Sikkim

by Andrew Duff

  Bishop and Crozier were both acquainted with Wongchuk, who himself wrote to The Times on 1 May. ‘I have been very pleased to see letters saying what I cannot say without easily being accused of self-interest,’ he wrote, ‘namely that my father, the Chogyal of Sikkim, is the very opposite of a feudal and outdated monarch ruthlessly suppressing the people of Sikkim.’ The referendum poll, he wrote (citing Jeremy Thorpe in support of his view) was ‘a gross distortion of the truth [designed] to give a superficial legality to a series of actions over the past year and a half by a country which in the past has been the first to condemn imperial ambitions in the actions of others’. His father had always wanted friendly relations with India, but had – understandably – ‘stopped short of jumping right into the tiger’s mouth’.

  Amid this stream of organised support for Thondup, two dissenting voices also wrote in to The Times. The first was G. S. Bhargava, then a research associate at the Institute of International Strategic Studies who would go on to become an eminent Indian journalist and a government officer in the late 1970s. Bhargava acknowledged the ‘crudeness’ of the Indian action, but defended the Indian government, who could not be expected to tolerate the Chogyal’s discussions in Nepal about a ‘Himalayan Federation’. The second was John Lall, the man who had been the first dewan of Sikkim. He also tried to defend the Indian position in the face of Wongchuk’s tightly argued accusations. What had taken place was simply ‘the accession of the state [of Sikkim] twenty five years too late’. It had been ‘Delhi’s folly’, he said, to tolerate the Chogyal’s nation-building in the 1960s, in particular allowing him ‘to recruit three companies of palace guards, when a squad or at most a small platoon was all that his security demanded’.

  The last word in The Times correspondence was from Hugh Richardson, the man who had been the last British resident in Tibet. He refuted Lall’s letter and brought discussion to a halt with a typically pithy and precise response, coruscating the Indian government for being party to ‘proceedings [which] call up the ghosts of Hyderabad and Goa’.*

  It was a telling jab in the ribs for the Indian leadership.

  None of these protests could change the facts of the matter. Mrs Gandhi’s government had gambled – and won. It had created the appearance of a Sikkimese appeal to be part of the Indian Union; and it had calculated that since Sikkim had no seat at the UN, the issue would never come under discussion there. The incorporation of Sikkim appeared to be a fait accompli, just one among many examples of Indira Gandhi’s increasingly autocratic style of government. During the first half of 1975, she had become the focus of mass discontent across the country. Her political opponent J. P. Narayan organised a mass rally in Delhi calling for her resignation, while Morarji Desai went on hunger strike to protest at her failure to hold elections in Gujarat. In March she appeared in court in a case in which she was accused of electoral malpractice.

  It was not just at home that she was coming under pressure. Relations with the Americans, too, were at such a low ebb that some in India had alleged that American’s presence on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia might presage an invasion by sea. Bill Saxbe, the US Ambassador, chose an interview with the New York Times correspondent in Delhi to make his frank views known. The interview was soon picked up by the Hindu newspaper. If India continued to treat the US in such a ‘brittle way’, Saxbe said, the US Congress and administration ‘may begin asking why they should bother about India’. ‘I have been here two months,’ he continued,

  and I have yet to see any official or press reference to the US as a friendly nation. You have a curious combination of factors here. When I call on cabinet ministers, they all love to talk about their sons and daughters and sons-in-law in the US and how well they like it there. The next thing I read in the papers is that these same people are denouncing the US . . . It is not easy to understand. I do not think it is personal – I hear all kinds of stories – there are people who write in the press that it is all a build-up for a campaign. But because it is a necessary condition for Indian politicians, should we adjust to abuse?14

  If such negative sentiment from his Indian counterparts continued, Saxbe said, the US would have to consider cancelling a forthcoming visit from President Ford. He also suggested darkly to the interviewer that ‘in Washington, US officials now openly say that though they have withheld comment on Sikkim so far, they may not do so any longer’.

  But despite the fighting words, the US had no real intention of raising Sikkim’s status as an issue. Washington would never change its position – to have ‘no position’ – on Sikkim.

  Especially after politics in India took a dramatic and unprecedented turn towards the end of June.

  -3-

  On 25 June 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a countrywide Emergency under Article 352 of the Indian constitution.*

  Her problems had come to a head two weeks earlier on 12 June 1975, when she learnt that she had been found guilty of electoral malpractice in the 1971 election. The charge was a minor one, but her opponents were clear on what was required – she must resign as prime minister. Thinking she could ride out the protests by appealing the verdict, Indira delayed. Her political opponents were outraged. On the 24th, her intelligence advisers told her that her old foe, J. P. Narayan, was going to ‘call upon the police and army in Delhi to mutiny’ the following day.15 She told her allies that she feared chaos on the streets. Worse, she told the Chief Minister of Bengal that the intelligence reports had implicated the CIA. She was ‘genuinely afraid that she would be overthrown and destroyed in the same way Chile’s CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet had staged a coup against Salvador Allende in 1973’.16

  Technically, the country had been under an Emergency since the Bangladeshi crisis in 1971, but she argued that the 1971 Emergency was only an external one. Now she declared an internal one as well, which gave her almost unlimited powers of legislation. It was a devastating move against her opponents: over the next 24 hours thousands were arrested, including J.P. Narayan and Morarji Desai.

  Six weeks earlier, the Constitutional Amendment Bill making Sikkim the 22nd state had passed its final hurdle, being ratified by 13 states and receiving presidential assent on 15 May.

  The Emergency, therefore, came into force in Sikkim just as it did across the rest of India, but there was still no universal clarity across the branches of the Indian government as to the status of Sikkim. In his letter to The Times in June, shortly before the declaration of the Emergency, Hugh Richardson, reminded readers that before 1947 Sikkim had been dealt with by the Foreign, and not the Political, department. In the period from 1947 to 1975 Sikkim hovered in a twilight world between Home and Foreign departments. After the Constitutional Amendment had been passed, there should in theory have been no doubt: Sikkim was a state of India.

  But confusion persisted. A week after Sikkim’s status had been finalised under Indian law, Simon Abrahams (who later married Thondup’s daughter Yangchen) went to the Indian embassy to apply for a visa. He was told that since Sikkim was a restricted area approval could only be given by the Ministry of External Affairs. As late as December 1978, when Nari Rustomji called 180, the number for connecting to local calls within India, he was told to ring 186, the number for international calls. When he did so, he was ‘informed that I should know that Sikkim is in India and not waste everyone’s time by calling 186’. It took him four days to get through.17

  One area where there was less confusion was in the Indian intelligence services. After May 1975, it was the Intelligence Branch (the home intelligence service) that was given the job of ‘strengthening the post-merger relationship between Delhi and Gangtok and to consolidate the gains of the merger’. The man posted to Gangtok on 5 June 1975 as ‘Officer on Special Duty’ was Maloy Krishna Dhar.18 He had recently completed an assignment dealing with the separatist movement in the north-east Indian state of Nagaland.

  Dhar promptly set about understanding the situation in Sikkim. He immediately saw that the Kazi was
deeply conflicted. The Kazi ‘had reluctantly committed himself to the merger of Sikkim with India . . . Once caught into the web of Delhi’s design [he] had no option but to drift along, though he did not want outright abolition of the identity of Sikkim.’ Dhar watched the Kazi struggle as the kingdom was suddenly ‘flooded with money, from plan and non-plan budgetary allocations’. Corruption mushroomed, reaching every corner of the state. The Kazini too, Dhar noticed, was deeply unhappy despite her public proclamations of loyalty to Delhi:

  As I penetrated closer to the hearts and thoughts of the Kazi I was left in no doubt that Kazi Lhendup [Dorji] and Kazini Eliza Maria had not really bargained for the merger of Sikkim with India. They wanted the Chogyal out and continuation of Sikkim as a protectorate of Indian with a democratically elected government and at worst a constitutional monarchy.19

  Here was the tragedy of Sikkim: there was virtually no one in Sikkim itself who believed in what had taken place in April 1975.

  As soon as the Emergency commenced in June, the pressure on the Chogyal was deliberately increased. Dhar found himself ‘asked by the Governor* to submit regular reports on the activities of the Chogyal, Crown Prince and the members of the gentry close to him’. When he was later asked by a senior officer in Delhi to submit reports on ‘the pro-Chinese activities of the former king and CIA operations in Sikkim from its Calcutta and Kathmandu bases’, he ‘declined to oblige, as I had no clue about such CIA and Chinese operations in Sikkim’. Dhar could not help but feel sympathy for Thondup. Everyone knew that Thondup had ‘played his cards wrong’ and that he had been ‘no match for the wily games of the Foreign Office, RAW and the huge presence of the Indian army’.

  In Delhi, Bill Saxbe – in between rounds of golf† – was still trying to understand the true implications of Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency. The Americans, along with many other nations, were flummoxed by the reaction from the Indian public. Although there were those who decried Indira’s actions, the overall impression was that many in India welcomed the strength of leadership she had shown.

  Saxbe noticed an unexpected shift, too, in Mrs Gandhi’s attitude to the US. In a long cable to Washington entitled ‘The Prime Minister: She loves us; She loves us not?’, he expressed some surprise at a series of ‘favourable gestures’ towards the Americans since the Emergency had been declared. But he cautioned against over-optimism: ‘Lest we become giddy with success, there is some balance as always with the US on the receiving end of some slanderous attacks in the local Communist press which appears to remain largely unchecked by censorship.’ Even the accusations of CIA involvement in South-east Asian affairs had blessedly receded: Mrs Gandhi, who had been open about alleging interference in the past, now reduced her rhetoric by saying merely that ‘sometimes there are presences which cannot be proved’.20

  With signs of an unexpected upturn in Indo-US relations, Saxbe felt no need to pursue the question of Sikkim. But he came under some pressure to do so, particularly from Senator Claiborne Pell, cousin to John Train (the friend of Hope Cooke’s running the Friends of Sikkim), and a long-standing member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Pell assiduously sought to understand what had really happened in Sikkim. In August, he was a member of a Committee delegation visiting Beijing. During a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Vice-Premier, Pell asked pointedly why the Chinese had failed to bring the matter up with the UN. Deng replied, with typical pragmatism, that he didn’t think the Security Council had the wherewithal to deal with such a matter; besides, he felt that ‘labeling India’s action as a clear act of aggression sufficed’. But, he added mischievously, he thought it was a ‘good thing, because it revealed the nature of the Gandhi government’.21

  More worrying for Saxbe and President Ford’s US administration was when Pell brought up the matter during a bridge-building visit from Indian Foreign Minister Chavan in October, asking some ‘sharp questions on Sikkim’. When Kissinger’s Department of State subsequently pushed – under pressure from Pell again – for Saxbe to find out more about Thondup’s welfare from the Ministry of External Affairs, Saxbe brusquely brushed them away, telling them:

  Frankly, we have no peg on which to hang further enquiries about the Chogyal other than his being married to an American citizen, and we are not getting any enquiries from her. Indeed, the Indians know of Pell’s interest in the Chogyal and Sikkim but they also know it is a political interest. The MEA’s Political Officer in Sikkim has closed down his office and communications with the MEA on Sikkim are referred to the Home Ministry for response. Are you sure you want us to pursue the Chogyal’s ‘current situation’ with the Home Ministry?22

  *

  Britain’s politicians, meanwhile, had their own problems to worry about. Events in a small corner of the Himalayas that was once a lynchpin in the northern frontier of its Indian Empire were of little practical concern as the Wilson Government focused on its own survival amid global economic turmoil and the surprising outcome of the vote on the European Common Market, in favour of continued membership. Nevertheless, Jim Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary who would soon take up the cudgels as Prime Minister, requested a political report on Sikkim. The resulting document – running to 31 pages – was drafted by Oliver Forster, the acting British High Commissioner, a man who, according to a colleague, ‘always liked to please’. Forster, who would end his career as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Pakistan, saw the report as an opportunity to show what he could do. It was, he wrote, ‘self-evident’ that Mrs Gandhi could have prevented the events that had taken place. But, he added, ‘as an exercise in realpolitik, India’s handling of the Sikkim situation must be a cause of moderate self-satisfaction for those concerned’.23 Britain’s attitude to Sikkim in the post-colonial world was summed up in the final paragraph:

  All in all, the world may be a little worse off for the loss of a Shangrila, ruled benignly but in the interests of a small minority by a Buddhist prince with an American wife and a liking for alcohol. The Indian action may seem a little crude and Indian self-justification somewhat nauseating, but no British interests were involved, no deep moral issues were at stake and only one life was lost, probably accidentally. In the days of British India we would have done just the same, and frequently did with recalcitrant Maharajahs, though one may hope a little earlier and with fewer exclamations at our own virtues. In the event, we successfully kept out of the whole business and such support as the Chogyal has received in the correspondence columns of The Times has not been sufficient to offend Indian sensitivities.24

  A couple of months after Forster’s report, an opportunity unexpectedly arose to understand a little more about what was going on in Sikkim when a British Army officer, Brigadier Sinclair, found himself diverted there during an Indian National Defence College programme. His Indian hosts decided to demonstrate the progress they were making in their newest state.

  ‘The tour programme was a masterpiece of security,’ he wrote, tongue-in-cheek. Over six days, it included:

  • three briefings

  • two interviews

  • three visits to monasteries

  • one golf match

  • twelve very heavy mess luncheons and dinners where drink was dispensed with aggressive hospitality [and]

  • a visit to a distillery without which no tour by Indian officers is complete.

  Sinclair continued: ‘The briefing at 17 Mountain Division by the GOC [General Officer Commanding] took four full minutes followed by the inevitable tea, biscuits and cashew nuts for the remaining twenty six minutes.’

  His report contained valuable military intelligence about the border area, under headings such as ‘Picquets and Patrols’, ‘Tactical Positions’ and ‘Modern Ground sensors,’ but towards the end of the tour he was given an unexpected chance to meet the Kazi and Kazini, about whom he had heard so much. The short interview confirmed much that the British intelligence agencies already knew about the emasculated new Chief Minister of Sikkim – and the woman b
ehind him:

  Throughout the interview the use of first person singular by her was most evident, and one wonders to what extent she runs Sikkim and not her husband. He obviously was very wise about Sikkim’s internal affairs, but when any question turned on state affairs with Delhi or Indian affairs generally then she answers with no reference to her husband. She is an Indian chauvinist par excellence! Her views on the Chogyal, the CIA, Western Intelligence Agencies, Dr Henry Kissinger, President Ford, Pakistan and the legacy of the British Raj are not worth repeating in this report, but one is forced to wonder how a person who reputedly has a special relationship with Mrs Gandhi is so unbalanced.25

  -4-

  In Gangtok, Thondup cut a sorry figure. His main occupations were now playing football and mowing grass.26 He let his hair lengthen, and grew a small, wispy beard. Since the Indian government had never admitted he was ever under house arrest in the first place, they could not release him from the same. But access to the Palace was carefully monitored. Captain Yongda, for instance, who had been released in late April (no charges were ever brought against him, making a mockery of his arrest), was unable to see the man he had once served.

  Gradually, however, Thondup was allowed to lead a more normal life. He found his new circumstances hard to take, in particular as it dawned on him that if he had removed himself from the picture Sikkim might have had a greater chance of surviving as a permanent entity. The imposition of the Emergency vindicated his suspicions of Mrs Gandhi’s intentions. He resigned himself to focusing on agreeing a settlement with the Indian government about his own future to protect his family’s interests. Shortly after the Constitutional Amendment, his lands had passed to the Sikkim government, but the question of family’s right to financial compensation would rumble on for decades.