Ambassador Malik’s memories of his years in Sikkim (1967-70) are a valuable addition to the number of memoirs emanating from retired IFS officers. Those were the years when the Chogyal of Sikkim, Paljor Thondup Namgyal, and his Gyalmo (wife), Hope Cook, were beginning efforts to exit Sikkim’s treaty relations with India, culminating with the integration of Sikkim into the Union of India in 1975. But it was. (Which was portrayed by Sunanda K. Dutta-Ray as a dacoit). There is an attempt to put Malik’s case in perspective by a key observer, if not the key player, from above.Malik arrived in Gangtok as a deputy to Ambassador NB Menon, the political representative in Gangtok following the 1962 armed conflict with China (and the spin-off conflict at Nathu La in the year of his arrival). Pakistan’s attempts to annex Jammu and Kashmir in 1965. Nehru was dead. Indira’s succession faced a challenge from the same circle that had made her prime minister. India’s security, not world peace, was the focus of Indian foreign policy.
It is this combination of events that forms the framework for Malik’s reflections. For most Foreign Service officers, there is a defined posting that stands out. In my case it is Karachi; In Hamid Ansari, he has several tours in West Asia; There is China in Vijay Gokhale; In Krishnan Srinivasan this is Bangladesh; In Bhaswati Mukherjee it is the European Union, etc. These are recent publications. The long citation would go on to further analyze KPS Menon and their years in Kuomintang China and the post-Stalin post-USSR and Chandrashekhar Dasgupta’s transformation of East Pakistan into a liberated Bangladesh. In Malik’s case, just five years after he joined the IFS, it is Sikkim.
What Malik saw and heard as Ambassador NB Menon’s deputy only adds to the background of his account. He spends a great deal of time on a very informative and well-researched account of our northeastern frontier and the relationship with Tibet from pre-colonial times to post-history. It’s reassuring and comprehensive, on its own terms, but I, for my part, think I have many holes to choose from. Malik regrets that Nehru did not allow the Ministry of States to integrate Sikkim with India soon after independence, as was the case with about 600 “princes” (as Sandeep Bamzai recently noted). He was called in a book), because the Chogyal was called ‘Maharaja’. by the Brits and was a member of the Chamber of Indian Princesses. Had Sikkim been unified then, perhaps the troubles that Malik and his allies experienced with the Chogyal would have ended early. Instead, Nehru accepted China’s ‘dominion’ over Tibet in return for a pledge of ‘autonomy’ for Tibetans from China, that great ‘pasban’, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim as buffer states on our side of the Himalayas. I decided to accept. . Malik sees this as a terrible betrayal of India’s genuine security interests in pursuit of Asian solidarity and the vision of Hindi-Chinese Bhai Bhai. It is a view that will already resonate in most areas of knowledgeable Indian opinion and in many other parts of the world.
India’s humiliation on the battlefield at the hands of Communist China in 1962 encouraged the early rebellion of the Chogyal, which was led by Hope Cook (possibly in league with the CIA) and the Chogyal’s sister, Kukula, who was Cook’s staunch opponent in the palace intrigue. , was fed by the trick of . On the same side to free his brother from the perceived Indian threat.
Essentially, it is Sardar Patel’s letter to Nehru from Sardar’s deathbed in November 1950 (primarily prepared by Nehru’s Foreign Secretary-General Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai) that proves Nehru’s innocence in dealing with the Chinese. Introduced to do, the most important thing is that they have been abandoned. The colonialism of the buffer state in Tibet (allegedly) bequeathed us in Tibet. In fact, the story of the Chogyal’s many crimes, with the support of his Indian allies, above all IS Chopra and Tikki Kaul, and Indira Gandhi with PN Haksar, sabotaged the attempt by securing Sikkim’s eventual annexation into the Indian Union. , just mentioned in chapter one, number 18 and, if you like, comment on the “conclusion” in the last chapter. The rest is the history of the region from the 7th century to the present, with dire warnings of the lessons to be learned from that history.
The protagonist of the story is Lord Curzon and the villain, in post-independence India, is Jawaharlal Nehru. Malik is of the opinion that Curzon understood the need for India’s security to make Tibet a buffer against the Chinese—except that this was not Curzon’s goal at all. He wanted to keep the Russians out – and Colonel Younghusband was sent on his infamous ‘expedition’, mainly to find and extinguish the Russians. Alas, to Curzon cheers, “there were no Russian arsenals, no secret Cossacks … the Russian bogey had become a phantom”. (Patrick French, young man, Harper Perennials, 1994/2004, p. 241).
Curzon and Younghusband were reprimanded by the Foreign Secretary of India and the Foreign Secretary in London for not understanding that the inclusion of the Tsarist Empire in the Kaiser’s encirclement of Germany, had been reached, with hostilities in Europe. Upon the outbreak, Russia would open a second front against Germany. Understanding also promised that both Britain and Russia would lay their hands on Tibet. Curzon broke that pledge and, as a result, found his second term as Viceroy nullified. The Treaty of Lhasa, which the Younghusbands had squeezed out of the Tibetans, was largely rejected by London, with its harshest clauses largely weakened. In fact, the British government of India was determined to bring in the Chinese not to keep them out of the affairs of the subcontinent. In the 1890s, he tried his best to deliver his “duty” to the Chinese Empire to defend its long border with Central Asia at Aksai Chin, but was unsuccessful. From the 1893 Trade Agreement to the Darjeeling Agreement to the Simla Conference of 1914, the British insisted on a Chinese presence in every agreement they entered into. The Brits were so married to Chinese sovereignty over Tibet that Sir Henry McMahon did not attempt to mark the McMahon Line on official maps of the Survey of India. This was accomplished only in 1932 at the behest of British Indian Foreign Secretary Sir Olaf Caro. And yet, Zhou Enlai virtually accepted the McMahon Line in his proposals for a boundary settlement presented to Nehru in April 1960. And after the Chinese reached the Brahmaputra Valley in 1962, their troops were unilaterally withdrawn behind most of the McMahon Line. Tawang, if not from Thagla Ridge.
For Aksai Chin, the British heritage for independent India included official maps showing the entire plateau, ‘where not a single blade of grass grows’, as unstated. It was Nehru in 1954, the year he signed the India-China Agreement on Tibet, which cartographically fixed the ‘flexible boundaries’ of British India on its northern borders by ordering the Survey of India to show all Aksai Chin as belonging. converted to lines. to India. This was in response to the construction of the Xinjiang-Lhasa road across the plateau by the Chinese, in which India was not aware of what was happening in the area that the Brits had left ‘disturbed’ and independent India unchecked.
Soon after independence, Nehru saved us from engaging in a war with ‘godless communism’ that the West had been fighting (and losing) for decades in our part of the world (Korea, Qumoy/Matsu/Formosa, Vietnam , Laos) , Cambodia; and, later, in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan). Nehru was defeated only when his China policy became inconsistent in 1959-60. Rajiv Gandhi tried to rectify this and was successful in ensuring peace and tranquility for three decades in 1988. Now, we are back in hostilities.
Unlike Ambassador Malik and virtually all our IFS experts on China, I admire the proto-Nehru 1949-59 and regret the post 1959 deutero-Nehru. On one vote, an overwhelming majority of Indians will vote for Preet Mohan Singh Malik. More sorry. Do read his book.
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