by Andrew Duff
While the politicians flung accusations and counter-accusations around, Thondup continued with the preparations to mark his 50th year. Ishbel Ritchie, the headmistress of the Paljor Namgyal Girls’ School, was one of those co-opted onto a ‘birthday committee’ set up to plan the events. She sensed immediately that there were tensions: the first committee meeting was, she wrote to her mother, ‘a rather haphazard affair, with a good half of the potential attenders absent’. Against a backdrop of ‘various agitations – of varying degrees of belligerence’, she was surprised that the Chogyal was ‘planning to have 2 days of events instead of one – there is to be some kind of pageant and cultural show’.
While Thondup was planning his latest effort to promote his homeland’s separate identity, he had no idea that Sikkim was cropping up in the latest summit meeting between Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai, now Premier of the State Council in China. In February 1973, a year after Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to meet Mao, Kissinger was back in Peking for an extraordinarily wide-ranging foreign policy discussion with Zhou. The pair galloped through Western Europe and the Middle East before the subject turned to India, touching on the Himalayas and the recent addition of Bhutan to the ranks of the UN.2
Bhutan’s accession was a curious anomaly, Kissinger pointed out. Since India retained control of their foreign relations, he suggested it was reasonable to assume that they also controlled the Bhutanese vote; Zhou agreed, musing that India’s relationship with Bhutan’s UN membership was not much different from the Soviet Union’s relationship with Ukraine’s: when the UN was created in 1945 Stalin had successfully gained three seats – one for the Soviet Union and one each for the Ukraine and Byelorussia, both Soviet states for whose defence the USSR was responsible.
But it was the discussion on Sikkim itself that provoked the most interesting comment from Zhou: Sikkim, he suggested, might be considered as India’s ‘Byelorussia’. It was an analogy that Kissinger got immediately – and it had nothing to do with the UN. Kissinger realised that Zhou was drawing a skilful comparison between India’s recent policy of migration of Indians into Sikkim with Stalin’s policy of ‘Sovietisation’ in Byelorussia, designed to scotch any signs of Western influence.
As the two diplomats chuckled conspiratorially, they swapped other anecdotes about the Himalayan region. Hope Cooke, Kissinger admitted to Zhou, had become something of a nuisance. ‘She keeps using her prayer beads and sifting her beads all the time,’ he told Zhou. ‘She has become more Buddhist than the population. She makes me so nervous I always avoid seeing her.’ Zhou responded with his own story – this time of the period when Nehru and he were building bridges between their two countries:
PM Chou*: In 1957 on my way back to China from the Soviet Union and Poland I also stopped in India. The scene then was different – another story. Nehru invited me to a tea party in his garden and among the guests were people in costume. There were two Tibetan lamas, and there suddenly appeared a female lama. Do you know who she was?
Dr Kissinger: Madame Binh?†
PM Chou: Madame Gandhi. [laughter] She was dressed up entirely in Tibetan costume. That was something that Nehru was capable of doing. I am not among those that go in for memoir-writing.
Dr Kissinger: It is a pity.
PM Chou: So perhaps we can ask you to write it in your memoirs since you have it now in your minutes. [laughter]3
Relations between the Chinese and the Americans had never been better.
Although Mrs Gandhi was blissfully unaware that Kissinger and Zhou were chuckling over her sartorial choices, she was all too cognisant of their strengthening relationship, and deeply distrustful of both countries’ intentions towards India. Her distrust only served to increase her sensitivity to any developments in the Himalayas.
A key dynamic was the relationship between Delhi and Washington. The events of 1971 – the US rapprochement with China, the Indo-Soviet treaty and US criticism of Indian action during the war which formed Bangladesh – had all contributed to a deepening froideur between the two countries. She had never liked Nixon, and had little sympathy for him when the Watergate crisis broke in early 1973. An article she had written in the August 1972 edition of Foreign Affairs had not helped matters either. The article was a clear attack on American foreign policy in Asia, and towards India in particular. After an historical analysis in which she noted with ‘grave concern’ that ‘US policy as it developed impinged seriously on our national interests’, she got into her stride. ‘It is necessary,’ she lectured, ‘to take note of the dispatch of the warship Enterprise to support a ruthless military dictatorship [in Pakistan] and to intimidate a democracy, and the extraordinary similarity of the attitudes adopted by the United States and China. Imagine our feelings.’
The appeal for emotional – rather than rational – sympathy had become a hallmark of Indira’s increasingly personal leadership style.
Her sense of persecution only increased when America partially lifted a long-standing embargo on arms sales to South Asia.* The announcement infuriated Mrs Gandhi and her ministers – the policy change clearly favoured Pakistan (who had convinced the Americans that they needed arms) over India. India’s antipathy to Pakistan was perhaps the only thing that trumped the poor relationship with the US. In the Indian parliament the foreign minister expressed his ‘utmost concern’, saying that the decision would ‘once again pose a grave threat to India’s security’.4
It also gave the larger-than-life Pakistani President, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, an opportunity to have a dig at Indira Gandhi – and to paint her, not him, as the one posing the threat to peace in South Asia. Pakistan ‘did not wish to get into an arms race with India’5, he told the press pompously, arguing that the country’s small size relative to India meant that it would reach an ‘arms saturation point’ sooner rather than later. The situation for India, however, he added mischievously, was different ‘in that India was a larger country, had pretensions of being a dominant power, and had other areas to “look after” such as Bhutan, Sikkim and now East Pakistan’. A few weeks later Bhutto even suggested privately to Kissinger that in order to maintain South Asian stability the US should ‘better its relations’ with Sri Lanka and other peripheral states – including ‘the Indian protectorates of Bhutan and Sikkim’.
While Sikkim was being discussed in speeches from and private conversations between world leaders in early 1973, Thondup was swearing in the new council of elected politicians in the Royal Chapel on 8 March. For a moment it seemed as if the disputes between the factions in Sikkim might have dissolved. At a lunch afterwards, Ishbel Ritchie reported the Chogyal to be ‘on good form, teasing as ever’.
But for those who sought democratic change – and for the young Nepali radicals, led by the Kazi and Kazini’s adopted son, Nar Bahadur Khatiawara – the February election result had become a rallying call. They were now determined to push for reform to Sikkim’s political system.
Bajpai found it astonishing that Thondup did not seem to appreciate the clamour for some kind of democratic change around him. Even the pro-Palace National Party was now muttering openly about the antiquated ‘appointment’ system that vested all the power in the Chogyal. Bajpai also thought Thondup’s continued talk of treaty revision genuinely out of touch. It ignored the geopolitical realities – Sikkim needed India, not the other way round, as Thondup seemed to be suggesting. More importantly, Thondup himself needed India. Bajpai was open with Thondup as to his views: if the Indian government were no longer in Sikkim as protector, he told Thondup, the Palace would be much more vulnerable to the growing clamour for political change.6 He also warned the Chogyal to be careful: Indira Gandhi, he pointed out, was not the same woman since her triumph in Bangladesh.7
Bajpai also tried to be as frank as he could with Delhi. The challenge lay, he told them, in where India would stand if trouble started. He knew full well that there was a substantial Indian intelligence presence both in Sikkim and in the north part of West Bengal around Dar
jeeling and Kalimpong – and that they were in contact with the opposition parties in Sikkim. He also shared Delhi’s view that a supportive Chogyal gave some stability in the region, but what frustrated him was Delhi’s inability to commit to a firm position.
Bajpai had two main routes into the core Indian bureaucracy. The first was via the new Foreign Secretary, Kewal Singh, who had replaced Tikki Kaul (now in Washington as Indian Ambassador). Bajpai and Singh knew each other well – they had worked together in Pakistan in the run-up to the 1965 conflict, after which Singh had been so impressed that he had then demanded that Bajpai be transferred to the Ministry of External Affairs. Bajpai liked Kewal Singh’s quietly determined approach to diplomacy.
But Bajpai also had another important contact in Delhi: R. N. Kao, the head of the Indian external intelligence service, the Research & Analysis Wing, known as RAW.
Kao, notoriously close to Indira Gandhi, had been watching the situation carefully for some time. Unwilling to take any chances, he had already deployed his intelligence agents on the ground during early 1973 in northern Bengal and the south of Sikkim to provide encouragement to the anti-Chogyal forces and to ‘build up their organisation and make their weight felt in the politics of Sikkim’. P. N. Dhar, Indira Ghandi’s Principal Secretary, confirmed RAW’s active involvement in his memoirs published in 2000: ‘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. This process had started several months before the storm broke in April 1973.’8
In Sikkim, Thondup had no idea about RAW’s involvement – but he could see that trouble was brewing.
The first signs appeared on 20 March when two of the six appointed ‘Executive Councillors’ did not turn up to be sworn in at a separate ceremony. Both were from the Kazi’s SNC. Hearing that one of them was in Kalimpong, Thondup sent his intelligence chief, Karma Topden, to investigate. Topden reported that the councillor was locked in a room in the Kazi and Kazini’s house, guarded by some of Khatiawara’s young thugs. A couple of days later, both Kazi and Khatiawara held rallies near the border with Sikkim, where the distinction between the movement for change in Sikkim and the Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling and Kalimpong blurred. The new opposition party, Janata Congress, also sought to whip up Nepali anxieties.
Thondup knew that something needed to be done to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation. The problem was that the popular support for Kazi and Khatiawara in the south of Sikkim and beyond made them virtually untouchable. Instead, in order to demonstrate that he was in control, the leader of the Janata Congress, Krishna Chandra Pradhan, was arrested for ‘fomenting communal strife’. The arrest backfired. On 28 March, the day of the Executive Council’s inauguration, a large crowd assembled near the palace in Gangtok to protest at the arrest. Sensing that this was his moment, the Kazi handed the Chogyal a note after the inauguration demanding three specific actions: the release of Krishna Chandra Pradhan; a commitment to the principle of one man, one vote; and a fully democratic administration.
As the crowd swelled near the palace, Thondup realised he was in an impossible position: the previous August he had effectively appointed himself as Sikkim’s dewan (prime minister) in an effort to simplify the administration and reduce Indian influence. Now he had to live with the consequence: there was no place other than the palace where popular grievances could be taken. Anxious to calm the situation, Thondup spoke to the crowd at length, astutely choosing to address them in Nepali. He explained that Pradhan had been arrested under the auspices of the legal system and that he had no mandate to unilaterally alter the laws of Sikkim. Neither, he told them, did he have any power to make changes to the system of government. That too would have to come from within; in other words, the people would have to persuade the councillors to request change. Although strictly correct, it was somewhat disingenuous – there was little chance of the recently elected National Party backing the idea of one man, one vote in the knowledge that it would sound their death knell. Nevertheless, Thondup’s words had an effect, calming at least some of the Gangtok crowd, many of whom – despite everything – still had respect for the institution of the Chogyal.
But as the crowd thinned a little, two determined young Nepali men stayed on. They announced that they would remain – on hunger strike – until the protestors’ key demands were met.
As the two young men made their dramatic protest, reports started to flood in to the palace of trouble in other areas of Sikkim, particularly to the south and west, where the border with West Bengal was extremely porous.
Hope felt conflicted: she had always made a point of supporting young Nepalis in Sikkim, in an effort to create the kind of tolerant, multi-ethnic state that she believed the country could be. Now she had to watch as her husband tried to defend the indefensible – a political system where the Nepalis, more than 75 per cent of the population, were marginalised. Worse still, she knew one of the hunger strikers well. As Thondup wrestled with what to do, someone suggested that Hope should attempt to break the hunger strike by going out with food for him. Thondup forbade it, snapping at Hope that she was the one who had ‘built up’ the hunger strikers by ‘making such a fuss’ over them in the palace.
Over the next three days, the situation worsened. Protestors started to pour into Gangtok. Many of them were obviously from outside Sikkim. Rumours circulated that the protests were suspiciously well coordinated.* Meanwhile the two opposition parties, the SNC and the Janata Congress, put aside their differences and formed a Joint Action Committee (JAC), immediately demanding reforms by 4 April, the Chogyal’s birthday.
The date of the ultimatum was chosen carefully as a potent symbol of the privilege they were looking to end.
In fact, the hunger strike was half-hearted, fizzling out only a few days after it started: by 1 April, the two men had sloped hungrily away to the hospital. But on the streets the protest intensified; a mob, estimated in the thousands, ‘armed with kukris and lathis’,† was now hovering near the junction just below the bazaar.
That evening, Thondup and Hope went up to dinner with Bajpai and his wife at India House (the former British Residency), accompanied by Thondup’s sons, Crown Princes Tenzing and Wongchuk, both now in their early twenties. Everyone knew that trouble was now highly likely – and that there were Indian intelligence agents involved – but Bajpai and Thondup were now operating in a strange hinterland of innuendo and oblique references. Bajpai had been reading Harold Nicholson’s Congress of Vienna (which Hope had lent to him) and made references to the conflict between Talleyrand and Napoleon, as the younger and more powerful man outgrew the advice of the old statesman. Later, Bajpai, perhaps recalling his days at Oxford in the 1940s and hoping to compete against Tenzing (now at Cambridge), brought out four tankards. While the crowd gathered below them in the bazaar, Bajpai, Thondup and his two sons downed pints of ale. It was as if Bajpai wanted to make sure this particular evening provided memories. Soon the party were dancing, Bajpai grabbing Hope’s wrist and declaring that they would dance ‘the last tango in Gangtok’.
Despite herself, Hope found herself caught up in the moment, ‘enjoying the almost sexual energy of his high’.9
Bajpai’s sudden display of unbridled hedonism was understandable: over the past few weeks Delhi had finally agreed that if Thondup was unable to accept that it was Indian support that was maintaining the status quo in Sikkim, then something had to be done to bring the Chogyal to his senses. ‘Having served as a seawall between the Chogyal and popular urges,’ Bajpai would say later, ‘we thought he should see just what would happen without our protective help.’10
The Kazi and the JAC were now fully aware of the implicit support that they had for their cause, and the strong position that it put them in. Even the release of the imprisoned Krishna Chandra Pradhan on the 2nd was not enough to stop the steady flow of demonstrators, some paid, congregating below the bazaar in Gangtok. The local Sikki
m police force commander pleaded with Thondup to invoke a section of the criminal procedure code that would ban the assembly of more than five persons, which Thondup finally agreed to do on the 3rd.
Some of the elected councillors, desperate to avoid a violent confrontation, therefore sought a meeting with the JAC. On the same day as the criminal procedure code was implemented, a group from the JAC, including the Kazi, met with representatives from the Palace – led by Jigdal Densapa, Thondup’s right-hand man – seeking to thrash out a last-minute compromise. By the evening, it seemed that they had reached an agreement: Densapa indicated that he could get Thondup to agree to the one man, one vote principle; he also acknowledged that a new constitution was required.
But at the last moment the Kazi left the room, saying he had to confirm the SNC’s position. Within minutes he had returned to tell the confused group that the deal was off. Who had he called? Khatiawara? The Kazini? Bajpai? Whoever it was, none of those assembled were in any doubt about what was likely to happen next.
-2-
Hope Cooke woke with a start at 7 a.m. on 4 April, the day of her husband’s birthday celebrations. It took a few moments to realise that what she was hearing was shots down below in the bazaar. A few minutes later, Karma Topden, Thondup’s intelligence chief, rushed breathlessly into the bedroom. In the bazaar below the palace, members of the small Sikkim police force in Gangtok – locally staffed and loyal to the Sikkim administration – were desperately trying to maintain order in the face of a crowd of ‘five or six thousand demonstrators’. Pelted with bottles and stones, the police had used tear gas and lathi charges to repel the protestors and prevent them from ascending to the palace, he added. They had already been forced to use live fire, injuring two protestors.