Kingdom

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30 highlights

• The coup was over in twenty minutes. At the end of it, the Chogyal was placed under house arrest, bringing about the end of a regime that had ruled Sikkim for 333 years. Just over a month later, on 16 May 1975, Sikkim joined the union of India as its twenty-second state.

• Depending on which side is telling the story, the “Sikkim affair” is variously referred to as an ‘integration’, an ‘annexation’ or a ‘merger’.

• “What is the Indian obsession with annexing Sikkim?” asked US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in bewilderment in a staff meeting in Washington when news of the coup reached the world.

• In 1950, three years after independence, Sikkim became a protectorate of the new republic. The kingdom had autonomy in domestic matters but India was responsible for defence, external affairs and communications.

• For Nehru, Sikkim’s autonomy was nearly sacred. “If we bring a small country like Sikkim within our fold by using force,” he said, “it would be like killing a fly with a bullet.”

• Indira Gandhi, fresh from victory in the 1971 war for Bangladesh’s liberation, summoned Rameshwar Nath Kao to her office. In 1968, she had handpicked this tall Kashmiri with a formidable intellect to set up the R&AW.

• Relations between the Indian state and the kingdom had reached a stalemate. India wanted to create a treaty of Permanent Association, even dangling the carrot of sponsoring Sikkim’s membership to UN organisations in return. But over the 1960s, the Chogyal had been demanding full independence with increasing vigour.

• In the Chogyal’s backyard, the demand for merger with India had originated from the first leader of the Sikkim State Congress,[7] Tashi Tshering, who had even gone to Delhi in 1948 to negotiate it. Patel, the man in charge of India’s integration, was keen on bringing Sikkim into the fold. Nehru chose to overrule him and sent Tshering back.

• On his passing in 2002, Kao’s own notes on the operations in Sikkim and Bangladesh were handed over to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. These will be made public in 2027, according to his will.

• Like its neighbours Tibet and Bhutan, Sikkim was a conservative Buddhist theocracy. The ruling elite came from two communities: the Bhutia, who migrated from Tibet in the thirteenth century, and the Lepcha, indigenous to Sikkim.

• The demographic dynamic of Sikkim started shifting in the late nineteenth century, when Jean Claude White, the first British political officer of Sikkim, began to bring in labour from Nepal to build roads and cultivate land.

• There was another reason why the British encouraged Nepali immigration—to counteract Tibetan influence in Sikkim. There were close religious, cultural and political ties between the two kingdoms.

• From the 1940s onwards, this, then, was the defining divide in Sikkim’s politics: the tension between its powerful minority and the landless and disenfranchised Nepalis, who had grown to 75 percent of the population by the 1970s.

• The Chogyal’s inability to provide political representation for the majority of his subjects became his Achilles heel. The R&AW recognized this and surreptitiously worked to exploit it.

• On the ground, the R&AW worked to encourage popular support and escalate protests against the monarchy. All anti-Chogyal political parties were merged under the leadership of Kazi Lhendup Dorji’s Sikkim National Congress. The aim was to compel the Chogyal to seek India’s assistance in restoring law and order.

• On 6 April, when Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary PN Dhar and foreign secretary Kewal Singh met her to apprise her of the situation in Gangtok, they found that she was in the know and was waiting for the Chogyal’s request for help. Dhar guessed that she had already been briefed by the R&AW.

• In May 1973, a tripartite agreement was signed between the government of India, the Chogyal and the political parties representing the people of Sikkim. Elections were held in 1974, and Kazi Lhendup Dorji became the kingdom’s first chief minister.

• As with Sikkim, India had inherited a treaty from the British that granted Bhutan a degree of autonomy that the Chogyal did not have. “The behaviour of Bhutanese monarchs was guided to reassure India that their concerns were important,” the foreign policy researcher Deep Pal told me, but “the Chogyal gave the impression that he was less dependable, and could tilt towards China at the most inopportune moment.”

• Times had changed, he insisted to Mehta, a writer for The New Yorker. “Now there is no popular agitation for merging with India. Now we want to be a separate country.”

• In every press interaction, the couple made a concerted effort to talk about Sikkim as separate from India.

• All this roiled the Indian establishment. Matters reached a head when Hope wrote a bulletin for Gangtok’s Institute of Tibetology, making a case for Darjeeling to be returned to Sikkim.

• The hill station, now part of the state of West Bengal, had originally been leased to the British by Sikkim in 1835.

• In the years since, Hope Cooke’s role in the rift between India and Sikkim has perhaps been overstated. While she may have contributed in accelerating certain events, there is more than a hint of sexism in the way the Chogyal and Gyalmo were written about and, subsequently, remembered.

• The Chogyal had been so preoccupied with showing Sikkim off to the world that he had misjudged the extent of the discontent brewing among his subjects.

• In the years after Indian independence, Kalimpong was a centre for international intrigue. Nehru had called it “a nest of spies”

• All land in Sikkim belonged to the Chogyal, who leased it to the Bhutia and Lepcha noblemen who formed the aristocracy. The Nepali settlers worked on the land without the right to own it.

• The monarchy was sensitive to criticism. Hope commissioned her friend Satyajit Ray to make a documentary on Sikkim, which he finished in 1971.

• The merger was accepted by the Sikkimese people as an inevitable consequence of being squeezed between two great powers, but there was less sympathy for the Kazi. He was labelled “desh bechoa” for colluding with the Indian state. When elections were held in 1979, his party did not win a single seat.

• Sikkimese are exempt from paying taxes and outsiders cannot buy land in the state. The Indian Constitution’s Article 371(F) ensures that pre-1975 laws remain in force.

• Interacting with twenty-somethings from Sikkim for her project, she found most were unaware that the state was an autonomous kingdom until 1975.