Smash and Grab- Annexation of Sikkim Read online

  The twentieth century was a time of tectonic change along the 1,500-mile sweep of the mountains Kalidasa called a gigantic measuring rod striding the earth from ocean to ocean. Mao Tse-tung’s ‘liberation’ of Tibet (from whom? wondered a bemused Jawaharlal Nehru) in the north destroyed a traditional buffer state, converted a monastic backwater into a military base to project power into South Asia, and brought the world’s two most populous nations, both nuclear-armed, face to face across the Himalayas. It also created the ‘Tibetan question.’ A diaspora of more than 100,000 Tibetans gives unrest a global dimension. To the south, some 700,000 Nepalese spilling out of their homeland every year are challenging borders and demanding political recognition of their ethnicity. Not for nothing did British writers call these border marches ‘the Asian Balkans’ and ‘the Belgium of Asia’.

  Bhutan, the Dragon kingdom, is the region’s success story. Sole survivor of the five monarchies that once nestled in the Himalayas, it is a newcomer in royal circles. Sikkim and Bhutan were bracketed together for a long time. Both were Buddhist kingdoms, their royal families closely related. They faced similar challenges from India, China and Nepal. But they were temperamentally different, and some believe their fortunes illustrate the difference personality can make to diplomacy. That is true only up to a point. Personal equations seldom counter legal and political factors. The Chogyal’s ineptness or the Gyalmo’s zeal in furthering her husband’s aspirations might have irritated New Delhi but would not in themselves have sanctioned intervention. Neither would the machinations of the chief minister, Kazi Lendhup Dorji, better known as ‘L.D. Kazi’, have made this possible. Even the virulent propaganda against the Chogyal launched by Kazi’s European wife, who exulted in styling herself ‘Kazini Saheba Elisa-Maria Dorji Khangsarpa of Chakung’, was more rumbustious than decisive.

  What really mattered was a substantive political difference between the seemingly identical kingdoms. The fourth Druk gyalpo, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, now referred to with irreverent affection as K4, put his finger on this crucial factor. ‘Sikkim didn’t have the same treaty,’ he reminded me laconically on the eve of his coronation in 1974. He was then only nineteen but wise beyond his years.

  King Jigme’s astute observation contradicted the illusion that official publications like Bhutan and Sikkim (May 1968) nurtured. Even the British blurred differences. After signing the treaty of Punakha with the first Druk gyalpo on 8 January 1910, Sir Charles Bell, the PO with additional responsibility in those days for Bhutan and Tibet, cabled back ecstatically: ‘By one o’clock the signing and sealing of the Treaty were over and Bhutan was incorporated in the British Empire.’ As Nirmala Das points out in The Dragon Country , ‘one cannot deny that Bhutan became a subservient state of the British and the latter interpreted the treaty of Punakha as it suited them’.

  Smaller Sikkim actually seemed grander and more modern then. The chogyals were an ancient dynasty when Ugyen Wangchuck became the first Druk gyalpo on 17 December 1907. Their elaborate court rituals were modelled on Manchu protocol. They were educated by Western governesses and tutors and were fluent in English. Sikkim had a settled system of revenue collection, an administrative hierarchy, written records, roads, and inspection bungalows for touring officials. Bhutan’s planning process was launched in 1961 with a 170-million Five-year Plan when Sikkim’s First Plan was ending.

  However, Sikkim was India’s protectorate. The treaty signed on 5 December 1950 may have been of questionable validity since India refused to register it with the United Nations but it gave India control of the kingdom’s external relations, defence and communications. A dos-and-don’ts letter from Harishwar Dayal, the first Indian PO, further restricted the durbar’s freedom while the Indian army virtually took over his kingdom’s northern and eastern districts bordering China. All this is fleshed out in Smash and Grab, which is basically the story of how the last Chogyal’s efforts to win a greater measure of independence played into the hands of RAW, the Research and Analysis Wing of the cabinet, as India’s external intelligence service is called.

  Bhutan only agreed under Article 2 of the treaty signed on 8 August 1949 ‘to be guided by the advice of India’ in conducting its foreign policy. After a while even this seemed irksome to the Bhutanese. India’s defeat at China’s hands in 1962 emboldened them to ask for a new treaty. Finding New Delhi unresponsive, the Bhutanese sent an aide memoire saying they interpreted Article 2 to mean Bhutan was free to seek India’s advice on any matter it chose but was also free not to accept the advice given. New Delhi did not reply but realised the need for flexibility. Queen Kesang’s cosmopolitan Dorji siblings, then the power behind the Dragon throne, were always a step ahead.

  Taking back the government after her brother, Prime Minister Jigmie Dorji, was mysteriously murdered in April 1964, King Jigme Dorje endeared himself to New Delhi. He established his democratic credentials with a law making the monarchy subject to a three-yearly vote of confidence. He ensured South Block’s cooperation by engaging a senior Indian diplomat to represent Bhutan at the United Nations and steer it through to full membership. Indira Gandhi was immensely gratified when he toured Bangladesh refugee camps. Bhutan was the first country after India to recognise the infant republic.

  K4, who succeeded to the throne in 1972, brilliantly accomplished the seemingly irreconcilable feats of both moving closer to India while also pushing farther on the road to complete independence. He anticipated the future by ending a century of royal absolutism and foisting a democratic constitution on his somewhat bewildered subjects. He also convinced New Delhi through prolonged track-two negotiations that Article 2 of the India–Bhutan treaty was impracticable and would give a handle to India’s enemies (read China). Instead of ‘advice’, a new Article 2 in the treaty of peace and friendship in perpetuity which replaced the 1949 treaty on 8 February 2007 spoke of ‘abiding ties of close friendship and cooperation.’ It committed both governments to not allowing their territory to be used ‘for activities harmful to the national security and interests of the other’. Bhutanese dissidents could no longer operate from north Bengal. More important, China, the kingdom’s only other neighbour, was denied a foothold in Bhutan.

  China is as much Banquo’s ghost in Indo-Bhutanese ties as it was in Indo-Sikkimese relations. India had previously represented Bhutan in negotiations with China, but was excluded when Sino-Bhutanese talks to discuss the undemarcated 470-km border began in 1984. Twenty rounds of negotiations appear to have eliminated most differences but though Bhutan’s sovereign status and United Nations membership limit India’s options, the Bhutanese remain mindful of Indian sensitivities. They have so far resisted Chinese pressure to enter into formal diplomatic relations and publicly sign a border agreement. A stable new Bhutan had come into being by 2008 when K4’s eldest son, twenty-eight-year-old Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuk, was crowned fifth Druk gyalpo (K5). Mark of New Delhi’s high esteem for a country that claims to be India’s only reliable friend in South Asia, K5 was the chief guest at the dazzling parade when India celebrated her sixty-fourth Republic Day in 2013.

  The new Bhutan was much better able to tackle the historical challenge of Nepalese immigration that destroyed the old Sikkim. While Bhutan and Sikkim were cultural fragments of Buddhist Central Asia spilling into South Asia, race, language and religion made Nepal a South Asian island in Central Asia. Now Nepal is a republic in turmoil and the entire sub-Himalayan tract from Meghalaya in the east to Uttarkhand in the west bears witness to the restless Nepalese quest for better living conditions. It is part of modern Nepalese mythology that they have always occupied these hills. True, their armies overran some areas from time to time. But the census records quoted here show most Nepalese are relatively recent arrivals.

  Sikkim did not have a single Nepalese in 1873. By the time the agitation erupted a century later they accounted for three-quarters of the population. Calculating it would be easier to manage Hindu economic refugees with a natural affinity to India than Mong
olian Buddhists with Central Asian ties, the British sponsored migration. Self-serving but shortsighted Sikkimese nobles—notably Kazi’s kinsmen, Phodong Lama and Khangsa Dewan— supported them in return for bribes from the migrants. About 225,000 of today’s 300,000 registered ‘Sikkim Subjects’ are ethnic Nepalese. Another 35,000 Nepalese probably have fake certificates. Sikkim’s Tibeto-Buddhist ethic has been watered down, and indigenes complain of existing on sufferance. Kazi once chided me for not speaking Nepalese. ‘It’s the language of the people,’ he said.

  Ironically, the Sikkimese Nepalese are most worried today about their future. When Nar Bahadur Bhandari, the first ethnic Nepalese chief minister, declared Sikkim had merged but would not be submerged, he was expressing his fear of West Bengal’s better educated, politically more articulate and physically more active Nepalese who have reinvented themselves as Gorkha. Darjeeling, rechristened Gorkhaland, the second feather in the Nepalese cap, is on its way to becoming India’s second Nepalese-majority state at the time of writing. Not many Gorkha leaders know—or care—that Gangtok leased Darjeeling to the East India Company in 1835 and asked for its return in 1947, sending a copy of the memorandum to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. New Delhi ignored the application. As Gangtok’s Himalayan Guardian reported in January 2013, Gorkha militancy has provoked a new loyalist National Sikkimese Bhutia Organisation to claim Bhutan’s Ha and Ammo valleys, the Illam region of Nepal, the Chumbi valley in Tibet, a slice of Bihar and, of course, Darjeeling.

  Bhutan’s astute rulers did not miss the writing on the demography wall. They noted that the revolt against the Chogyal was a Nepalese affair to which Kazi lent a semblance of Sikkimese respectability. They saw how easily RAW officials manipulated ethnic Nepalese opinion. K4’s first response to the crisis in Sikkim was to repeal his father’s much-praised law on the confidence vote. He then turned his attention to ensuring that foreigners didn’t also swamp Bhutan.

  Unlike Sikkim, Bhutan does not share a frontier with Nepal. The Nepalese didn’t begin to move there until 1900 when the Bhutanese government recruited labourers (tangyas ) to work the tropical forests in the extreme west which the indigenous Drukpa disliked. They were allowed to stay on as tenant-farmers and more than 12,000 ethnic Nepalese were granted citizenship under the 1958 Nationality Law after Bhutan’s first countrywide census in 1988. Another census seven years later, assisted by the United Nations Population Fund, recorded 125,336 working foreigners. Most were illegal migrants who had taken advantage of Bhutan’s porous borders, empty spaces, planned growth and $425 per capita GNP against Nepal’s $160 and India’s $350.

  ‘Those who entered Bhutan after 1958 and acquired citizenship, land and property illegally are not Bhutanese citizens and cannot be accepted as such under our citizenship laws,’ the government warned to justify the evictions that followed. But the ethnic Nepalese who were there in 1958 ‘and their descendants are genuine Bhutanese citizens’. Drukpa officials meticulously avoid the word Nepalese. ‘We call them Lhotshampa, Southern Bhutanese’ King Jigme Singye Wangchuck told me. It is thought the Bhutanese term will make assimilation psychologically easier. Druk dignitaries admit privately that Lhotshampas constitute a much higher share of the population than the officially acknowledged 20 per cent. How Bhutan tackled the threat and the ensuing refugee problem is no part of the Sikkim story. Ogyen Thinley Dorjee is.

  Many regard the personable young seventeenth Karmapa Lama, head of Buddhism’s Karma Kagyu sect and representative of the world’s oldest unbroken line of succession through reincarnation, as the Dalai Lama’s natural heir. The future of this potential world leader of the Tibetan and Buddhist communities is inextricably linked with that of Sikkim where Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the sixteenth Karmapa Lama who fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama and died in 1981, established the gated red and white Rumtek Dharma Chakra Centre. It adjoins Sikkim’s ancient Rumtek monastery and is the new seat of the Karmapas. It is also the global headquarters of Karma Kagyu Buddhists.

  Ogyen Thinley Dorjee was born in 1985 in a nomad family in eastern Tibet. He was identified as the reincarnate in 1992, and installed in the traditional seat of the lineage at Tsurphu near Lhasa. The Dalai Lama recognised his status. The Chinese hailed him as a ‘Living Buddha’, the Communist regime’s term for high incarnations. When he escaped from Tsurphu and arrived at the Dalai Lama’s headquarters in Dharamsala early one January morning in 2000, he at once became a complication in India’s domestic politics. Though New Delhi granted him official refugee status, it doesn’t appear to know quite what to make of him. The foreigners who visit India to worship at his feet, the thousands of dollars they offer in homage, the worldwide network of fervently loyal Karma Kagyu centres and the many invitations to address congregations in Europe and America feed into Indian paranoia about the outside world. Other contenders for his throne take care to fan instinctive suspicion of a possible Chinese plant.

  The vast majority of Buddhists believe, however, that allowing the young Karmapa to assume the duties of his lineage would solve many future problems. The disappearance in 1995 of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima whom the Dalai Lama had recognised as the Panchen Lama and his substitution by China’s nominee warns of Beijing’s strategy of controlling Tibet through its traditional institutions. An even more ignominious, acrimonious and divisive succession struggle is likely if the Chinese try to impose their protégé on Tibetans as the next Dalai Lama.

  Pawan Kumar Chamling, Sikkim’s ethnic Nepalese chief minister, has repeatedly asked New Delhi to let the Karmapa Lama take over Rumtek. The heads of Sikkim’s sixty-four monasteries and the leaders of all the political parties in the state back the demand. The Sikkim Pradesh Congress Committee even made the Karmapa’s return an election plank in 2004. But the Indian government keeps him like a prisoner of state at the small Gyuto monastery near the Dalai Lama’s headquarters in Dharamsala. He cannot step out of Gyuto without official permission. Although New Delhi has allowed him to visit the United States, it will not, for some unexplained reason, permit him to accept invitations from Karma Kagyu centres in Europe. Within India, he cannot set foot on Sikkimese soil. The nearest he was allowed was Mirik in Darjeeling district, just across the border with Sikkim. Thousands of devout Sikkimese flocked to Mirik where he presided over a mammoth public rally.

  Thirty-seven years after the annexation, New Delhi still finds it necessary to be more circumspect about Sikkim than any other part of India. Perhaps this is because, contrary to public belief, China has not explicitly recognised Sikkim as an Indian state. India acknowledged Chinese sovereignty over Tibet in the 2003 Declaration on Principles for Relations and Comprehensive Cooperation between India and China. But, as an American scholar, David Scott, points out in his essay, Sino-Indian Territorial Issues: The ‘Razor’s Edge?’ , ‘the text shows a one-way agreement, one-way obligations and one-way concessions’. Complacent Indian commentators cite China’s acceptance of a border trade post at Nathu-la as recognition of Indian sovereignty over Sikkim. Scott warns ‘that was implied rather than explicit, de facto rather then de jure.’ As if to bear out his doubts, China contested Indian control of the 2.1-sq-km Finger Area tract in northern Sikkim five years after the Declaration .

  That might explain the confusing and contradictory explanations still trotted out for the actions this book describes. The democracy version is peddled at the popular level as the most appealing. Sympathetic Westerners are told that border defence had to be consolidated against China’s military buildup in Tibet. Hints are dropped—without substantiation—that the Chogyal was in secret cahoots with the Chinese. That’s what Shankar Bajpai seemed to suggest as we strolled through the National Palace Museum during a visit to Taiwan in 1990. ‘Do you really think we could have allowed the Chogyal to get away with things?’ he suddenly asked, apropos of nothing and without elaborating what dreadful ‘things’ the monarch hoped to get away with. According to N.N. Jha, a former lieutenant-governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Chogyal
’s meeting with the Chinese ambassador at King Birendra’s coronation was the last straw. ‘I was there and I had to report it to New Delhi,’ he says. It wasn’t a mere ambassador the Chogyal met in Kathmandu: what cooked his goose according to P.N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary, in Indira Gandhi, the ‘Emergency’ and Indian Democracy, was an encounter there with China’s vice-premier, Chin-hsi Liu.

  Another bizarre version surfaced at the packed luncheon meeting at New Delhi’s Oberoi Hotel in April 2011 when the Aspen Institute launched Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India. A man introduced himself as V.K. Mathur, son-in-law of Bipin Bihari Lal, the kingdom of Sikkim’s last chief executive who became the first governor after annexation. Mathur had something important to tell me but could do so only in private. We met the next day at the India International Centre where he whispered in the strictest confidence what, according to him, very few people knew: ‘Hope was a CIA agent!’ Having dropped his bombshell, Lal’s son-in-law sat back and stared at me with an exultant ‘now-what-do-you-make-of-that!’ look.

  Actually, the CIA canard was whispered from the moment the Chogyal’s interest in an unknown young American woman became known. I never believed it because it was obvious that despite his reputation for philandering, the Chogyal was deeply in love with Hope. It was clear, too, she was no giddy socialite: she had studied Buddhism and Tibetan culture, and had great hopes of realising his ambition for a prosperous sovereign Sikkim. But the twenty-three-year-old American marrying a much older widowed Mongolian king felt isolated and persecuted in an alien setting. American diplomats in New Delhi were not particularly sympathetic. A senior member of the embassy there habitually let his voice drop to a breathless whisper in mocking imitation of her speaking style whenever her name came up in conversation. But when I was going up in 1973, a kindly Peter Burleigh in the American consulate in Calcutta (who nearly forty years later twice acted as American ambassador to India) asked me to inquire if she wanted anything. ‘Cheesecake!’ Hope exclaimed when I passed on the message. She then thought better of it and sent me a note saying it was a joke. Smash and Grab may have added to her discomfort. In July 1997 she compressed her complaints into a closely typed seven-page note. Much of it is personal trivia. But she does say at the end that what she misses ‘overall in the account is analysis.’ This introduction is partly an attempt to answer that charge.