaper interview a few days later, she made a snide reference to Tibet, saying that the Chinese statements on Sikkim ‘seem odd to us considering what they have done’. She also sought to justify her own actions in Sikkim the previous year: the situation had been ‘just building up’ when India had acted. ‘While we could perhaps have tried to hold back the (Sikkimese) people,’ she said, ‘I think that would only have led to a different type of explosion later on.’14 And, she reiterated pointedly, ‘nobody reacted in the US and China’ when Pakistan had ‘very quietly swallowed up’ Hunza in October 1974, within weeks of her own actions in Sikkim.
In Gangtok, meanwhile, Lal had reasserted Indian control. His dressing-down of the Kazi had worked beautifully.
On the 16th, the Kazi called another meeting of the Assembly. It was only four days since the 18 Assembly members had signed a letter demanding a complete rethink of the administrative arrangements in Sikkim. But in the intervening period money had been distributed, promotions had been promised, threats had been made, all in the cause of ensuring that those who had signed the 12 March resolutions understood exactly where their best interests lay: squarely with Lal, Singh and the Indian government. Lal knew which buttons to press. Sunanda Datta-Ray, who was one of the few Indian journalists with close access to those in Sikkim at the time, wrote later about the intimidation that took place. One member was assured there would be something ‘in the ministry or as a Member of Parliament in Delhi’ if he acquiesced. The Kazi himself was
summoned again and threatened once more with the loss of his job. He was warned too that his wife’s inner line and residence permits* would be revoked. Without them she would not be able to set foot in Kalimpong, leave alone play at being first lady in Gangtok. She could even be deported. All the signatories were individually interviewed. Some were similarly warned of New Delhi’s severe displeasure. Others were promised rewards.15
A new set of resolutions was drafted, rescinding everything that had been written on the 12th. That meeting, the latest set of resolutions declared, had been ‘illegal’, and the suggestion that negotiations should be opened with the Chogyal had been ‘anti-democratic and anti-people’. One resolution in particular contained the harshest condemnation of those who supported the idea of a continuing monarchy:
The whole world knows that it is the Chogyal who has, throughout his life, been the greatest obstacle in the smooth functioning of the democratic government, and his latest actions have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Chogyal is unable to reconcile himself to the loss of his absolute powers and the changes brought about by the mass upsurge of April-May 1973. He and his agents have been doing everything in their powers to discredit and weaken the party and the government led by it so that they can regain their lost powers. With this end in view, they have sent their agents into the ranks of the party to carry out their subversive activities, and it is these infiltrators who have succeeded in misleading some party members and ministers in attending an ille
gally constituted meeting called without the knowledge and consent of the party leader and president.16
With the Assembly back into line, Lal immediately tightened up on the administration and instituted a security crackdown across Sikkim. The effect was highly noticeable. On the same Sunday that the Assembly performed its volte-face, Ishbel Ritchie sat down to write a letter to her mother, as she did after church every week. What she was hearing on the street was worse than ever. But she knew that hardly any letters were evading the censor. She made a decision – she would give the letter to a friend in Calcutta and get it sent from there. ‘I do hope you are now receiving my letters,’ she began in a letter that gives an extraordinary insight into the doom-laden atmosphere pervading Sikkim:
It is exasperating to send them and then not get them delivered.
We seem to be running short of a lot of things – white flour hasn’t been obtainable for a little while and sugar is v variable in supply – Thuli reports that our regular grocer is also short of tinned things – an order I put in yesterday has resulted in 2 items out of 6 being sold. I don’t know whether this is due to general shortages in India or a bit of policy, since it was hinted by one of the officials (or so I hear) that they could easily make folk here toe the line by such a policy.
I’m going to get this posted in Cal. – please don’t comment on the contents in your reply. Things are getting pretty bad & it seems that a total absorption by our ‘big brother’ is only a matter of weeks or months off, but the methods being used are most inept & calculated to build up bitterness most unnecessarily. H.R.H. is being physically prevented fm. seeing the Chief Min, and vice versa which is a sorry state. They are both prepared to talk in the best interests of their country but big brother doesn’t think it is in his interests – though no one can make out what b.b.* thinks his interests are – his actions are weird. Our folk get more & more bewildered – & in some cases more & more angry, especially those who’d genuinely looked for improvements & more freedom after the upheavals . . . The whole atmosphere is surrealistic at times . . .
