Sikkim

by Andrew Duff

  On his arrival back in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama found a city changed irrevocably since his flight eight months earlier. The head of the Chinese delegation in the city was now an uncompromising party acolyte, Zhang Jingwu, who was of the opinion that, after Tibet, it was only a matter of time before Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan were ‘liberated’. He ordered the people of Lhasa to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s return as a victory for common sense. Meanwhile he made a calculated effort to win over the Lhasa elite, enticing them with offers of roles in the corrupt Chinese administration. To win over the ordinary people, he set up free medical treatment and a bank, and offered free cinema shows; in November he ran a series of lavish parties to celebrate the invasion of the previous year.14 All this was done with ‘an ample supply of silver dollars’, which, according to the Indian political officer, they ‘squandered with the liberality of princes and the sleek abandon of rakes.’15

  The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan leadership had little choice but to try and make the best of a difficult situation. Tibet’s occupation was rapidly becoming a fait accompli, and there was little sign of outside support from either Britain or India. With Nehru focused on problems nearer to home (and persisting with his vision of a world where the giants of Asia worked together) and the UK government focused on an orderly withdrawal from its other imperial possessions, the Chinese occupation of Tibet did not merit much attention.

  In America, however, interest in Tibet as a front in the Cold War, albeit a minor one, was now picking up in the offices of the CIA. Larry Dalley, the young officer who Henderson had sent to Kalimpong during the Dalai Lama’s sojourn in Yatung, was based in the USA’s Calcutta consulate. He had been tasked with collecting what intelligence he could on the events taking place in Tibet and the Chumbi Valley.16 Dalley advised his superiors in the Calcutta consulate that there was one family that was superbly placed to help them understand the situation: the Namgyals, the rulers of Sikkim.

  Dalley added that Sikkim’s location, abutting the Tibetan Chumbi Valley to the east and with a mountainous border in the north, leading straight onto the main Tibetan plateau, was ideal for intelligence purposes. What was more, the Namgyals’ ancient links with Tibet meant they could travel there freely. Best of all, Dalley reported, Thondup had two astonishingly beautiful sisters who were frequent visitors to Calcutta, where the US consulate was situated.

  Thondup’s two younger sisters could not have been more ideal as targets. By the early 1950s, they were both in their late twenties, and both married to high-ranking Tibetan officials. Their given names were Pema Tseuden and Pema Choki, but they were better known by the nicknames given them by an English governess employed in the Gangtok palace. She had found the Sikkimese words too much of a mouthful; instead, she gave them names that would stick for the rest of their lives: Coocoola and Kula.

  Coocoola, the elder by 15 months, had already encountered the Americans as a teenager. In 1941 she had travelled up the Chumbi Valley to be married to a Tibetan nobleman. Thus she was in Lhasa in late 1942 when the OSS (the American intelligence service in the Second World War) sent two officers, Ilya Tolstoy and Brooke Dolan, on an extraordinary mission into Tibet to understand the lay of the land. The two men, preparing to present a gift from Roosevelt to the Dalai Lama, had realised they only had a plain box when they spotted the beautiful princess nearby. ‘I came forward,’ Coocoola later recalled, ‘and donated the bright red ribbon in my hair.’

  Few were able to resist Coocoola’s beauty. Several years later, when the explorer Heinrich Harrer spent seven years in Lhasa, he found he could not stop himself gazing at her endlessly at social functions.

  When I look back on the affection we had for each other it is the Tibetan words that most readily come to mind to describe my feelings. To fall in love is ‘sem schor wa’ and means ‘to lose one’s soul’; to describe a woman as one’s darling the term ‘Nying Dung’ is used, which translates as ‘to strike the heart’. In the case of Coocoola, both were accurate. She was very different to the other Tibetan girls. She had a delightfully attractive face and a lovely slim figure that was not hidden by several layers of thick clothing in traditional Tibetan style, but draped in close-fitting garments of colourful silk.17

  Harrer was hidebound by her marriage (‘any liaison remained unthinkable’), but in 1952 he had no hesitation in describing her as the most beautiful woman in the world, ‘the stunning urbane archetype of a Himalayan princess’.18

  Her younger sister Kula was hardly less striking. Fosco Maraini, the Italian traveller and author of Secret Tibet, fell in love with her ‘delightfully frivolous’ attitude while passing through Gangtok on the way to Lhasa. She wore ‘elegant black leather French sandals, and her fingernails were painted red’, he wrote. ‘She knows about the west from books, but has never been outside Asia. At school she learned English stories and poems by heart (she went to school in Kalimpong) and now reads Life, Vogue and the Reader’s Digest. She confused Colbert with Flaubert and Aristotle with Mephistopheles.’ On a skiing trip up to the Nathu La, he watched with amazement as she transformed into a hardy, strong climber. ‘Who would have suspected,’ he wrote, ‘there was so much strength and determination in her pearl and porcelain body?’19

  The two sisters backed up their rare combination of beauty and toughness with a kindhearted nature that melted many European hearts. It would become their trademark. When Maraini reached the first bungalow in Sikkim after the long trek down the Chumbi Valley, he

  found a letter from Pema Choki waiting for me with a basket of fruit; and a gramophone with several records of good music. What a delight! Who else would have thought of such a charming welcome? While I rested I listened to Brahms, Mozart, Scarlatti. It was like bathing in a fresh river after a long period of sweat and fatigue.20

  By the summer of 1951 both sisters had gravitated into the CIA’s orbit. Soon they were couriering notes destined for the Dalai Lama. A succession of CIA officers made themselves available for the ‘discreet courtship’ of the two sisters, arranging fortuitous meetings at the horse races in Calcutta and Darjeeling and accompanying them on trips into the high passes of Sikkim.

  It was Coocoola, the elder sister, who became the more frequent of Dalley’s contacts. She was deeply passionate about the Tibetan cause, even more so than her brother. She would become known later for her ability to both host and enjoy parties, with the best French wines being served in heavy decanters. But her position, her beauty and her love of the good life belied an adventurous and thrill-seeking nature. When travelling the trade route between Gyantse in Tibet and Gangtok, she always insisted on riding with a rifle slung across her shoulder and a revolver in her pocket to repel bandits.21

  In 1951, during an early contact with Dalley in Calcutta, she brought down a Lee Enfield bullet as a demonstration of the old British ammunition that the Tibetans would need if they were to resist the Chinese occupation, along with a tin of the sweet tinned fruit in syrup that was favoured by Tibet’s monasteries. Could, she wondered, a way be found to use the fruit tins to smuggle ammunition into the country? Dalley went as far as to bag up a tin and send it through the diplomatic channel to Washington; sadly, the ingenious scheme never saw the light of day. She was equally bold in her attempts to put pressure on the Americans to give their full support to Tibet’s cause. After a visit to Lhasa in 1952, she brought an oral message from the Dalai Lama about the increasing food shortages in the city; he was hopeful, she said with a stern voice to her CIA contact, that when the time came the ‘United States would give material aid and moral support’.

  Thondup and the sisters were reportedly never on the payroll of the CIA. Thondup in particular was ‘not the kind of person comfortable in dark alleys’.22 But they were (according to John Turner, one of the Calcutta CIA officers involved) highly adept at offering ‘tidbits of intelligence to try and influence US policy’.23 Not surprisingly their activity came to the attention of the intelligence services of the newly independent India. B. N. Mullik,
the new head, went so far as to visit Darjeeling in 1953 to assess just how deeply the Americans were involving themselves with the Namgyals and the region. Mullik had a difficult job: under the British, external intelligence had been run from London, meaning that the only intelligence infrastructure and experience in India in 1947 was internally focused. But Mullik was highly perceptive. He saw what others perhaps did not: with the Chinese establishing themselves in Tibet, Sikkim was rapidly becoming an international frontier-state between India and China. It was hardly a surprise, he said, that the small mountain kingdom had become a focal point for the Americans based in Delhi.

  -4-

  In Gangtok, Thondup’s frustrations with the new power arrangements in Sikkim continued. The convoluted voting system designed to appease the Nepalis was bad enough, but things were even worse when it came to the day-to-day administration of Sikkim.

  The theory was simple enough: under the 1950 treaty, defence, external affairs and communications were the responsibility of the Indian government; everything else was run internally from Gangtok. The Durbar (parliament) was headed by an Indian-appointed dewan. Thondup, as head of state (he was now to all intents and purposes the Chogyal, given his father’s withdrawal from society), retained control over the police and finance; certain other areas – education, health, forests, for example – were ‘transferred’ to be dealt with by elected officials and the civil servants.

  In practice, however, the system was labyrinthine in complexity. The Dewan, John Lall, on loan from India, had a house that was judiciously placed on the road between the old Residency on the hillside – where the Indian-appointed political officer was now based – and the Palace on the promontory. From the start, it was ambiguous whether Lall was an Indian official ‘deputed’ to Sikkim (and therefore reporting to the Indian political officer) or a Sikkimese official ‘borrowed’ from India, and therefore Thondup’s man. Lall had no doubts: he felt his ultimate loyalties lay squarely with the Indian political officer and with New Delhi. This naturally irked Thondup, who wondered what powers he was actually left with; he ‘bitterly resented even the hint of any suggestion, albeit unintended, that ultimate authority derived not from the ruler but from the Government of India through the Indian-loaned Dewan’.24

  Lall also decided early on that, as there were no qualified administrators in Sikkim, Indians should be drafted in as an ‘interim’ measure. Not surprisingly these Indian officers formed their own little colony, huddling together against the cold weather and keeping themselves to themselves. Worse, they were paid higher salaries than the Sikkimese, ‘as compensation for insecurity of service, and also to provide an incentive to them to uproot themselves from their existing billets to take up work in a remote country on an uncertain frontier’.25 Thondup felt that his country was now being run by outsiders. His relations with the new Political Officer, Balraj Kapur, were also poor. The political officer, Thondup noted, was now viewed by the Sikkimese politicians as a supportive arbiter in the event of reaching an impasse with the Palace. It was a far cry from the days of the British, when he had thought of Sir Basil Gould as a ‘friend, philosopher and guide’.

  Thondup clung onto whatever he could to keep his idea of Sikkim alive. One source of support came right from the top – in the form of Pandit Nehru. In 1953 the Indian prime minister, who harboured an abiding love for the Himalayan states, and in particular for Sikkim, visited Gangtok with his daughter, who was already involved in politics, working tirelessly for her father and her husband, Feroze Gandhi, on behalf of the Congress Party. Despite his day-to-day troubles, Thondup showed off his country with considerable pride. It was the first visit by a prime minister of any country to Sikkim, which Thondup took to be another important step towards recognising its independent position. Sikkimese elections the following year, which passed off with little disturbance, increased the perception that the 1950 Indo-Sikkimese Treaty might, in fact, be the best thing for the country.

  But Nehru was also operating on a bigger stage. As he persisted with his dream of a pan-Asian federation of nations, he moved ever closer to Mao and the new Chinese leadership. Some of the concessions he made were essentially pragmatic, but the outcomes were often at the expense of Sikkim’s cousins in Tibet: in 1952, the Government of India agreed to downgrade their representation in Tibet to a consul-general, implicitly conceding that Tibet’s foreign relations were controlled by China. Two years later Nehru agreed to withdraw the Indian military escort in the Chumbi Valley (that had been established by the British after the 1904 Younghusband mission into Tibet) and hand over the dak bungalows there. He also conceded control over the telegraph line (that the British had laid in the Chumbi Valley) to China. All of these minor concessions, Nehru believed, helped to improve Sino-Indian relations by removing awkward signs of India’s colonial inheritance.

  When Nehru and Zhou Enlai, China’s Premier, signed the Panchsheel Treaty, the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’, in 1954, it ensured that India would never again intervene in Tibet. The following year Nehru arranged the Bandung Conference, which founded the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, an attempt to create a powerblock rising above the factionalism of the Cold War. At the conference Nehru and Zhou Enlai publicly reaffirmed their commitment to the Panchsheel. This was, Nehru felt sure, a new era of cooperation in Asia.

  The press were delighted. This was ‘Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai’*, a brotherhood of nations, a new model for the world. Nehru considered the partnership with the Chinese as a huge triumph. In the Indian parliament he laid out his views on the Panchsheel Treaty unequivocally:

  It is a matter of some importance to us, of course, as well as, I am sure to China, that these countries, which have now almost 1800 miles of frontier, should live in terms of peace and friendliness and should respect each other’s sovereignty and integrity, should agree not to interfere with each other in any way, and not to commit aggression on each other . . .

  But not everyone shared Nehru’s optimism. The leader of the opposition painted a quite different picture of the agreement and its focus on Tibet:

  Tibet is culturally more akin to India than it is to China, at least Communist China, which has repudiated all its own culture. I consider this [occupation of Tibet] as much colonial aggression on the part of China as any colonial aggression indulged in by western nations . . . In international politics when a buffer state is abolished by a peaceful nation, that nation is considered to have aggressive designs on its neighbours. It is also said that in the new map of China other border countries like Nepal, Sikkim, etc. figure. This gives us an idea of the aggressive designs of China . . .26

  It was a very different view of the future of Asian relations – one that looked at the Himalayan states, including Sikkim, as vital Indian barriers, not as a ‘Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai’ bridge, as Nehru liked to think.

  In April 1954, it was Thondup’s turn to go to Lhasa. His Tibetan wife, Sangey Deki, had already given birth to two boys, one in March 1952, another in April 1953; it was the Tibetan custom that a man should take his bride home to her parents after the birth of her first child. The journey also provided an opportunity for Thondup to see the Dalai Lama and to witness the Chinese occupation at first hand.

  On his return, Thondup headed to the Calcutta consulate, where he debriefed CIA officer John Turner. Thondup had little good to say. On reaching Yatung after crossing the Nathu La, Thondup reported, he was accosted at the Chinese checkpost by drab and dour unfriendly soldiers, who demanded his papers as if he was nothing more than an ordinary citizen.27 In Lhasa restrictions were placed on his movements; he was forbidden from photographing any government facilities and had found the whole city stuffed full of Chinese soldiers. Soaring prices were hitting the poorest in Lhasa hard. The Chinese had driven him out to the brand new Damshung airfield outside Lhasa and shown him a fresh stretch of road leading in to Kham, clear evidence that preparations were being made to make Tibet more accessible to Chinese troops. He had found the Dalai Lama, T
hondup reported sadly to his CIA handler, ‘unhappy but resigned to his fate’.

  Thondup was right. The Dalai Lama and his advisers had now decided that their best option was to at least explore what an accommodation with China would look like. Shortly after Thondup’s visit, the Tibetan leader left Lhasa for Peking to try to reach some kind of understanding with the Chinese over the status of Tibet. Initially the Dalai Lama was impressed with Chairman Mao in their meetings. Mao’s charisma, he reported, ‘inspired’ him; the Dalai Lama was under no illusions that change and modernisation were required in Tibet, and Mao’s insistence that this was a shared objective seemed to augur well for some level of cooperation. But over six months in Beijing their differences became clear, as did the underlying strategic rationale behind Mao’s interest in Tibet. He realised that Mao saw Tibet as an answer to the need for mineral resources and that the Party had little respect for Tibetan culture. The single ‘liberated’ nation that Mao envisaged certainly encompassed Tibet.

  The final straw came on the day before the Dalai Lama was due to leave Peking. Mao praised his ‘scientific mind and revolutionary character’; the Dalai Lama was flattered. But then the communist leader lent over and added in a conspiratorial tone: ‘Of course, religion is poison.’

  The scales fell from the young Tibetan leader’s eyes.

  -5-

  By the time Thondup returned from Lhasa to Sikkim in 1954, John Lall had come to the end of his term as dewan in Gangtok. Thondup and Lall had never seen eye to eye, and Thondup now persuaded the Indians that if arrangements were to work in the future, he should be the one to personally choose the dewan. The Indians agreed. Thondup’s thoughts turned to his old friend from the Dehradun course, Nari Rustomji. ‘Uncle Rusty’ was just concluding a posting in Assam; a few phone calls and it was all arranged. Nari Rustomji arrived to take over as dewan in the second half of 1954.