Smash and Grab- Annexation of Sikkim Read online

  The wheel had turned full circle. The man in the grey suit, Bhim Bahadur Gurung, was an ethnic Nepalese politician and prominent among the batisey chor (thirty-two thieves) of Kazi Lendup Dorji’s party, a leading architect of the throne’s dissolution and the kingdom’s destruction. In the distant past, Gurung had enthusiastically defended his king’s demand for independence, but he had recanted his loyalty to become one of New Delhi’s most loyal adherents in Sikkimese politics. As speaker of the assembly before the 1979 elections, and as legislative leader of Ram Chandra Poudyal’s opposition Congress (Revolutionary) Party afterwards, Gurung had not allowed any memory of national loyalty to influence his actions.

  There were more surprises in store. Beyond the gilt trellis of the palace windows echoed the haunting strains of Dela Jong Sil Lee Gee Yang Chagpa Chilo— Why Is Denzong Blooming So Fresh and Beautiful?—the national anthem no one had dared sing for nearly a decade. The singing had continued for hours as an endless stream of ragged peasants, men and women, tramped over hill and valley for days to reach the palace. They filed before the prince to measure the ground three times with their bodies in token of submission to his sovereignty; not the abbreviated homage of bowing from the waist, fingertips touching the ground three times, but the full-length prostration with knees, palms and forehead flat on the carpet. This was the kowtow of imperial China. BhutiyaLepchas call the obeisance cha , and the Nepalese dok . It is India’s sastanga-pranam . Each visitor added to the pile of khadas before Wangchuck until his pale bespectacled face, wan from the strain of living in public for days on end, could barely be seen. The array of silver sacramental dishes holding rice, millets, butter tea, chhang (millets fermented in hot water) and other auspicious symbols, laid out before his seat under the drawing-room’s enormous and priceless thankas (religious scroll paintings mounted on antique brocade and watered silks) had disappeared long since.

  As the last notes of the anthem faded into the silence of the Himalayas, there rose a more militant throb: hundreds of feet stamping round and round the palace to the resonance of ‘Long Live Denzong Chogyal!’ Bhim Bahadur Gurung produced his final trump to that defiant accompaniment: a sheet of court paper with a one-rupee stamp, on which was typed:

  On the Nineteenth day of February, Year Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-two, Tibetan calendar Chya-Jya and Chu-Khy, the people of Sikkim have decided to offer traditional scarf to the Thirteenth consecrated Chogyal of Sikkim, Tobgyal Wangchuck Tenzing Namgyal, at the Tsuk-la-khang of Gangtok at 3.00 pm.

  There were minor inaccuracies. The presentation was in the palace and not the Tsuk-la-khang chapel royal, a square double-storey building with a gleaming yellow roof across the lawns, where the Chogyal’s coffin had lain in state for nineteen days. It was late in the evening after the funeral, and the shadows were closing in, when Gurung was finally able to edge into the seemingly unending queue. The prince’s correct names are Tenzing Topgyal Wangchuk Sisum Namgyal. But the mistakes passed unnoticed. What everyone talked of was the incontrovertible fact that thirteen men in public life had invited India’s wrath with that affirmation of loyalty.

  Gurung and two others represented the Congress (Revolutionary) Party in the legislative assembly. Dugo Bhutia, once active in Nar Bahadur Khatiawara’s militant Youth Congress, sat as an independent member. Six signatories were legislators from the chief minister’s own Congress (Indira) Party. The three others enjoyed less formal political prominence. P.B. Subba, president of the Tsong Association, had shared Nar Bahadur Bhandari’s imprisonment during the Emergency. Rinchen Wangdi, an impetuous young aristocrat married to the Chogyal’s niece, had recently been won over by Kazi Lendhup Dorji’s devious and mischievous appeal to Bhutiya-Lepcha youth to stand up and fight for their rights against Sikkim’s ethnic majority. Finally, Sonam Yongda, the Sikkim Guards captain who had paid dearly for his patriotism, and returned to the monastery whence he began. Clad in the lama’s maroon, Yongda acted as general secretary of the Lhadi Tsokpa, the monks’ body.

  For them and for 30,000 others, the death of one chogyal was the birth of another. The mantle of monarchy had fallen on twenty-nine-year-old Wangchuck, educated at St Paul’s school in Darjeeling, and Harrow in England, with an honours degree from the Ealing School of Business in London, and nearly three years of working experience in the Heinz factory in England, which had put him off baked beans and tinned soup for life. ‘The succession is automatic,’ said the prince, realising only too acutely that no matter how softly he spoke, every word was clearly audible in New Delhi. The reserved young man, with no previous experience of responsibility or a public role, had almost overnight acquired confidence and maturity.

  Prince Wangchuck dismissed a coronation as an unnecessary state ceremony. ‘It is for the people to accept and acknowledge me as the new chogyal, and you can see for yourself the support I have been shown by the people,’ he told reporters. The monks of Pemayangtse (the sublime perfect lotus) monastery had already formally recognised him as the gyalpo (king) who upholds the chhos (righteousness), hence chogyal. Their recognition had a special significance for Lhatsun Chempo, the monastery’s founder, had consecrated his ancestor Phuntsog Namgyal ‘ruler of the southern slopes’ 341 years earlier. That was enough for the Sikkimese, Buddhist Bhutiya-Lepchas and Hindu Nepalese alike. The khada, symbol of purity, token of allegiance, solemnised their acceptance of a new king. No mute gesture could be more expressive.

  Gangtok was swathed in khadas. An American woman, Buddhist and bull-fighter, had even brought back the scarf that the Chogyal had placed in the private altar of her French chateau. Reverently, she laid it on his bier. A cord strung between a scarlet and gold lacquered pillar and the heavy droop of a brocade banner in the Tsuk-la-khang was piled high with skimpy strips of gauze offered by the poor. Villagers who had come unprepared could buy a scarf for a rupee. Superior fabric cost five rupees. The money helped to pay for invocations by more than 300 lamas in the capital alone during the forty-nine days of mourning; prayers that testified to the profound faith of a king who had only his religion to sustain him during eight lonely years of humiliation and persecution.

  Once there were ivory lengths of watered silk from China. But the Nathu-la trade had been cut off many years ago. Proud clans like the Martam Topdens, Rhenock Tashis and the Densapas of Barmiok still treasure bolts of antique Chinese silk carefully preserved in aromatic herbs, but most have to be content with the glossy manufacture of Indian factories. As Karma Topden told curious reporters at Dum Dum airport, Sikkim received everything, from khadas to constitutions, readymade from India!

  The ritual survives from a time when Denzong, the rice bowl, called Sukhim, or happy house, by Tsong refugees, was a fragment of a vast spiritual empire that extended from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh, from the Mongolian steppes down to the Ganges plains. Though Bhutan is also a child of that disappearing civilisation, a certain sturdy individualism separates the martial Druk race from the heartland of Tibetan culture. Ladakh, where still survive the descendants of Tibet’s ancient kings, was more nearly related to the Tibetan founthead. But Sikkim was the closest of all, seeking Lhasa’s guidance in its worship, social customs and political institutions.

  Immigration has so heavily diluted that ethos that the last census revealed that Bhutiya-Lepchas, now reduced to being a protected tribe in their own homeland, constitute less than 24 per cent of the population. Hindu settlers from Nepal and India comprise the overwhelming majority. Therein lay the country’s weakness: the vulnerable Achilles’ heel through which the Chogyal was wounded and brought low. His durbar could not stand up to the onslaught of manipulated ethnic strife.

  But the Great Leveller also heals. There could have been no more inspiring embodiment of racial integration than Khatiawara, the rebel politician who had once vowed to gorge on the Chogyal’s blood, making the strenuous ascent to the royal cremation ground as his private act of expiation. His gesture was just as dramatic as Gurung’s testament. More expectedly, Sikkim’s young chief minister, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, afflicted by a painful back ever since the Indian police beat him up in 1975, waved away his official jeep, also to follow the cortége on foot. Pressed by Darjeeling to take more immigrants, Bhandari retorted that Sikkim had merged but would not be submerged.

  It was the passing of an age. Slowly, the procession of monks and mourners climbed the windswept heights of Lukshyama cradled in a distant ring of snowcapped peaks. A richly caparisoned riderless pony preceded the coffin as the Chogyal’s own Mercedes had done on the drive from Gangtok’s Libing helipad to the Tsuk-la-khang. Wangchuck led the royal mourners. His sister Yangchen and her English husband, Simon Abraham, his half-brother and half-sister, children of the Chogyal’s American second wife, Hope Cooke, walked with him. Upright young Palden, uncanny in his striking resemblance to the dead crown prince, stocky little Hope Leezum, phlegmatic as any Tibetan.

  It took four hours to cover the distance of about six miles, the final lap steeply up a stone and boulder-strewn bridle path to the last resting place of the Namgyals. Thousands of grieving Sikkimese already waited there. The metal trident of Apa Sahib Pant’s Hanuman temple shone down from above. Indian soldiers worked noisy pneumatic drills in clearances below, and the old mule track to Tibet meandered away through the mountain ranges. Thick grass covered the slope and a tree with a curiously hollow bole provided a perch for hundreds of spectators.

  Three chortens (receptacles for offerings) in which relics, or sometimes prayers, are enshrined, on a higher ridge marked the cremation sites of Sir Tashi Namgyal, the eleventh chogyal, and of his parents, the hare-lipped Thutob Namgyal and his domineering Tibetan gyalmo, Yeshi Dolma. There were two newer stupas lower down, for Sangey Deki, the Chogyal’s beautiful first wife who died in 1956, and Crown Prin
ce Tenzing, killed in 1978 when his Mercedes, swerving to avoid a truck speeding up the hill, was hurtled into the ravine below Deorali. The vigorous young crown prince was only twenty-eight, glowing with robust health, when he perished so cruelly. Tragedy seems to dog all first-born heirs to the Sikkimese throne.

  They brought his battered body here to be burned by his mother’s memorial. The two chortens stand side by side, the cube for earth, the orb for water, and the cone for fire, each topped by the wooden finial of a crescent and circle signifying air and ether. They were modest monuments, testifying to the humility of a dynasty that had never sought the ostentatious grandeur of India’s maharajas, relying only on native dignity and public loyalty. Now, the Chogyal too followed that doleful route. A small new stupa awaited his body, its whitewash still damp from the rains. His permanent memorial was to be in Tashiding (the elevated central glory) monastery built in 1716 whose sacred Thongwa Rangtrol chorten promises nirvana at sight. As a high incarnate lama, the Chogyal was entitled to share this honour with two of Sikkim’s most revered ecclesiastics, Jamyang Khentse Rimpoche and Gyaten Rimpoche.

  It was the end of a tragically star-crossed life. Posterity may one day be able to explain why—and the precise moment when—fate turned against Palden Thondup Namgyal, the twelfth consecrated Denzong chogyal. Few men can have known such extremes of fortune. Sir Tashi’s second son was recognised at birth as an incarnate of the eighth chogyal, Sidkeong Tulku, and through him, of a legendary king of Tibet, as well as the monk, Aen-Tul Karma Rinchen of the Kargyu-pa sect of Kham. In his person, therefore, the Chogyal united the Nyingma-pa sect, to which the royal family belongs, and the more widespread Karma Kargyu sect, one of the earliest branches of the Kargyu-pa school of Mahayana Buddhism, which acknowledges the young Ogyen Trinley Dorje as its seventeenth Gyalwang Karmapa. The Dalai Lama had identified the Chogyal’s early mentor, Linghu Rimpoche, from the monastery of that name near Gyantse, as an incarnation of Lhatsun Chempo.

  He was elected president of the Mahabodhi Society of India and invited to Buddhist conferences in Burma, Japan and Cambodia. Jawaharlal Nehru sent him on a delicate mission to Lhasa as New Delhi’s confidential envoy. He led India’s delegation to a Moscow conference of Orientalists. Britain admitted him to the Order of the British Empire; France created him a Commandre de L’Ordre de l’Etoile Noire; and India made him a Padma Vibhushan. He was an honorary major-general in the Indian army and colonel-in-chief of the Eighth Gurkhas. Nehru was paternally fond of the active and imaginative prince so bubbling with enthusiasm for his country. Diplomats and academics admired his illuminating discourses on Himalayan fauna or the religious rituals and political traditions of the border marches. Even the humblest caller enjoyed his hospitality. He was fêted in European capitals and the USA; an admiring world regarded him as the beau ideal of an enlightened executive monarch. The international glitterati flocked to Gangtok for his second marriage to an attractive, well-connected and very young American heiress who seemed anxious to identify with Sikkim and its culture. The world regarded it as a fairytale romance.

  Sikkim’s transformation from a primitive mountain principality into a modern nation was due entirely to the Chogyal’s vision and effort. A streamlined administration, thrusting economic plans, an impartial system of justice, and a finely balanced political dispensation that reconciled tradition with democratic aspirations were the lasting achievements of his reign. Roads, bridges, industry, modern farming, schools and hospitals bore witness to his efforts. His career blossomed between the late 1940s and the middle 1960s. They were the most fruitful years of his life. The Chogyal was ambitious even then, but it was admitted that his ambitions were all for his people’s welfare. Those who met him during those years of fulfilment paid tribute to his gentle charm, classical Tibetan scholarship, progressive administrative ideas, and scientific interest in contemporary forms of advance. They also recognised in him a staunch ally of India’s democratic leadership.

  Suspicion set in only when the kingdom seemed likely to break out of the strict limits laid down by the protector; when economic growth and social awareness coalesced in a political awakening that threatened to take Sikkim out on a tide beyond the reach of New Delhi’s control. The Chogyal did not try to hold back the nascent forces gathering in his country. He saw the new impulses that provoked unreasonable fear and hostility, strong enough to eventually overwhelm him and his ideas, as the natural culmination of the process that India had helped him to start. No man should be pilloried for seeking freedom, he pleaded, but he pleaded in vain. His tactical failure was to allow detractors to portray the higher status he sought for Sikkim as personal, not national, ambition. The propaganda might not have been possible if the Chogyal had ensured that more ordinary Sikkimese—especially the Nepalese majority—understood and shared his aspirations. By failing to take enough Nepalese officials and politicians into his confidence, or to give them the sense of authority they craved in their adopted land, he allowed propagandists to project him as only a feudal Bhutiya-Lepcha chief.

  And so he was publicly reviled and rejected in the closing years of his reign, depicted as a tyrant and a monster, painted as India’s implacable foe, and the enemy the Nepalese had to overthrow. The sad, shy man with his gentle ways and embarrassing stammer, his soft speech and quiet thoughtfulness, was lost to view under an avalanche of abuse. The ludicrously unreal image that emerged was of a sinister racist schemer who exploited the Nepalese poor, squandered the kingdom’s revenues and Delhi’s development assistance on his own extravagances, conspired with India’s enemies, and relentlessly pursued his wanton pleasures amidst the smoking ruins of his country. It was a cruel and wicked distortion. But it served its purpose. Sikkimese, especially Nepalese, officials who had earlier striven for his patronage, carefully shunned the palace. Indians who had been flattered to claim royalty’s acquaintance would no longer risk communication with the deposed ruler. The American woman he had raised to the throne, who had offered so many irritants in Gangtok’s uneasy relations with New Delhi, dragged him through the US courts over her financial settlement and custody of their children, even disputing their right to visit their father in Sikkim, until the union, disastrous for king and country, ended in divorce. It was too late by then for the severance to help his blighted career.

  Tenzing’s untimely death was the final blow. He was Sikkim’s vibrant young hope. The Deorali accident extinguished the faint glimmer that all that the Chogyal had so ceaselessly striven for would one day be vindicated through his son’s restoration. The triumphs of earlier years were forgotten in the lonely twilight of the shabby genteel palace. But his bold experiment of blending the best in Sikkim’s past with the demands of emerging nationhood did not deserve to fail, just as this son of Khampa princes did not deserve to forfeit the promise and goodwill with which he had set out.

  The cremation was the end of a pilgrimage, the fall of the last outpost of a civilisation whose totems had carefully been preserved in an alien ambience. Central Asia’s influence was evident in the chain of khadas attached to the bier, its other end held by a lama who preceded the pall-bearers. It was a relic of the Chinese hurin-fan , the soul’s banner. The yellow umbrella over the coffin (yellow being royalty’s colour in the antique rituals of the Ch’ing court) and the full-length prostrations with which wave upon wave of subjects, rediscovering their allegiance in a moment of sorrowful clarity, bade farewell to their departed king and paid homage to his successor also reflected Sikkim’s roots in the Asian heartland.

  Matrimonial pacts reinforced the old alliance. Aware of the ethnic divide that had toppled his father, Crown Prince Tenzing used to joke he would take two wives, a Bhutiya-Lepcha and a Nepalese. Otherwise, Sikkim was cocooned in the minority’s cultural past. The Chogyal’s mother and first wife were Tibetan. Two of his sisters had married into the Lhasa aristocracy. His younger brother’s wife had been chosen from the Dalai Lama’s exiled entourage in Dharamsala. The Densapas of Barmiok and the Tashis of Rhenock followed the precedent. Even Kazi’s richly endowed first wife had originally been married to one of the Panda Tsang brothers, warlords of the Kham marches. More to blame than anyone else for the kingdom’s disappearance, Kazi was busily lobbying in New Delhi on the day that Sikkim nursed its grief. But everyone else was there to acknowledge that the siege was over. The garrison had capitulated. A nation’s umbilical cord had been cut.