How curtains fell on a Shangri La

Sandeep Dikshit

The creation of Bangladesh was the cherry on the cake of spymaster Ramnath Kao’s legendary run as the chief of India’s external spy agency, the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW). There were several icings on the cake as well. One of these was the elaborate, immoral, painful and at-times exhausting 27-month RAW-led operation to merge Sikkim into India. 

The story has been adequately chronicled with at least three pro-state narratives — Satyendra Shukla’s The Story of Integration, Maloy Krishan Dhar’s Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled and Brijbir Saran Das’ The Sikkim Saga. The tilt in the scales of historical narrative was sought to be balanced by Andrew Duff’s Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom and Sunanda K Datta Ray’s Smash & Grab. 

This recent book by GBS Sidhu fills many gaps. In fact, it makes a point to demolish many narratives born out of confusion about events that took place at a breakneck speed in Sikkim from 1973 to 1975. There could be none better placed to try to set the record straight for Sidhu headed the three-man RAW team tasked to first raise a united opposition and then calibrate its street power to compel the Chogyal to throw in the towel.  

This is a book RN Kao wanted Sidhu to write, perhaps to counter the anti-India tenor by Datta Ray and Duff. Kao had penned a foreword but passed away in 2002 before the book was written. Seven short notes covering events during his career, including the note on Sikkim, were consigned to a vault. The Sikkim note, clubbed with one on Bangladesh and another on Indira Gandhi’s assassination, will be made public in 2027, 25 years after Kao’s death. Till those remaining nine years come to fruition, this is the best placed narrative on offer.

Sikkim’s raja, the Chogyal, had an easy run in the early years after the end of British colonial rule with India discouraging any democratic opposition to acquire critical mass. But the tide turned with the onset of Indira Gandhi’s reign and her two successive Principal Secretaries PN Haksar and PN Dhar who overruled the pacifist line of a third Kashmiri and Foreign Secretary TN Kaul. Till the change of guard in the PMO, the word merger was a varjit swar (prohibited) and the strategy was to control the anti-durbar agitation so that it does not become a nuisance. 

The RAW operation was originally a tactic to build pressure on the Chogyal to make him sign a new treaty. But it subsequently assumed the role of an operation that led to the complete merger of Sikkim with India. Sidhu was plucked from a regular police job to head the RAW’s operations, possibly because he was the son-in-law of then Foreign Minister Swaran Singh. It might have been assumed that Sidhu’s assurance to opposition leaders that India had lifted its protective cover from the Chogyal’s head would have carried more weight. 

Action in placid Sikkim began heating up with the arrival of two foreign women to add to the air of intrigue and glamour provided by Coo Coo La, sister to the Chogyal. A Scottish woman, her best years past her, fell for the most important leader being run by Indian intelligence, Kazi. The second was an American, Hope Cooke, who married the Chogyal. Both affected a sea change in their respective husbands’ attitudes. The Kazi turned more aggressive towards the durbar while the Chogyal began badgering India for more powers. 

But Sidhu denies that Cooke was a CIA agent on the basis of basic rules of spy craft: why would CIA create a highly visible contact when there were other sources including two Scottish headmistresses who regularly sent “letters” from Gangtok to their “parents”. 

As the book takes us through the nitty-gritty of intelligence agency’s marshalling of an opposition, there were fatal mistakes, including a heavy-handed Indian Army operation to disarm the Sikkim Guards because of the Foreign Office’s misreading of the situation that pulled in the Indian Army into an operation that was imminently avoidable.

Like the Chogyal, Sikkim’s political players of the time never lived happily ever afterwards. The name of Nar Bahadur Bhandari, the man who upstaged Kazi, appears intermittently as a Nepali pro-Palace lout. To Sidhu’s horror, his successors changed the policy and began consorting with pro-Chogyal forces. Hope fled for the US while the Kazini pined away till her death in Kalimpong. Bhandari became the chosen one and Kazi, who played India’s game for three decades, was sidelined. Another Shangri La fell prey to the developers, the builders and the traders. But India got its twenty-second state.