Sikkim

by Andrew Duff

  Once he had the freedom to move about, Thondup found solace in his flat in Wood Street in Calcutta, from where he could see friends and supporters, including the journalist Sunanda Datta-Ray, and get medical help for an increasing number of illnesses. But it was a strange existence: Datta-Ray later recalled the harsh surveillance during the Emergency: ‘Very few people could see him then; and a formidable circle of intelligence officials surrounded him always on visits to Calcutta or New Delhi. They kept constant watch at the door of his Wood Street flat, drove dinner guests away from his table in the Grand Hotel, and set up a watching post when he ate in the Calcutta Club.’27 The restrictions were often petty, but somehow Thondup found ways to maintain his dignity. When his Indian minders in Calcutta refused to let him fly the Sikkim flag on his car, he responded in typical style: he told them he would walk while they drove. An assistant walked alongside him, carrying the Sikkim flag.

  As the months passed, Thondup became more and more concerned about his own – and his family’s – financial future. There had been no talk of a settlement for him, and, with the Emergency still in force, he was understandably anxious.

  In November 1975, an opportunity arose to discuss the matter with Indira Gandhi. The Indian prime minister had gone from strength to strength during the first five months of the Emergency, cultivating a more personal style of leadership than ever. Her birthday in November offered an opportunity to consolidate her gains with a suitably regal celebration. But few expected her to choose Gangtok in Sikkim as a venue for the celebrations.

  In the US embassy, Bill Saxbe (who was now, like his predecessor, adept at the piquant ‘telegram from Delhi’) captured the sense of majesty surrounding the carefully choreographed visit. His cable was entitled, with high irony, ‘Let us all praise Indira, particularly on her birthday’.

  We are struck by the contrast as we review accounts of the low-key 1974 observance of Mrs Gandhi’s birthday with this year’s ‘Glorianna’ tributes. Officially the Prime Minister spent a ‘quiet birthday’ in Sikkim yesterday along with members of her family. Actually Sikkim Chief Minister Dorji and his cabinet colleagues called and presented bouquets. Gangtok was elaborately festooned for her arrival, and large crowds appeared to greet her according to press accounts. Meanwhile in New Delhi President Ahmed addressed an invited audience at the Rashtrapati Bhavan where he released post birthday commemoration publications: a cartoon biography, a pictorial album, a special collection of tributes . . . The President said that Mrs Gandhi’s popularity was increasing every day in spite of the ‘calumnies’ by her enemies. The Congress Party organs vied with each other in producing pledges and observances to mark the day while, according to the press, in most state capitals Chief Ministers extolled Mrs Gandhi’s leadership and achievements. Information Minister V.C. Shukla paid perhaps the most fulsome tribute, declaring ‘It would not be out of place to say that Indira Gandhi is one of the greatest leaders of present times, and again, that the formative stage of her mental development was when she was in her teens.’

  While the president and the Emergency’s ministers were piling on the tributes, Mrs Gandhi gave a press conference in Gangtok in which she attempted – not so subtly – to justify the takeover earlier in the year by talking up the threat from China. ‘We have always sought amity and good relations even with our enemy,’ she said, painting herself as a rejected lover. ‘But unfortunately our hands of friendship have so far been spurned.’ On her return from a helicopter flight up to forward areas to meet with Indian soldiers on the northern border with Tibet, she re-emphasised the dangerous possibility for subversion: ‘In any border state like Sikkim,’ she warned, ‘it is not just a question of invasion but there are other ways of influencing the situation.’

  It was the kind of bravura performance that Thondup would once have mocked over dinner with friends. But now he was reduced to meeting privately with Indira to try and resolve the question of his finances. The American embassy received a report of what had transpired from Karma Topden, Thondup’s former intelligence chief, now resident in Calcutta and in regular contact with the US consular officer. Mrs Gandhi, perhaps trying to scotch once and for all the possibility that Thondup could become a figurehead for protest, offered the former ruler a deal. If he would ‘assent’ to the incorporation of Sikkim into India, he could be ‘assured of financial assistance’. Thondup turned the offer down, particularly when Mrs Gandhi mentioned ‘an American girl’ who she said she knew he had met in Calcutta ‘and warned him against continuing his contacts with the CIA and being a trouble-maker’.28 He refused point-blank to stoop to such blackmail. He had no intention of letting Mrs Gandhi interfere with his active social life.

  The following day there were persistent attempts from foreign journalists in Gangtok trying to find out what had happened in the meeting. The New York Times reporter managed to get him to stop his car. In an article entitled ‘Sikkim’s Ex-King Virtual Prisoner’, he reported that Thondup wound down the window to tell him that he was ‘under instructions not to make any public comments’. Moreover, he added, rumours that he was becoming an ‘alcoholic recluse’ were unfounded.

  ‘I’m well and I’m not drunk,’ he protested.29

  While Thondup protested his sobriety in Gangtok, his former wife Hope Cooke was fretting more than ever over the question of her nationality.

  The renunciation of her US citizenship in 1963 in favour of a putative Sikkimese one had seemed sensible at the time; now it looked like a grave error. The bill she had persuaded her old friends Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Congressman James Symington to sponsor had passed easily through the Senate on 30 October. But when it got bogged down for eight months in Congress, Hope felt ‘mortified that my beloved country was doing this to me. I felt that in Sikkim I’d upheld some of the best traits of the Americans, and since returning I had been almost reverently grateful for our asylum.’30

  The problem for some Congressmen was the bizarre nature of what she was asking: House consideration of a bill that concerned a single American – and of a matter of nationality that many felt she had brought upon herself.

  It took a further six months to resolve the difficulties. Finally, on 15 June 1976, Private Law 94-52 received the assent of President Ford. Thirteen years earlier an article in McCall’s about her wedding had started with the words: ‘I remember how I felt when I realised that I was no longer an American.’31 Now, at the age of 36, all Hope Cooke felt was relief as she was ‘lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence’ once more.

  A couple of days later, she gave an interview to the New York Times from the New York apartment that had become her new home. Dressed in ‘chocolate-coloured t-shirt, white cotton slacks and canvas espadrilles’ and speaking in her trademark ‘low, whispery voice’, she told the newspaper that she was now just a ‘regular New Yorker’, relived to be ‘no longer in a state of suspense’. Her children, the reporter noticed, were ‘thoroughly Americanised. Yesterday morning, dressed in shorts, sneakers and Captain Marvel and Washington Redskins t-shirts, they chatted in unaccented English about the lemonade stand they plan to open on the sidewalk.’

  Asked if she had plans to return to Sikkim, she was unequivocal: ‘I can’t go back. I live here now. I am rooted here now.’32

  -5-

  In February 1976, Mrs Gandhi postponed the planned elections and declared that the Emergency would continue to ‘consolidate the gains’ that had been won since it was first declared eight months previously. Many suspected the influence of her headstrong son Sanjay in the decision to ‘suspend democracy’ for a prolonged period.

  A few days later the American embassy reported that it had heard Thondup had been given ‘100,000 rupees (about $11,500) to pay outstanding bills and salaries’. They assumed that ‘the Chogyal has adopted the type of cooperative attitude that he was advised by Mrs Gandhi to take during her visit to Sikkim’. In fact, Thondup was getting increasingly morose about the parlous state of his o
wn finances while he watched Delhi’s money pour into Sikkim. It was galling, too, to watch a huge army parade on 4 April, the day that had always been a national day of celebration of his own birthday; no less soul-destroying for Thondup was the inaugural ‘National Integration Day’ held in May on the anniversary of the date that Sikkim had joined the Indian Union.

  By September, Thondup was thoroughly depressed. Nari Rustomji, his old friend who had been dewan in the 1950s, was acting as a go-between in an effort to help him find a settlement but was finding it hard to persuade Thondup to agree to anything. But for Thondup the matter was one of principle: ‘It is demeaning having to beg for money but maybe that is the way it is fixed. It is not shameful as they are “on account” payments, whatever that means, pending our settlement. But it does put us in one big fix.’33

  Matters came to an ugly head in October. On the evening of the 18th, Thondup was found unconscious by one of his servants, who immediately shouted for Crown Prince Tenzing and the family doctor. The doctor knew straight away that he was witnessing an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. Thondup was flown immediately to Calcutta, where he spent a week convalescing in Bellevue Nursing Home while the Indian media speculated on what had happened. Whether the overdose was planned or not, it was undoubtedly a reflection of his troubled state of mind.

  Within a week Thondup had made a full recovery, but his mental fragility had been splashed across the Indian newspapers, now clear for all to see.

  As Thondup recovered from his overdose, he wrote to Rustomji that his financial situation was now ‘critical, with literally no money in the kitty’. His main concern was for his children, for whom the Government of India deliberately held back foreign exchange so that he could fund ‘only 25% of their needs’. Desperate to see the two youngest again after he had made a full recovery, he petitioned the Government of India for renewal of his passport (as Chogyal he had always travelled on a diplomatic one) and for permission to travel to the United States. He was turned down. As Hope was – understandably – not keen to let them travel to Sikkim, Thondup had no option but to accept effective estrangement from the children of his second marriage.

  It was not easy either for Thondup to watch the mess that was developing politically in Sikkim – and across India. The Kazi, following a meeting with Indira Gandhi during her November 1975 birthday visit to Sikkim, had been persuaded to merge his party with Indira Gandhi’s Indian National Congress in late 1975. If it was intended to legitimise his actions, it had the opposite effect, only increasing the taunts in the Gangtok bazaar that the Kazi and his government were ‘desh bechoa’ (sellers of the nation).

  Maloy Dhar, the Indian Intelligence Branch officer in Gangtok, almost felt sorry for the Sikkimese leader, now well into his seventies:

  Two indomitable women, Indira and Elisa Maria [the Kazini] had put [the] Kazi on a tiger and he did not know how to disembark. He was left with no option but to swim along with the current that flowed from Delhi. He turned to Delhi for everything and started neglecting the Nepali forces that had the potential of challenging his actions.34

  Those Nepali forces, of course, were equally worrying for Indira’s government. Delhi, therefore, also sought to neutralise Khatiawara – who was now bitterly opposed to the Kazi and Kazini, and could emerge as a rival. When Indira and her family visited Gangtok again to celebrate her 59th birthday, her son Sanjay (by now as much, if not more, in control of the reins of government as his mother) tried to persuade Khatiawara to become ‘an important functionary in the Indian Youth Congress’, which he was now running.* It was a move that Dhar, who knew Khatiawara’s reputation, advised against. He was right: the move backfired, instead providing Khatiawara with the ‘connections to build up a firewall’ against the Kazi, which, by early 1977, he turned into support for a new party, Congress for Democracy.

  Behind the scenes, the Kazini despaired of the horribly confused situation. She had now built up an unlikely friendship – based on a shared nationality – with Ishbel Ritchie. By December 1976, Ishbel was writing to her mother of the increasing number of visits and the Kazini’s obvious distress. ‘I think it does her good to unburden herself to a sympathetic ear . . . both she and the Kazi-sahib are over-working,’ she wrote.

  By February 1977 even Indira Gandhi realised that time was up on the Emergency. She announced prime ministerial elections for March. The Congress Party was badly beaten. By prolonging the Emergency the previous year, Mrs Gandhi had rapidly lost the trust of the Indian people. The Janata Party, led by the elderly Morarji Desai, trounced her, winning 299 seats to 153 for Congress.

  The Janata victory across India prompted the Kazi to perform another remarkable act of political prostitution. The word soon filtered through from Delhi that the funds that had been pouring into the state would dry up unless the Kazi joined Janata. He duly did so within days of the general election announcement, calculating that this would take the wind out of the sails of Khatiawara and his new party – which it did.

  But the suspension of the Emergency had much bigger consequences for Sikkim – and for the Kazi. In Delhi, despite Janata’s comprehensive victory, Morarji Desai was well aware that he needed to exorcise Indira Gandhi and consign her to political exile for ever. He explored every avenue to do so and soon alighted on what he felt was a very obvious symbol of all that had been wrong with Indira’s government even before she had declared the Emergency: her actions in Sikkim.

  It did not take long for word to reach Gangtok that something was in the offing.

  Suddenly Thondup had a new lease of life. He sped down to Calcutta to sound out his friends about what might be possible. Many tried to calm him down, warning that it would be a ‘tough road’ to get back what had been lost. But no one could deny that there was hope in the air. C. R. Irani, the editor of the Statesman newspaper and a friend to Thondup, promised to sound out Desai.

  Meanwhile in London, Wangchuk – who was proving to be highly astute and politically minded – arranged to meet with the old campaigner J. P. Narayan. He then persuaded the Daily Express in London to run an article reporting that in their brief conversation Narayan had told him that ‘he had always felt that Sikkim should be treated differently from other states’ and that, while he was not in government, he would help by trying ‘to prevail upon the existing administration to that effect’.35

  But it was not only the Namgyal family who were wondering if the change of government in Delhi might affect the situation in Sikkim. Khatiawara, the man who had been the main driver behind the agitation in 1973 and a leading light in arranging the circumstances for the takeover in 1975, now calculated that it was time to tell the truth.

  In August 1977, Khatiawara wrote an extraordinary memo to the new Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai. In it, he and nine others revealed just how contrived the events between 1973 and 1975 had been. He went through the events stage by stage, admitting that the assembly had been ‘forced’ to pass the important bills in June 1974, and that in the referendum itself most people had believed they were only voting on the future of the Chogyal, not on the question of merging with India. The referendum in April 1975 had been ‘unconstitutional and illegal’ and the Sikkimese people had been ‘befooled and deceived’. The ‘Merger with India’, he concluded, ‘imposed on us a political trickery and debauchery, for no one, however meek or small, has ever in the entire history of the world, signed away his country as has been made to appear to have been done by the Sikkimese leaders.’

  The document was deeply politically motivated – Khatiawara had high ambitions. But no one could now dispute that the merger had been forced on the Sikkimese people through duplicity.

  The following month, in September 1977, 81-year-old Morarji Desai set up the Shah Commission to inquire into ‘excesses, malpractices and misdeeds during the Emergency or in the days immediately preceding [it]’.36 He thought he had an embarrassment of riches with which to pursue Mrs Gandhi. No one was in any doubt that the Commission’s mai
n aim was to end her political career for good.

  But the process was badly handled. Shortly before she was due to appear at the enquiry, Mrs Gandhi was arrested on separate spurious charges. Her lawyers made short shrift of them. When they were dismissed, she managed to portray herself as a victimised martyr, being persecuted for taking the decisions that she had felt to be right at the time. She used the sympathy generated to force another split in the Congress Party. Now, Congress was split again: this time into Congress (I) – for Indira – and Congress (S).37 When Justice Shah eventually got her to appear in front of the Commission in January 1978, her lawyer told the hearings that since they were ‘illegal and unconstitutional’, she would not be testifying. With its raison d’être gone, the Commission packed up on 20 February 1978. The whole thing had been a fiasco.

  Still searching to find a way to beat his old political foe, Desai returned to the issue of Sikkim.

  On 7 March 1978 he took the extraordinary step of admitting that India should not have annexed the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim in 1975. The New York Times ran the story the following day under the headline ‘Desai Deplores Annexation of Sikkim, But Says He Cannot Undo It’:

  It was ‘not a desirable step’ said the Prime Minster, in an interview, of India’s absorption of Sikkim. ‘But it has been accomplished, and most of the people there wanted it,’ he went on. He said the reason was that the former ruler or Chogyal of Sikkim, 53-year-old Palden Thondup Namgyal, was not popular with his people.