by Andrew Duff
When Colonel Singh of the First Paratroopers arrived with a small squad of soldiers, they found Thondup and his son Tenzing in the palace. Both father and son realised that as soon as the firing started things had changed forever. When Singh demanded that they give up any weapons they had, they handed over the motley collection of guns: ‘18 in all: eight .303 rifles left over from World Wars I and II, several hunting rifles and shotguns that had been presented by visiting potentates, two or three broken down carbines, and three sub-machine-guns’. Some had been buried in the garden by Tenzing; they too were handed over.
General Kullar also came to the palace, apparently embarrassed by what had taken place. Even if Thondup’s rank of Major-General in the Indian Army was only honorary, Kullar knew it made Thondup the senior man. He apologised for what he knew had been a dirty little action. But there was no mistaking that Thondup was now under effective house arrest. Around the edge of his lawns stood Indian Army soldiers with machine guns and rifles at 50-yard intervals along all the paths.
Later in the afternoon, Political Officer Gurbachan Singh visited. The Chogyal, still trying to get his head around what had happened, gave him short shrift. ‘You have the bloody gumption to show your face here after what you’ve done?’ Thondup asked him angrily.
‘If you want me to leave, I will,’ Singh replied.
‘Please do,’ Thondup spat out.
As evening fell, Thondup donned his full Sikkim Guards uniform and made his way to the sentry boxes. There, alone, he made his own homage to the dead Guardsman. He took pride in the fact that it was a Sikkimese Nepali who had defended him to the last.
Like all leaders for whom men lay down their lives, he must have wondered whether the price paid by Chhetri had, in the end, been worth anything.29
Later that evening Thondup and Tenzing sat in the palace under effective house arrest. Nominally the soldiers stationed outside were for their ‘protection’, but no one was under any illusions about the situation. The phone lines were also dead.
Then they both suddenly remembered that they had a lifeline. In the spare room downstairs sat the only amateur radio transmitter in Sikkim, call sign AC3PT. They rarely used it, but perhaps . . .
They went to the room, brought the set to life and started to transmit.
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Horst Geerken, a German telecoms engineer with Telefunken in Jakarta and a well-known ham radio enthusiast in Asia, was the first to hear the transmission. The details were clear: AC3PT was stating that his country had been attacked, that communications had been cut, and was calling for the story to be told to the world. The transmission went on for 8–10 minutes before the line went abruptly dead.30
Geerken sat back, a little non-plussed. He had just established that AC3PT was Palden Thondup Namgyal (address: The Palace, Gangtok, Sikkim) when Swedish ham Thomas Schell SM6AFH called through to say he had overheard the transmission. Another Swede, Stig Parrson SM4JPN, broke in to say he too had overheard it. They all decided to do something about it. While Schell was informing Swedish radio outlets, Geerken contacted a journalist friend of his own in Germany, who recorded Geerken’s report and sent it to Norddeutscher Rundfunk (North-German Broadcasting) and other news agencies.31 In Japan, Nobuyasu Itoh went as far as to record it. Others too, including John Clarke in Kent,* would report hearing transmissions.
The following morning, just before the story started appearing on newspaper front pages around the world, Richard Helms, US Ambassador in Tehran, sent an urgent cable to Bill Saxbe, the Ambassador in Delhi. Helms too had received a report from an Iranian ham. Under the subject line ‘Reported Coup in Sikkim’, the cable read:
1. Local Ham operator has just picked up transmission from Sikkim’s only registered Ham station (T Namgyal, The Palace, Gangtok, Sikkim) following report which we are unable to evaluate: coup d’etat is in progress. Indian army has surrounded palace and is holding Namgyal and others inside building hostage. One Plane has been shot down and there is considerable shooting in the area. Namgyal has asked that word be transmitted to world press as Indian authorities were controlling all communications.
2. As above was being dictated, AP ticker item from New Delhi arrived indicating opposition of Chogyal to Sikkim constitution promulgated last July which gives effective power to Indian-nominated Chief Executive. Although embassy is uninformed about Himalayan affairs, ticker item lends credence to Ham operator’s claim that there is political trouble in Sikkim.32
Indian soldiers were eventually sent into the palace to confiscate the radio set – but by then it was too late. If the Indians had hoped they could stop information coming out by banning journalists from Sikkim, they were sorely mistaken.
Ham radio, managing to circumvent the journalist ban, had got the word out about what was happening in Sikkim.
With the Chogyal safely under ‘protective custody’ in the palace and hundreds of soldiers on the street, Chief Executive Lal announced an emergency Assembly on 10 April. He made absolutely sure before the session began that he could be certain of the outcome.
Two resolutions were prepared. The first was that ‘the institution of the Chogyal is hereby abolished and Sikkim shall henceforth be a constituent unit of India, enjoying a democratic and fully responsible government’. There was no pretence: Delhi had decided that Sikkim must become part of India – and that could only happen with the Chogyal removed from the scene. No one even mentioned that it clearly breached the provisions of the Assembly’s own constitutional document prepared the previous July, which forbade the Assembly from discussing any matters relating to the Chogyal. The second resolution provided for an immediate referendum on the first.
Khatiawara later recalled that the Assembly members were ‘rounded up and, under threat, were escorted to the Assembly . . . and made to sign on the dotted line’.33
The referendum poll, it was announced, would be held four days later, on Monday, 14 April.
‘Rarely in its history since Independence,’ Rustomji later noted, ‘had Delhi operated with such phenomenal dispatch.’
In New York, Hope Cooke received the news from Sikkim with some trepidation. She still cared deeply for the Chogyal and for the country, despite all that had happened. Moreover, her own citizenship status was still unresolved.
The Friends of Sikkim group that had been set up a few weeks earlier quickly galvanised into action. On 10 April, Mr Tung of Debevoise, Plimpton, called on the US representative at the UN.34 He had, he told them, legal opinion from around the world to support the case that Sikkim was not an internal Indian affair. The case should, therefore, be brought before the Security Council immediately to discuss these international ‘acts of aggression’. The request for a UN appeal was quickly dismissed, but Tung’s visit did highlight the tricky situation that the US and the UK now faced. How should they respond, particularly in the face of a possible request for asylum from the Chogyal himself? Advice was immediately issued from Kissinger to London and the Asian embassies:
Q: Would the US grant political asylum to the Chogyal if he requests it?
A: That’s a hypothetical question which I am not prepared to address at this time. (If pressed on US policy on asylum: Without reference to any specific case you know that our policy is to give prompt consideration to requests for political asylum. The Department’s recommendations in such cases are sent to the US immigration and naturalization service which has the legal authority for the final decision.)35
The legal implications of such a request from a country that some argued had never existed were unprecedented.
Kissinger’s team at the State Department must have prayed that it would not happen.
The Indian authorities were well prepared for the inevitable reaction from the other regional powers. The Pakistan government railed against this ‘annexation by force’, which they said should be of ‘great concern to the world and in particular to states of this region . . . what the world feared might be India’s real intention has been co
nfirmed’. The Peking People’s Daily repeated the charge that Mrs Gandhi had ‘long cherished the ambition to annex Sikkim’ and framed the Soviets as the real force behind the action.
But Mrs Gandhi’s government had a plan in place.
On 11 April Foreign Minister Chavan addressed the Indian parliament in a prepared statement. The action had been necessary because the Chogyal had shown himself ‘determined to obstruct the functioning of the democratically elected government through all means at his disposal’. As evidence they cited ‘his statements questioning the validity of the democratic process, and even the Government of Sikkim Act, his propaganda campaign, and efforts to intimidate, terrorise, threaten and even physically harm political leaders and common people in Sikkim in a bid to disrupt law and order, obstruct the functioning of the government and subvert the democratic process’. The demand for the abolition of the position of Chogyal was ‘being studied’ by the government; in the meantime the referendum would, he said, settle the matter of India’s relations with Sikkim once and for all.36
Over the next two days, Gangtok descended once more into a frightening melee of protestors brought in from outside the town to create an atmosphere of intimidation. Sunanda Datta-Ray, the Calcutta-based journalist who was one of those given access to the Sikkimese capital, interviewed bystanders who were convinced that ‘the rhythm and the accents of the cheer-leaders indicated they were professional trade union organisers from the Darjeeling tea gardens and road repair gangs’. Datta-Ray, horrified by the mounting violence, carefully ‘counted 54 Sikkimese Nationalised Transport trucks packed with Nepali in the convoy that wound its way through the streets, the chant of “Palden Namgyal, Sikkim chorr!” (Palden Namgyal, leave Sikkim) clearly audible from the palace’.37
‘They’ve a’ gane clean gyte here,’* wrote Ishbel Ritchie to her mother, quoting Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley. ‘Any news or reports you may have (or will get) really need only the additional comment: aye pu’ the ither yin.’† She again used Scots words to convey her coded message to avoid the censor’s pen: the school was closed for safety, she wrote, due to ‘processions and demos all over the place – mostly skellums from South and West districts – jeep-loads of banshees in the night coming right down to the hostel’.‡ Harold Wilson – who had just declared that he would be holding a referendum on EU membership in the UK – ‘has got a lot to learn from here’, she wrote sarcastically.
Despite 2,000 CRP soldiers, 450 police and an estimated 25,000 soldiers in and around Sikkim, key figures considered close to the palace over the past three decades were dragged into the bazaar, she added. ‘This is what happens when you are leal,’** she added bitterly. One elderly man, Athing-la, who had been key adviser to Tashi, the Chogyal until 1964, was ‘hauled out of his house while four CRP men, ostensibly looking after his safety, watched placidly’.38 He was hauled through the streets and forced to carry a Sikkim Congress flag. The Kazini, horrified by the level of violence that was being meted out (and perhaps feeling some guilt for her own role in creating the trouble), confronted the protestors to get the old man back into her own bungalow and to safety.
Little of this was known to the US embassy, which had to rely mostly on the carefully controlled information coming out of the Indian press. A primary concern was the health of the Chogyal, whose fate no one really knew. ‘The Chogyal remains secluded in his palace, allegedly “ill with flu”,’ was all that they could confirm to Washington. With no reliable official information, they could only report what they read. ‘The Chief Minister Kazi Dorji,’ they went on, ‘was said by the Indian press to have presided over the largest public meeting in Sikkim history at Singtam on April 11, where over 15,000 Sikkimese reportedly “endorsed the Assembly’s resolution”.’39
All this was just the warm-up act for the day of the referendum.
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Fifty-seven polling stations had been set up in record quick-time for the hastily arranged referendum on 14 April 1975. Each polling station was manned by Central Reserve Police. There was no question posed to the estimated 95,000 registered voters. Instead the Assembly resolution of 10 April was printed on pink slips of paper in three languages: English, Nepali and Sikkimese. It was, of course, a single resolution covering two completely unrelated subjects, deliberately conflated to ensure both were passed by those wanting one or the other: the removal of the Chogyal, and accession to India. Voters, many of them illiterate, were confronted with two boxes. One, marked ‘FOR’, was in the same shade of pink as the slips. The other box marked ‘AGAINST’ was white. ‘Voting’ was done in full view of everyone in the polling station; in some, the ‘AGAINST’ box was carefully placed at the far end of the room from the entrance, making it crystal clear that a vote against would be noted.40 Ishbel Ritchie later found out that one of her staff hadn’t cast his vote and she enquired why. He looked at her with beaten eyes. ‘They would have known who I was voting for,’ he replied.
As the votes were being cast, the Indian administration arranged for the Chogyal to be allowed to hold a press conference. By now he was a shadow of his former self, resigned to the inevitability of the surreal events happening around him. In the sitting room of the palace, he tried to summon the motivation to fight for his country for one last time. The sheer volume of abuses made it hard for him to remain coherent. The referendum poll, he said under the harsh lights of the Indian press, would only have legitimacy if it were conducted under a ‘neutral agency’; the Indian election commission, he added, could hardly be termed neutral. The poll was ‘illegal and unconstitutional’, he continued, since it was based on an Assembly resolution that clearly breached the stipulation in the 1974 Government of Sikkim Act, which forbade them from discussing matters regarding the Chogyal and the royal family. The elections of 1974 that had created the Assembly (where the Sikkim Congress had won 31 out of 32 seats) were in any case ‘fantastic’, possible only ‘in a police state’.41 As for the personal charges against him (that he had been involved in an assassination conspiracy and that he was obstructing the democratic process), he challenged anyone to provide evidence or cite a specific instance of either charge. He had managed to use a radio transmitter to get the truth out of the country, he said, despite the outrageous ban on reporting.
Sunanda Datta-Ray later recalled the performance as a ‘faltering defence’. But for Gurbachan Singh, the Indian Political Officer, it had served ‘a propaganda purpose’. The press conference showed, he said in follow-up interviews, that allegations that the Chogyal was under house arrest were clearly wrong. In any case, he added, the Chogyal had not expressed any desire to leave the palace.
‘Official sources’ even found a way to brush aside the stories of the radio broadcast. If they were true, they said in a final insult (the irony of which was not lost on the Chogyal), they were ‘an affront to the 1950 treaty, which gave India exclusive rights over communications to India’.42
The Chogyal was well and truly beaten.
The results of the referendum were announced less than 48 hours after the polling booths were closed: 59,637 slips had been deposited in the pink box; 1,496 in the white box, a margin of support that the US embassy wryly commented was ‘about the same 97% margin’ as the 1974 elections.43
The Kazi was triumphant, carried on a special Air Force plane to Delhi to oversee what he termed ‘the final completion of an act that should have occurred in 1947’.
Mrs Gandhi, challenged to respond to Peking’s accusations of annexation, repeated her earlier criticism of China’s apparent double-standards: ‘China has been saying many things,’ she said haughtily, ‘but they did not say anything when Pakistan moved into Hunza.’
In any case, she asked newsmen, drawing an unfortunate parallel, ‘What have they done to Tibet?’44
On 16 April, Henry Kissinger held his staff meeting in Washington as normal. Proceedings were dominated by discussions of the ignominious evacuation of personnel from Cambodia as the Vietnam War dragged to an end. Bu
t in the final moments, the niggling issue of Sikkim arose once again.
MR ATHERTON: The next step in the disappearance of Sikkim has taken place. There was a plebiscite and as expected they asked to join India as a constituent state.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: What is the Indian obsession with annexing Sikkim?
MR ATHERTON: It is their obsession with the Himalayan frontier.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Then why not Nepal? Is that next?
MR ATHERTON: That would be a little more difficult. They are a member of the United Nations. In fact, I don’t think they really wanted to take this last step, until the Chogyal started to assert more authority than he had. And he made some statements at the coronation of the King of Nepal publicly, which upset the Indians. So they just finally decided that they had gone too far, and disarmed his palace guard. The Sikkim Assembly voted to request inclusion – a plebiscite. And it will become just another Indian state. And the Chogyal will probably – you may well get a request from him to come here since his wife is here.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: We will accept it, won’t we?
MR ATHERTON: I think so. It has a nice esoteric complication, because his wife gave up her citizenship to marry him.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: I think the country can stand the Chogyal of Sikkim.
MR ATHERTON: There are enough people in Congress interested in this.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Is Pell in on this? Who handles Sarawak? That’s Habib. Pell wants 200,000 South Vietnamese to go to Sarawak . . .45
It would prove to be the very last time Henry Kissinger had to think seriously about the Himalayan kingdom that had so frequently and unexpectedly cropped up in conversations with world leaders, from Zhou Enlai to President Bhutto.
