Sikkim and the Himalayan Chess Game

Summary

At the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, in mid-September 1965, Britain’s ITN broadcast a 15-minute report from what they called ‘another potential starting point for a Third World War’. The images were not of Indian and Pakistani soldiers in disputed Kashmir. Instead, the dramatic footage showed Indian and Chinese soldiers 14,000 feet up on the other side of the Himalayas, on either side of the border between the Kingdom of Sikkim (an Indian protectorate perched between Nepal and Bhutan) and Chinese-occupied Tibet. The broadcast highlights an often-overlooked international dimension to the 1965 conflict, which caused frantic diplomatic activity involving India, Pakistan, China, the US and the Soviet Union and was, in fact, an important factor in the eventual de-escalation of the crisis. Kashmir, the largest of the 600 Princely States of British India, which became the main theatre of the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, had been a running sore between the two countries for nearly two decades. At Partition in 1947 the question of the Princely States’ future loomed large. All ran their own affairs under individual agreements with the British. Official policy was to allow the ruler of each to determine whether the Princely State would join India or Pakistan. For most it was a simple decision. For Kashmir, it was not. The Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, ruled a majority Muslim population. India’s leaders presumed Singh would decide to join India. Pakistan’s leaders argued that the Muslim population should join Pakistan. Singh, fearing the socialist Nehru’s India almost as much as he did the prospect of joining Jinnah’s Pakistan, considered a third option: asserting independence, harbouring dreams of creating a Switzerland of Asia. Reality jolted Singh out of his reverie. When Kashmiri Muslims began to flee to Pakistan (principally to avoid punitive taxes), Pakistani Pathans crossed back into Kashmir to ‘liberate’ its people from their Hindu ruler. A bloody conflict brok...