June 7, 1999
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CHINA'S
SHADOW OVER SIKKIM Himalayan Plunder In annexing Sikkim India lost more than it gained. By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray CHINA'S SHADOW OVER SIKKIM
Valuable as these nuggets are, G.S. Bajpai does not present them in the context of the larger bungling that cost India the confidence of the Third World. There was the fiasco of confusing "suzerainty" with "sovereignty" in describing Beijing's relations with Lhasa. Extra-territorial rights in Tibet were surrendered without obtaining anything in return. Finally, the army was routed at Bomdila because it was totally unprepared for action. Moreover, the artful mix of force majeure and political legerdemain used to annex tiny Sikkim, which Delhi was treaty-bound to protect, earned India a reputation for bullying duplicity that persists to this day in many parts of Asia, without bringing any tactical or political advantage. Glossing over all this, China's Shadow Over Sikkim disappoints in other ways too. Some readers might confuse the author with Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai or his son, Katyatani Shankar, the last but one political officer in Sikkim and the architect of an act of vainglorious expansionism. Apparently, Bajpai got to know the last Chogyal during his five years in Gangtok. Since he does not say what he was doing there, it must be presumed he was in Intelligence. That would explain both access to documents (I liked his citing Mao Zedong to exalt even China's most aggressive action as a "sacred duty and a most lofty and glorious undertaking") and political innocence. There is little to substantiate the title's suggestion of Sikkim as an active counter in the Sino-Indian dialogue. The well-worn history the author reiterates excludes, surprisingly, Lhasa's August 1947 telegram demanding a swathe of CIS-Himalayan territory, including Sikkim. If he means that China has similar designs or that it will recognise India's takeover in return for some concession, possibly in Aksai Chin, he should have analysed present-day bilateral ties, Beijing's long-term geostrategic calculations and Sikkim's relevance to modern warfare -- not 19th century. Actually, the text and appendices belie the introduction's ambitious claim that the book "is not intended to be a narrative history of Sikkim". But, mercifully, it is not as biased a narrative as some chauvinistic Indian accounts. Though he refrains from discussing India's role in the demonstrations that provided the excuse for annexation, Bajpai knows the terrain too well to trot out his grander namesake's fiction of an Indian Don Quixote rescuing the Sikkimese masses from the Chogyal's oppression. It is a pity, therefore, that the case for Sikkim as a pawn in the Great Game of the eastern Himalayas is not made out more convincingly. NEW RELEASES » Chomolungma
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It still shocks to be
reminded that the Indians were so lacking in resources when the battle of the air waves
hotted up on the Sikkim-Tibet frontier that they often "adopted (a) clumsy technique
of simply making a noise with their loudspeakers so that the Indian troops could not
listen (to) the Chinese propaganda broadcasts". Or that the army officer who took
delivery of the corpses of jawans killed at Nathu-la in 1967 insulted his country and the
dead by signing a receipt saying that the men had been "engaged in military
provocation across the border." 
