Friday, 07 February 2014
It was bad enough that the Government of India annexed Sikkim in 1975. Worse was the meek response of large sections of the media to the event. The Press swallowed New Delhi’s lies without batting an eyelid
Government-Press relations have always been the subject of speculation. Many politicians denounce the media as the enemy within while some media braggarts boast of being permanent adversaries. Mr LK Advani alone seemed discerning and honest enough to describe India’s media as the Government’s ally, though the Union Steel Minister, Mr Beni Prasad Verma, might add that the alliance has to be paid for. Indeed, Jawaharlal Nehru’s benevolence invented the phenomenon of the “embedded journalist” which shamed the profession during the American invasion of Iraq.
The concept reached its apogee in India as newspapers lustily applauded the mix of military force and political legerdemain that swallowed up the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim in 1975. The only parallel I can think of was in the conduct of the nearly 200 Murdoch publications during the Iraq war. Ms Alison Broinowski, the former Australian diplomat at whose seminar on Australia, Asia and the Media nearly 35 years ago I presented two papers, says the Murdoch Press was “hysterical” in backing Mr George W Bush’s immoral adventurism. India’s Press similarly supported every fraudulent manoeuvre described in detail in my book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim. Listening to the recent panel discussion that launched a revised edition of the book, I recalled that “disgraceful sycophancy”, to quote Mr BG Verghese, the first panellist.
As editor of the Hindustan Times, Mr Verghese had bravely opposed the operation with a memorable editorial titled, Kanchenjunga, Here We Come. He spoke of a “dastardly blow in the back for democracy,” maintaining that the “rigged plebiscite” that gave a semblance of legality to the acquisition could not possibly have been held in “far-flung areas” in the time claimed. For Sir Mark Tully of the BBC the “shameful” annexation highlighted the “great problem” of India’s “failure to deal with smaller neighbours”. Having personally known the last King of Sikkim, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, Sir Mark rejected as “an obvious lie” the image of a “tyrannical ruler” whom democrats overthrew. The Chogyal was “passionately committed to development”. Not only was the plebiscite “bogus” but the saddest memory was that no one in India uttered a critical word.
He was not quite right there. Mr Verghese did object with considerable vehemence, while two Bengali journalists — Dipankar Chakrabarti and Sukanta Raha —were jailed when a magistrate ruled that their writing in a relatively obscure monthly magazine called Aneek “seems to be calculated to prejudice the minds of the people against the territorial integrity of the Union of India”. My book naturally went much further than any article could. When Smash andGrab first appeared in 1984, Sachin Chaudhuri, the distinguished lawyer who became Union Finance Minister, warned me, “You’ve been a good friend to the Chogyal. But in the process you may not have been a good friend to yourself!” I was relieved, therefore, when a review by Nari Rustomji of the ICS said the book showed the author was “as true a friend of Sikkim as he is a good patriot of his own country.”
The third panellist, Mr Srinath Raghavan of the Centre for Policy Studies, the most respected historian of modern India and author of a bestselling book on Bangladesh, was too young to remember the Sikkim saga. But as an Indian Army officer he had served at Jelep-la in Sikkim. He knew Sikkim wasn’t a princely State: Its relationship with India rested on the 1950 treaty which meant parity between both parties. Mr Raghavan’s point was that Sikkim was not an aberration. Nation-building always involves “sordid episodes” which is why Edmund Burke thought “a sacred veil” should “be drawn over the beginning of all governments”. Some in the audience didn’t like his mentioning Junagadh, Hyderabad and Jammu & Kashmir as other instances of nation-building, possibly suspecting he was questioning their integration.
Any ultra-patriotic reaction causes concern. The Sikkimese have made their peace with destiny; they know there can be no turning back in history’s one-way street. As my friend Karma Topden, who was the Chogyal’s Deputy Secretary and Protocol and Intelligence chief, as well as Rajya Sabha member for two terms and India’s Ambassador to Mongolia, thus being familiar with both sides of the fence, admits, Indian statehood has brought money, opportunities and empowerment. But I cannot help wondering why India’s media swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker.
New Delhi’s fictitious ‘news reports’, datelined Gangtok, were published without murmur. Indian papers acclaimed the constitutional requests in sophisticated English supposedly written by Kazi Lendhup Dorji, although everyone knew he was India’s catspaw in Sikkim and couldn’t string together two words in English. Indian allegations against the Chogyal and his staff were published as proven crimes though not a shred of evidence was adduced. (All the charges were quietly dropped as soon as the kingdom was annexed.) The full-scale military attack on the Chogyal’s palace in which one of his guards was killed and another wounded was suppressed. No report mentioned that telephone lines to the palace and the homes of loyal Sikkimese officials had been cut. Or that the Chogyal was a prisoner.
Above all, the political rationale was humbug. Various books, including the memoirs of PN Dhar, Principal Secretary to Indira Gandhi, confirm what everyone knew — that the Indian authorities had trucked hundreds of Nepalese to Gangtok where they were joined by simple villagers who had been told there was feasting in the capital for the Chogyal’s birthday. The Indian Army housed and fed this crowd, using it to pressure the Chogyal. The world was told the Sikkimese were demanding their democratic rights from a despotic monarch.
Foreign journalists were banned from Sikkim. But Indian reporters could easily have checked everything. They didn’t. Later, they suppressed the startling disclosure by Nar Bahadur Khatiawada, one of the leading “democratic revolutionaries”, that legislators had been forced to sign resolutions they didn’t understand asking for merger. Mr Khatiawada’s petition to Morarji Desai after he became Prime Minister was also ignored.
Why? Why is Indira Gandhi’s hatchet man in Gangtok, a police officer with suspected R&AW connections, the only authority on Sikkim Ramachandra Guha cites in his monumental India after Gandhi? I cannot decide whether obedience to authority coupled with hopes of reward (plots of land, foreign trips, diplomatic assignments, Rajya Sabha nomination) underlies the abdication of professional integrity or whether Indian journalists and historians are also at heart expansionists.
(The accompanying visual is of Kazi Lendhup Dorji being sworn in as the first Chief Minister of Sikkim after the Himalayan kingdom was incorporated into the Indian Union. He is being administered the oath of office by Governor BB Lal on May 16, 1975)
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