Smash and Grab- Annexation of Sikkim Read online

  The book reflected the general perception at the time. It didn’t mean to question Hope’s personal credentials. She had returned to the United States when I began my researches. There was no means of knowing that some of her most controversial moves were made at her husband’s direction or that she drew on her own funds to keep the household going. I have decided, therefore, to leave the narrative as it is. It would be improper to change it without corroboration, which is no longer possible. In any case, Hope has very capably defended her position in her most readable autobiography, Time Change.

  It came as no surprise to the Sikkimese when Dhar’s memoirs confirmed that RAW’s R.N. Kao personally supervised all the seemingly spontaneous events that led to the annexation. ‘Under Kao’s overall guidance, the RAW team helped the pro-democracy leaders build up their organisation and make their weight felt in the politics of Sikkim,’ Dhar writes with measured candour. ‘This process had started several months before the storm broke in April 1973.’ In short, RAW set the revolutionary ball rolling before Kazi and the Nepalese mob knew they were revolting. The reason? China’s conquest of Tibet had made Sikkim ‘an area of geo-strategic importance overnight’.

  I read Dhar’s revelations with some disquiet. I never met Kao. It surprised me, therefore, when Sellappan Rama Nathan, Singapore’s former intelligence chief, former executive chairman of the newspaper group that published the Straits Times, and the island-state’s sixth president, told me Kao had strongly recommended me for a senior job in Singapore. It didn’t happen then. Kao was dead and Nathan no longer headed the newspaper group by the time I joined it as editorial consultant. It was my independent decision to go to Singapore after a stint at the East-West Center in Honolulu when my editorship of The Statesman was usurped. But Nathan’s disclosure intrigued me. Though Singapore’s former president insisted Kao had stressed and highly praised my journalistic abilities, I wondered if the recommendation was another ploy like the blocked tunnel to keep me out of Sikkim.

  Nothing is impossible. It was the Great Game all over again. Kazi, Kazini, the Gyalmo and even the Chogyal were pawns on the chessboard of Asian power politics. India had decided to absorb Sikkim for reasons that had little to do with the local players. The turbulent events described in the book and the tumultuous personalities that held the stage were incidental to that steely purpose.

  I had started revising Smash and Grab when out of the blue arrived an e-mail that seemed as wildly improbable as Kazini’s tales of exotic places and exalted people. I still don’t know how much of it to take seriously. The author of this astounding message, apparently from some remote Scottish village, claimed Kazini as her very own ‘Gran’. According to Claire M. Jordan, Kazini’s son Roderick (Rory) Denis Edward Langford Rae had once courted her mother, now eighty-three. He had left Britain unaware his girlfriend was pregnant. The world knew Rory, product of Ampleforth, the famous Roman Catholic public school, and Oxford, as an executive of the Indian Tea Association in North Bengal. The woman who claims to be his daughter savours a far more sensational version.

  In her telling, Rory was soldier, civil servant and spy, fluent in several Chinese dialects, and involved in hush-hush Sino-Indian border talks in Arunachal Pradesh when he died in 1965. He was then thirty-eight. Claire says there ‘was something dodgy’ about the end. The death certificate places it in Dibrugarh town in Assam. But the Assamese police told her mother ‘he died at Dum Duma, fifty miles from Dibrugarh and most famous for having a military airbase there’. His ‘body was flown back to Dum Duma and a car accident faked to conceal the fact that a British government agent was involved in the (Sino-Indian) dispute’.

  Reading with mounting wonder a thriller that might have come from John Le Carre’s pen, I asked myself why Kazini needed to invoke such distant celebrities as Kemal Ataturk and Field-Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim when she had all the excitement right in her own family, born of her own womb. If Rory had lived adventurously, his daughter seemed determined not to lag too far behind. Claire says she was trained as a biological scientist to rehabilitate (joke?) sick or injured hedgehogs. Those prickly creatures aren’t her only specialty. She proudly claims to be one of the world’s few authorities on the proper care and handling of orphaned ship rats! She has worked as a secretary on Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, been a computer programmer and data analyst for the National Health Service, and owned a small occult shop. Her accomplishments don’t end there. She runs a discussion group on the Net ‘which dissects the Harry Potter books in immense, forensic detail’; has ‘won a couple of quite major prizes for poetry’; and is working on a science fiction novel. The only weakness—apart from poverty—this versatile woman admits is linguistic. Unlike Kazini who indicated she was fluent in several European languages, Claire ‘can’t get much further with foreign languages than Je ne parle pas Francais ’. The local council pays her ‘a pittance’ to stay home and help her arthritic mother. Lest anyone doubt her tale, Claire silences sceptics by saying she finds lying physically painful because she has a strong mania for accurate data.

  Claire’s version paints Kazini as a far humbler being than the European grande dame she made herself out to be. That she was plain Ethel Maud and not Elisa-Maria I knew already from the Macdonald sisters who ran Kalimpong’s Himalayan Hotel. According to Claire her maiden name was Shirran and she was born in Doune, Perthshire, Scotland in January 1904, in a family of farm labourers of mixed English, Southern Irish and Scottish stock. Claire seems much impressed by Kazini’s father’s rank of Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant in the Black Watch regiment which was ‘only one step below Regimental Sergeant Major which is the most senior NCO there is.’ She was not to know that in the class-conscious Indian cantonments where Shirran served (two of his daughters were born there) he would have been shown the servants’ door.

  No wonder Kazini, who knew better, went to such lengths to replace her real background with dazzling invention. Being without formal education except for a stint of secretarial training, she relied only on her intelligence, charm and ambition to weave a fantasy world. Her first husband, Claire’s grandfather, Bertram Langford Denis Rae, was an Anglo-Burmese (with Karen, Shan and Chinese blood) policeman in Burma. He was ‘a war hero and a part-time British government spy’. George Orwell, then Eric Blair and also in the police, was supposed to be a friend. Bertram and Kazini divorced in 1940.

  I might have treated Claire’s tale with even greater reserve than Kazini’s flights of fancy had it not been for Sangharakshita with whom she put me in touch. Born Dennis Lingwood, Sangharakshita is an English Buddhist monk who had lived in India for twenty years, fourteen of them (1950–1964) in Kalimpong. Our paths never crossed but I gather from his racy memoirs, Precious Teachers: Indian Memoirs of an English Buddhist , which he kindly sent me, that we had some common acquaintances, Kazini among them. Sangharakshita who obviously knew her far better found her as eccentric and obsessive as I remember, but also more human. She confessed to him her distaste for India and Indians and preference for Pakistan and Pakistanis, which she wouldn’t dream of revealing to an Indian journalist whose help she sought.

  Sangharakshita’s account explained Kazini’s reticence about her son. Unable to imagine her as a mother, he was not surprised when she told him ‘she had no maternal feelings and was quite indifferent to her son’. Rory’s death ‘had not affected her in the slightest’ she assured him ‘in a tone, and with an air, that suggested the event was of absolutely no interest to her.’ If so, she was even better at dissimulation than I thought. For she responded on 19 April 1965 to my letter of condolence after Rory’s death with fulsome praise for him and me. ‘I am only sorry that you did not meet, for you would have liked each other tremendously... he was so like you, frank, humorous, brilliant and honest... he was a man, like yourself, who could walk with beggars and kings’ she typed on her personal writing paper, signing ‘Kazini’ with her usual flourish.

  Claire wasn’t the only surprise to crawl out of
the woodwork. When excerpts from Smash and Grab appeared in several publications, a man called Narinder Kawlra turned up to say Kazini was his aunt. She had been married to his uncle, Barkat Narain, director of India’s health services. He remembered her as ‘an affectionate and loving lady’. There was a sequel. Kazini descended on Sachin Chaudhuri, who was holidaying in Kalimpong, with a heavily annotated copy of the book under her arm. She had never admitted to a third marriage, she said, and my mention of the health services director was greatly embarrassing. She wanted to sue for defamation. By way of replying, Chaudhuri told her a well-known story about a leading Calcutta barrister and MP whose stock response (in a colloquial mix of English and Bengali) whenever defamation was mentioned was ‘Defamation is all right but first prove the “famation”!’ Kazini didn’t sue but wrote viciously abusive fictitious letters to the newspapers.

  Sangharakshita says he realised even in the 1950s that Sikkim was doomed. ‘India’s shadow had fallen across Sikkim’ and ‘sooner or later, by one means or another, Sikkim would be absorbed into the Indian Union and lose its separate identity’.

  A tale so full of colourful personalities and political drama is certainly worth re-telling.

  SUNANDA K. DATTA -RAY

  Calcutta, 15 June 2013

  P REFACE

  This is not the story of the Chogyal’s life. Only he could have written that. Nor does it pretend to be a comprehensive account of Sikkim’s Buddhist polity. It is an observer’s chronicle of a recent passage in the subcontinent’s history. Describing what happened, and how, will not change the present or future. But it may serve some purpose if, in truly recounting how law, usage and promises were ruthlessly set aside to destroy one of the last surviving fragments of a cultural empire that once straddled the heart of Central Asia, it also reveals the dangerous ease with which public opinion can be whipped up into chauvinistic acquisitiveness.

  Governments the world over sometimes take morally indefensible action to protect national interests. But seldom are such measures clothed in the righteousness that seemed to sanctify every excess in Sikkim. So successful was the propaganda that no one in India deemed it necessary even to question the official picture of an enslaved people struggling against a tyrannical king. Nor did anyone think of asking at the end of the painful saga when the king had unceremoniously been removed and the kingdom ceased to exist, whether the Sikkimese had gained any freedom under an Indian governor who was far more powerful and autocratic than the Chogyal had ever been.

  He may have been an evil oppressor. His subjects may have had every reason to revolt against the throne. But even if, for argument’s sake, we accept these postulations, they do not justify outside intervention to extinguish a country’s identity. Only two Indians, S. Dutta Chowdhury, the police commissioner, and Tarachand Hariomal, the judge, sustained faith in Indian justice.

  We tend to forget that when the British left the subcontinent in 1947, they wiped the state clean of all traces of colonial political and administrative arrangements. They explicitly refused to transfer paramount authority over the princes to the new government in New Delhi. In the case of Sikkim, there was no paramountcy: it was an independent kingdom in a treaty relationship with British India. When the treaty was annulled and British India had ceased to exist, tiny, vulnerable Sikkim was as much a sovereign nation as India herself. An independent Sikkim placed itself under India’s protection in 1950, entrusting only certain aspects of its governance to New Delhi while retaining the essence of sovereign authority in Gangtok. Whatever we may think of the Sikkim durbar or of the Chogyal, who was ill-served at the end by sycophantic advisers, grasping relatives and meddlesome lawyers, the fact of juridical parity cannot be gainsaid. Even if the British had been masters of Sikkim, India could not claim to exercise their imperial prerogative.

  This book has been inordinately delayed. It was started when the 1975 coup was still fresh in the public mind, and would have been completed long ago but for a series of domestic interventions. But time does not alter basic principles. Delay is of even less consequence in this instance because earlier publication would have had as little practical impact. The odds are that any contradiction of the official version will be denounced as further evidence of the ingenious Chogyal’s ability to expound his case even after death.

  It would have been difficult to write this account if he and his sons had not generously placed their records at my disposal, allowing me access to a great deal of unpublished correspondence with the political officer and chief executive in Gangtok, and with the Indian government in New Delhi. The late Crown Prince Tenzing enthusiastically supported my labours; his younger brother, Prince Wangchuck Namgyal, now the thirteenth Denzong Chogyal in the eyes of legitimists though he is lost in meditation somewhere in the jungles of Nepal or Bhutan, continued with information and assistance.

  Nor would I have appreciated the personal flavour of Sikkimese politics but for the exuberance of Kazini Elisa-Maria Dorji Khangsarpa of Chakung, to give her the full honorific she so revels in. Kazini never failed to enliven my holidays in Kalimpong with titillating descriptions of people and events, all of which bore the unmistakable stamp of her vividly imaginative personality. It was a matter of deep regret to me when she decided some time in 1975 that my sympathy for Sikkim made me uncomfortable company.

  Many others—members of the royal family, civil servants, politicians and diplomats—helped in almost equal measure. At some time or other during the last two decades and more, I have discussed the situation with almost every one of the actors who play some part in this story. Even those who might appear in a less than favourable light—and this cannot be helped, for their actions, not my personal relationships, shape the tale— were always ready to hold forth on the subject.

  Kayatyani Shankar Bajpai was never anything but warmly hospitable, as was his successor, Gurbachan Singh, the last of the proconsuls. B.S. Das must have been one of the most easily accessible administrators ever sent to Gangtok. I drew a blank only with Bipin Bihari Lal. But then, I was not the only one. Even Kazi Lendhup Dorji, the first chief minister, without whose collusion Sikkim would never have been absorbed, stood in awe of Lal’s abrasive tongue and overbearing demeanour. Lal treated the Chogyal like dirt.

  Nearer home, my thanks are due to D.P. Simpson for typing the preliminary draft, and to Mrs Mercy Sam who spent many laborious hours painstakingly making the almost illegibly corrected manuscript presentable for the publishers.

  It needs to be added that my account may seem to rely rather heavily on Sikkimese sources. The fault lies entirely with the Indian authorities who responded to the simplest queries with evasion or propaganda. When I asked the Lok Sabha secretariat to confirm M.C. Chagla’s reported clarification in Parliament of Sikkim’s separate status, the secretariat evasively referred me to the external affairs ministry. In public, New Delhi still clings to the defence that it merely responded to spontaneous local developments. Privately, Indian officials hint vaguely at the Chogyal’s intrigues and the Chinese threat. But no specific allegation was ever made, leave alone substantiated. Even Das’s admirably candid description of his tenure does not go beyond suggesting that the Chogyal’s desire for revision of the 1950 treaty and recognition of his country’s status were somehow an intolerable affront to New Delhi’s dignity.

  The absence of any credible Indian explanation, coupled with all that I saw and heard while reporting the story, conveyed its own lesson. The Chogyal would undoubtedly have been acclaimed as a freedom fighter if he had been engaged with the Americans, British or French; he became a conspiring monster only because he had the misfortune to be pitted against democratic, anti-colonial India. To be pro-Sikkimese was to be anti-Indian.

  The Sikkim durbar, as it then existed, was amateurish, overly trusting and incorrigibly timid. Some of its luminaries were always more careful of private interests than of their national cause. It totally lacked the resources to cope with a crisis of this magnitude. Ultimate irony, it w
as never able to abandon faith in Indira Gandhi’s innate sense of justice, or in the sanctity of legal commitments. But, at least, it had nothing to hide.

  SUNANDA K. DATTA -RAY

  1983

  P ROLOGUE

  ‘Palden Thomdup Namgyal, Chogyal of Sikkim, died more of a broken heart than of throat cancer.’

  The Voice of Sikkim , 5 February 1982.

  ‘If India believes that it is a democracy, if it believes in the democratic principles of Panchsheel, I think it should do justice to us.’

  PRINCE WANGCHUCK NAMGYAL , Sunday , 18-24 April 1982.

  A tubby little man in a grey lounge suit bustled into the crowded drawing-room and bowed low before the carved and gilded table, choksey in Sikkimese, behind which Prince Wangchuck Namgyal sat. Placing yet another khada (the white scarf symbolising purity that is presented on all ceremonial occasions) on the already overflowing heap, he folded his hands and murmured: ‘We hereby recognise you as the Thirteenth consecrated Chogyal of Sikkim.’