[When the Indian troops moved in there was general
jubilation on the streets of Gangtok. It was in fact in faraway Kathmandu that
there were reverberations. Beijing expressed grave concern. But in the absence
of popular protests against the Indian move, there was only muted reaction at
the United Nations in New York. It was only later that there were contrary
opinions within India - (Former Indian Prime Minister) Morarji Desai said in
1978 that the merger was a mistake. Even Sikkimese political leaders who fought
for the merger said it was a blunder and worked to roll it back.¹ But by then,
it was already too late.]
By
Sudheer Sharma
 |
| Lhendup Dorji |
The last Prime Minister
of the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, Kazi Lhendup Dorji, met an ignominious
Death.
On the northern corner
of West Bengal state of India, there is a hill station - Kalimpong, which once
hosted celebrities from all over the world. The hill town, where most of the
settlers are of Nepali origin, no longer retains its old charm. But until a few
weeks ago the last prime minister of a country - that has lost its independence
- used to live here. Kazi Lhendup Dorji, who died on July 28, 2007 at the
ripe old age of 103, had played a pivotal role in the merger of Sikkim into
India.
Dorji is seen as a
'traitor' in the contemporary history. He lived, and died, with the same
ignominy. "Everybody accuses me of selling the country. Even if it is
true, should I alone be blamed?" he asked me, when I met him in Kalimpong
in November 1996. But the allegation of 'betrayal' towards one's own motherland
was so powerful that Dorji could no more lead an active political life. He
spent his solitary life at the 'Chakung House' in Kalimpong for several
decades. Few people chose to remember Kazi when he passed away nor took pain to
recall his life and times.
So much so that the
Kazi was ignored even by Delhi. "I went out of my way to ensure the merger
of Sikkim into India but after the work was done, the Indians just ignored
me", Kazi told me during an interview for Jana Astha weekly, nearly 11
years ago. "Earlier, I used to be given a 'Red Carpet' welcome. Now I have
to wait for weeks even to meet second grade leaders."
When I visited
Kalimpong for the second time in 2000, Lhendup's anger towards Delhi had
reached new heights. At one time, he was received warmly by Indian leaders
including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mrs Indira Gandhi. But later he became a political
actor whose utility had been finished and thrown away into the dustbin.
The
Origin of Crisis
After India got
independence in 1947, the Sikkim State Congress, which was established as per
the advice of Nehru, launched anti-King movement. Sikkim managed to overcome
the crisis then but after Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister of India, the
tiny Himalayan kingdom found itself in a crisis from which it could never
escape. The anti-King movement, launched by the Sikkim National Congress (SNC)
under the leadership of Lhendup Dorji in 1973, led to the demise of a sovereign
nation.
India openly supported
the movement against King (Chogyal) Palden Thondup Namgyal. The then ADC to the
King, Captain Sonam Yongda, claimed that soldiers of Indian Army in civil dress
used to take part in the protests. Some of the protesters were brought from
Darjeeling and the surrounding areas. The number of Sikkimese who took part in
the protest was quite small. But that was enough.
Lhendup's protest
movement depended mainly on Indian financial assistance. The money was made
available through Intelligence Bureau (IB). "The people from IB used to
visit me twice or thrice a year. An IB agent, Tejpal Sen, used to handover
money to me personally", Dorji had told me in a recorded interview.
In fact, the main actor
behind the 'Mission Sikkim' was India's external intelligence agency, RAW
(Research and Analysis Wing). Set up in 1968, RAW was able to disintegrate
Pakistan (and form Bangladesh) within three years. The annexation of Sikkim was
their other 'historic' success. The strategists of RAW didn't want to repeat a
Bhutan in Sikkim. Bhutan managed to acquire the membership of the United
Nations in 1968. So, they launched a movement under the leadership of Lhendup,
which is described at great length by Ashok Raina in his book Inside RAW: The
Story of India's Secret Service.
Raina writes that New
Delhi had taken the decision to annex Sikkim in 1971, and that the RAW used the
next two years to create the right conditions within Sikkim to make that
happen. The key here was to use the predominantly-Hindu Sikkimese of Nepali
origin who complained of discrimination from the Buddhist king and the elite to
rise up. "What we felt then was that the Chogyal was unjust to us",
said CD Rai, editor of Gangtok Times and ex-minister. "We thought it may
be better to be Indian than to be oppressed by the king."
Lhendup - who belonged
to the Kazi family - had a historic enmity with Sikkim's ruling Chogyals. He
said he wanted to pressurise the King through public protests but lamented that
the King never came forward for reconciliation.
Under pressure from
Delhi, the Sikkimese King was forced to hold tripartite talks with SNC and
India. The talks not only curtailed royal powers, it also turned Sikkim into an
Indian 'protectorate'. In the elections held in 1974, Lhendup's SNC got
overwhelming majority in the parliament. The government and the king saw each
other as enemies. Ultimately, the cabinet meeting, on 27th March 1975, decided
to abolish monarchy. The Sikkimese parliament endorsed it and decided to hold a
referendum on the future of monarchy. Four days later, the outcome of the poll
in 57 stations across the country was: 'Abolition of the monarchy'.
In an interview, then
Agriculture Minister of Sikkim KC Pradhan recalled that the referendum was
nothing but a charade. "Indian soldiers rigged the polls by pointing
rifles at the hapless voters", he said. Immediately after the referendum,
Kazi Lhendup moved a motion in the parliament proposing that Sikkim be annexed
to India. The 32-member parliament, which had 31 members from Lhendup's SNC -
passed the motion without a blink. Needless to say that the entire episode was
being orchestrated by India. The then Indian envoy to Sikkim (known as
'political officer') BS Das wrote in his book The Sikkim Saga, "Sikkim's
merger was necessary for Indian national interest. And we worked to that end.
Maybe if the Chogyal had been smarter, and played his cards better, it wouldn't
have turned out the way it did."
But Chogyal didn't play
his cards well. When Sikkim was undergoing turmoil, the Chogyal visited
Kathmandu in 1974 to attend the coronation ceremony of King Birendra. According
to insiders, King Birendra, Chinese deputy premier Chen Li Yan and Pakistan's envoy
advised Chogyal not to return to Sikkim. "They narrated a 'master plan' to
save Sikkim from Indian hands but the King didn't accept", said Captain
Yongda. "It was because the King couldn't think even in his dreams that
India could use force to annex Sikkim."
A
"Double Game"
In fact, India was
playing a "double game". On one hand, it was supporting Lhendup in
whatever way possible against the King. On the other hand, it was assuring the
king that monarchy would survive in Sikkim. The Chogyal was also an honorary
Major General of the Indian Army. He never thought that his 'own army' would
act against him. It was only an illusion.
The Chogyal of Sikkim
was in his palace on the morning of 6 April 1975 when the roar of army trucks
climbing the steep streets of Gangtok brought him running to the window. There
were Indian soldiers everywhere, they had surrounded the palace, and short
rapid bursts of machine gun fire could be heard. Basanta Kumar Chhetri, a
19-year-old guard at the palace's main gate, was struck by a bullet and killed
- the first casualty of the takeover. The 5,000-strong Indian force didn't take
more than 30 minutes to subdue the palace guards who numbered only 243. By
12:45 pm it was all over, Sikkim ceased to exist as an independent kingdom.
The Chogyal also lost
the second opportunity. The Sikkim Guards had the capacity to stop the Indian
Army for two hours. If the Chogyal had informed Beijing and Islamabad about the
Indian invasion from the transmitter set up at his palace, both the countries
had assured him - during the Kathmandu meeting - that they would instruct their
security forces to open fire along the borders with India. Chinese army could
even travel to Gangtok to rescue the Chogyal.
Captured palace guards,
hands raised high, were packed into trucks and taken away, singing: "Dela sil, li gi, gang changka chibso" (May
my country keep blooming like a flower). But by then, the Indian tri-colour had
replaced the Sikkimese flag at the palace where the 12th king of the Namgyal
dynasty was held prisoner. "The Chogyal was a great believer in India. He
had huge respect for Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Not in his wildest
dreams did he think India would ever gobble up his kingdom", recalls
Captain Sonam Yongda, the Chogyal's aide-de-camp. Nehru himself had told
journalist Kuldip Nayar in 1960: "Taking a small country like Sikkim by
force would be like shooting a fly with a rifle." Ironically it was
Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi who cited 'national interest' to make Sikkim the
22nd state of the Indian union.
During a meeting,
former Chief Minister of Sikkim BB Gurung told me that the King and Lhendup
were just fighting a proxy war. "The real battle was between an American
and a Belgian lady." If that was true, the real victor was the third lady
- Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Two
foreign Ladies
Chogyal Palden met the
24-year-old New Yorker, Hope Cooke, in Darjeeling in 1963 and married her. For
Cooke, this was a dream come true: to become the queen of an independent
kingdom in Shangri-la. She started taking the message of Sikkimese independence
to the youth, and the allegations started flying thick and fast that she was a
CIA agent. These were the coldest years of the Cold War, and there was a
tendency in India to see a 'foreign hand' behind everything so it was not
unusual for the American queen to be labelled a CIA agent. However, as Hope
Cooke's relations with Delhi deteriorated, so did her marriage with the
Chogyal. In 1973, she took her two children and went back to New York. She
hasn't returned to Sikkim since.
Then there was
Elisa-Maria, daughter of a Belgian father and German mother who left her
Scottish husband in Burma and married Kazi Lhendup Dorji in Delhi in 1957. The
two couldn't have been more different. Elisa-Maria wanted to be Sikkim's First
Lady, but Hope Cooke stood in the way. "She didn't just want to be the
wife of an Indian chief minister; she wanted to be the wife of the prime
minister of an independent Sikkim." With that kind of an ambition, it was
not surprising that with annexation, neither Hope Cooke nor Elisa-Maria got
what they wanted.
Meanwhile, in New Delhi
Indira Gandhi was going from strength to strength, and India was flexing its
muscles. The 1971 Bangladesh war and the atomic test in 1974 gave Delhi the
confidence to take care of Sikkim once and for all. Indira Gandhi was concerned
that Sikkim may show independent tendencies and become a UN member like Bhutan
did in 1971, and she also didn't take kindly to the three Himalayan kingdoms,
Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal, getting too cosy with each other.
When the Indian troops
moved in there was general jubilation on the streets of Gangtok. It was in fact
in faraway Kathmandu that there were reverberations. Beijing expressed grave
concern. But in the absence of popular protests against the Indian move, there
was only muted reaction at the United Nations in New York. It was only later
that there were contrary opinions within India - (Former Indian Prime Minister)
Morarji Desai said in 1978 that the merger was a mistake. Even Sikkimese
political leaders who fought for the merger said it was a blunder and worked to
roll it back.¹ But by then, it was already too late.
Lhendup Dorji became
the first chief minister of the Indian state of Sikkim and retained the post
until 1979. The Indian government conferred on him 'Padma Bhusan' in 2002 and
he was also awarded the 'Sikkim Ratna' by the state government in 2004.
Despite such 'rewards',
Lhendup and his wife Elisa spent their last years in Kalimpong repenting their past
deeds. After the death of his wife in 1990, Lhendup was forced to lead a
solitary life. He neither had any children nor relatives to take care of him.
He cut himself off from his own people to avoid their wrath and hatred.
In the elections held
in 1979, Lhendup's SNC failed to bag even a single seat in the Sikkim's
legislature. This effectively brought to an end to his political career. At one
time, when he had gone to file his nomination, his name was missing from the
electoral roll. In his resolve to dethrone the Chogyal dynasty that had
400-year-old history in Sikkim, Lhendup ended up delivering his motherland into
the lap of India. In return, all he got was a life haunted from the shadow of
the past and an ignominious death.
