Chapter 125: Falling Dominoes

Thimphu, Bhutan

August 1949

The Dorji House was a long, low wooden building at the edge of the valley, with prayer flags snapping on its roof. Jigme Palden Dorji, the Lonchen of Bhutan, sat at one end of a table that was a little too large for the room. He was a short, broad man in a dark gho, with watchful eyes, and he had been waiting for the Indian delegation for an hour.

V.K. Krishna Menon came in out of the rain at ten past three with Rameshwar Kao and a young civil servant named Pillai. He shook hands in the Bhutanese manner, with a slight bow, and sat without being asked.

"Lonchen. You received His Excellency’s letter?"

"I received it. I did not understand it."

"Then I will explain." Menon opened a thin folder. "In June, your sovereign wrote to the Prime Minister to ask for a protectorate agreement. A guarantee of Bhutan’s territorial integrity, an Indian subsidy, and non-interference in internal affairs. The sort of treaty that you had with the British in 1910."

"That is correct."

"The Prime Minister cannot give you that."

Dorji’s face did not change, but his hands closed on the table. "Why not?"

"Because the world has changed since 1910. In October, the Chinese Communists will be in Peking. By next year, they will be at the borders of Tibet. A protectorate is a piece of paper. It does not stop an army. It does not build a road, a school, or a hospital. It does not give a small country a seat at any table in the world." Menon looked up. "What the Prime Minister can offer you is something else."

He took a sheet from the folder and slid it across.

"A tiered accession. Three stages, over fifteen years. In the first, India takes responsibility for Bhutan’s defence, foreign policy, and currency. Your sovereign remains king. Your laws are your own. Your monasteries, your customs, your language, your festivals remain untouched. In the second stage, five years from now, we integrate your economy: customs, trade, banking, transport. India builds the roads and the dams. In the third, ten years after that, your administration and ours are merged where they overlap. Bhutan becomes a constituent state of the Union with a special constitutional status."

Dorji read the sheet slowly. Beside him, a monk in saffron robes, the representative of the Je Khenpo, whispered something in Dzongkha, and the Lonchen nodded.

"This is a loss of independence."

"It is a loss of the appearance of independence," Menon said bluntly. "The substance, I regret to say, was lost long ago. You have two neighbours, Lonchen. One of them is India. The other, in two years, will be a Communist state with the largest army in Asia. Which would you rather be defended by?"

Dorji was silent.

"I will tell you what the Prime Minister told me," Menon said, more softly. "He said that a small country should never be asked to choose between being absorbed and being forgotten. He said that the Union has room for a Bhutan that keeps its own face. A Bhutan that is neither a subject nor a ward, but a partner. If His Majesty wishes, he may become the first of a line of hereditary Chief Ministers of the new state, with a seat in the Rajya Sabha and a voice in every decision that touches his people."

Kao, who had not spoken, now set a small packet on the table.

"This is the intelligence summary the Lonchen asked for last month. Chinese Nationalist officials have been seen in Lhasa. Communist agents have been seen on the Sikkim border. And in Paro, two weeks ago, a Tibetan merchant was found carrying a letter in Chinese. We have taken the liberty of having him detained."

Dorji turned the packet over. He did not open it.

"You are very well informed, Mr. Kao."

"It is my profession."

"It is a profession that makes a small man uneasy."

"I know," Kao said. "That is why I brought it, Lonchen. I would sooner you saw our hand now than felt it later."

They negotiated for nine days. There were long silences, quarrels over the Bhutanese tax privileges and the role of the monasteries, and a tense afternoon when the king, Jigme Wangchuck, a young man of twenty-three with a grave, careful face, came down from the palace to listen and said almost nothing. On the ninth day, in the Tashichho Dzong, with the monks chanting in the next room, the Lonchen signed the first-tier accession on behalf of his sovereign, and Menon signed for India.

"You have done a good thing," Menon said in the courtyard afterwards, in the thin, cold light. "Not an easy thing. A good one."

"I hope history agrees with you," Dorji said. He looked up at the great white-walled fortress, the prayer wheels turning in the damp, and added, "I hope that my grandchildren are not asked to pay for it."

Kathmandu

September-November 1949

In September, Nepal erupted in chaos.

For a century the Rana prime ministers had ruled it as a family estate, with the king a prisoner in his own palace. Since 1947, the Nepali Congress had been agitating from exile in India and Banaras, and in the summer of 1949, the Communist Party of Nepal, a small, disciplined group trained in Calcutta, began to arm itself in the western hills. On the fifth of September, a column of eight hundred guerrillas attacked the garrison at Palpa. On the twelfth, the Rana prime minister, Mohan Shumsher, declared martial law. By the end of the month, half of Nepal was in revolt, and the Ranas were shooting prisoners.

In New Delhi, Mullick brought the intelligence to South Block on the twenty-eighth. He laid three sheets on Ram’s desk.

"Prime Minister. The Communists in the west have captured Pokhara. They are being supplied through Tibet. Our agents report that Chinese Communist officers have been seen in Lhasa asking about the Nepal passes."

"Mao is not yet in Peking."

"He will be in a month. When he is, the Nepal border will be the next pressure point after Tibet."

Ram studied the map of the Himalayan foothills for a long moment. "I will not allow an unstable state on our borders controlling the Himalayas. Nor do I intend to allow the Ranas to save themselves by shooting their own people." He looked up. "Who among the Nepali Congress leaders can be spoken to?"

"B.P. Koirala and his brother Matrika Prasad, Prime Minister. Both are in Banaras. Both are socialists, but anti-Communist and anti-Rana."

"Bring them to Delhi."

The Koirala brothers came on the first of October, in a closed car, under Kao’s escort. B.P., the younger, a slim, bespectacled man of thirty-five with an air of tired idealism, sat across from Ram in the Prime Minister’s study. Beside him sat Menon.

"Mr. Koirala. I will be direct. Your party is losing control of the revolution to the Communists. The Ranas are murdering your followers. And in a month, the Chinese will be at Nepal’s northern border."

"I am aware, Prime Minister."

"I propose a bargain. India will give you political support, funds, weapons, and a safe base for your people. We will use our influence to bring the king out of the palace and put him at the head of a transitional government. In exchange, Nepal enters a tiered accession with the Union, on the model of Bhutan: defence and foreign policy first, then economy, then administration. Your party forms the first elected government of a democratic Nepal under the constitutional monarchy."

B.P. Koirala was silent.

"It is a heavy price," Menon said. "I do not conceal it."

"It is more than a heavy price," Koirala said slowly. "I have spent my life fighting for a free Nepal. And you ask me to put it into the hands of Delhi."

"I ask you to put it into the hands of the Nepali people, with a friend standing behind," Ram said. "Mr. Koirala, which would you prefer? A Nepal under the Ranas, which will be dead in six months? A Nepal under the Communists, which will be a Chinese satellite? Or a Nepal with democratic institutions, an elected parliament, and an Indian shield?"

Koirala took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "My brother and I will need to consult our colleagues."

"You have a week."

They took five days. On the sixth, Matrika Prasad Koirala came back alone and said that the party’s central committee had voted, narrowly, to accept. Kao informed Ram that the Congress believed they could hold power within the Indian system and delay the accession from inside; Ram left them to their illusions. Menon drafted the instrument. Ram signed it the next afternoon.

Washington, D.C.

October 1949

The Secretary of State received the Indian Ambassador in his office on the thirteenth of October. Dean Acheson was a tall, angular, courteous man with a magnificent moustache, and he listened to the Ambassador with every appearance of calm.

"The Government of India has concluded that the situation in Nepal can no longer be left to chance. We are prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent a Communist seizure of the Kathmandu valley."

"Mr. Ambassador. The Nepalese Government is a sovereign state."

"A sovereign state that has just shot four hundred of its own citizens at Pokhara. A sovereign state whose western provinces are in the hands of armed Communists. My government believes that the Nepal Congress, which has the support of the people, should be assisted to power."

Acheson regarded him over his spectacles. "And the price?"

"There is no price to the United States, Mr. Secretary. India will bear the cost."

"And in return?"

"In return, Nepal will accede to India on the Bhutanese model. A friendly state on the Chinese frontier, under Indian protection, committed to the principles of democratic government."

There was a long silence. Acheson looked at the paper. He had spent the autumn watching China fall, and he had no desire to see Nepal follow.

"I will take this to the President," he said. "I will say that the State Department does not object."

"May I say that India would be grateful."

"You may say that Mr. Truman has a long memory, Mr. Ambassador. He remembers who warned him about Jinzhou."

The Rana Palace, Singha Durbar, Kathmandu

November 1949

The Ranas fell in a week.

It began on the fourth, when King Tribhuvan, who had been forbidden to leave the palace for twenty years, walked out of the front gate in a Land Rover with a few servants and was driven to the Indian Embassy. Mohan Shumsher declared him a traitor. By the sixth, the garrisons at Bhaktapur and Patan had mutinied. On the eighth, the Nepali Congress, armed with rifles from the Indian Army’s surplus and a few hundred volunteers, took Kathmandu’s radio station, and the Rana prime minister’s own bodyguard turned on him.

Mohan Shumsher surrendered on the tenth, in the courtyard of Singha Durbar, to an Indian officer who had come in with a battalion of Gurkhas "to protect the Embassy." He was escorted to the airfield and flown to Delhi, where he was housed comfortably in a bungalow in Civil Lines and allowed to read the newspapers.

The Communists did not give in. A column of twelve hundred guerrillas, under a former schoolteacher named Pushpa Lal Shrestha, marched on Kathmandu from the west. They never arrived. At Hetauda, on the road from the plains, they met three battalions of CISF reserves and a brigade of Gurkha infantry, which had been moved up "to protect the industrial sites," the new cement works and the Raxaul-Amlekhganj railway. The fighting lasted two days. The guerrillas were outflanked, outgunned, and pushed back into the hills, and by the sixteenth, the survivors were fleeing toward Tibet.

Ram read the dispatch in his study.

"Training," he said to Shaktidas, with the first thin smile that day. "Two thousand CISF men who have never been under fire, and who have just been under fire. It will save us a year."

"The Gurkhas are asking whether they may remain."

"They may stay as long as the king wants them." Ram laid down the paper. "Is the instrument signed?"

"King Tribhuvan signed it this morning. Koirala will form a government on Monday."

"Then Nepal has joined the Republic," Ram said. "On the same terms as Bhutan."

Moscow

November 1949

Three days after the fall of the Ranas, a long, grey freighter named Jal Kamal tied up at the Soviet port of Nakhodka. A second arrived the next day, and a third followed. They were the first vessels built entirely in the Visakhapatnam yard, and each carried six thousand tons of the finest leather, wool, cotton, and teak, as promised under the Moscow accord.

In the Kremlin, Molotov read the report aloud.

"The Indian ships are early, Comrade Stalin. And the quality is higher than the contract specified."

Stalin sat at the end of the long table with his pipe, looking at a map of Asia. He did not look up.

"Early?" he said. "The English have noted the Indian tendency to be flexible in their interpretation of time, at length. Did the English weave a lie to dress up their imperialism or did Indians suddenly turn punctual?"

"Neither, comrade. I believe it is to stay our hand."

"Hmm." Stalin tapped the map, where a red line was moving south across China. "Mao is almost at Peking. He will want everything. Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, and the Indians will have to give him some of it or fight." He drew on his pipe. "Does Gupta understand this?"

"I believe so. He has sent the ships early to remind us that India honours its contracts, and to stop us from pursuing too hard on Nepal."

Stalin was silent for a moment.

"We will see how long he honours them when Mao asks him to," he said at last, and almost smiled. "Send the Indians a message. Tell them that the Soviet Union has noted the Nepal arrangement and sees no objection. We are busy enough with Mao. And comrade, instruct the Organs to establish rezidentura in Delhi, Kathmandu, Rangoon."

Peking

December 1949

The collapse of the Kuomintang in the north took five weeks.

It began at Tianjin in late October, when Fu Zuoyi’s garrison, cut off for months, accepted terms and went over. In November, Du Yuming’s army, which had held the Huai line so well all spring, found its flanks stripped by desertions. The peasants had stopped feeding it. The railways had stopped running. The Soviet advisers who had arrived with the Communist armies in Manchuria had left them with a thousand guns and ten thousand trucks, and the American supplies that came through Assam were not enough.

Beijing opened its gates on the eleventh of December, with little but fierce fighting. On the nineteenth, Shanghai followed. By the end of the month, Chiang Kai-shek was in Chongqing with the remnants of fifty divisions, and the Nationalist armies were retreating south and west in good order, fighting every mile.

In Delhi, Ram read the telegrams with a face that showed nothing. Shaktidas said, "You expected this."

"Everyone expected it. I had hoped to delay it. We have delayed it by a year and bought the time we needed." Ram laid the cable down. "The corridor through Assam stays open as long as the Generalissimo has an army to supply. After that, we shall see."

"And the Communists?"

"Will pursue them South; they will not allow the KMT to exist, at least on the mainland."

Lhasa

December 28, 1949

The Chinese envoys came on the last Wednesday of the year, in a convoy of six trucks, flying the red flag.

They were led by a man called Zhang, a thin, soft-voiced official in a grey tunic, who had spent two years in Xinjiang. He was received at the Kashag with every courtesy and presented a letter. It said that the People’s Republic of China, shortly to be proclaimed, would "peacefully liberate" Tibet and "return it to the great family of the motherland." It asked the Tibetan Government to send a delegation to Peking to negotiate.

The Kashag, a council of four lay ministers, had received many letters from China over the years and dismissed them all. This time, there was silence in the hall when the letter was read. Shakabpa, the finance minister, a stout, sceptical man, spoke first.

"They mean to take us."

"They have not said so."

"They have said it very politely," Shakabpa said. "That is how one knows."

That evening, a young monk in a plain maroon robe, a Ladakhi named Tenzin who had been a novice at Drepung for three years and had never been asked for anything, was summoned to the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s summer palace. He was shown into a small room hung with silk, and the fourteen-year-old boy who sat on the cushioned throne dismissed his attendants.

"Brother Tenzin," the Dalai Lama said. "Eighteen months ago, you told me that the Chinese Communists would win the civil war. That Tibet could not stand alone. That India would offer an honourable arrangement."

"I did, Your Holiness."

"You were right about the first. I have been thinking about the second." The boy’s voice was quiet, and the old gravity in it had grown. "The Kashag has not yet understood what the letter means. Several of the older ministers still hope that the Chinese can be persuaded. Two of them, I am told, have been in contact with the envoys."

"Your Holiness has good sources."

"I have monks who talk to monks." The Dalai Lama almost smiled. "I have decided to expel them."

Tenzin was silent.

"By my own authority as the sovereign. It has not been done in a hundred years. The Regent has registered his protests but agreed. The Kashag will be angry. But I will not have men in the government of Tibet who are listening to Peking." He looked at the monk steadily. "When you write to New Delhi, tell the Prime Minister this. Tell him that I am ready to hear India’s proposal. And tell him that I wish to hear it soon."

Tenzin bowed deeply. "I will send word tonight, Your Holiness."

Three days later, on the last day of 1949, four members of the Tibetan nobility were dismissed from the Kashag by decree and escorted to the border. Zhang, the Chinese envoy, left Lhasa the same afternoon, saying he would return. The Kashag, chastened and a little frightened, met for six hours and voted to send a delegation to India.

In New Delhi, on the second of January, Ram opened a sealed cable from Tenzin. It was short. It said only: The Dalai Lama is ready. He has expelled the pro-Chinese ministers. Awaiting your terms.

Ram read it twice, then folded it and put it in his pocket. For a time, he stood at the window of his study, looking north over the dark gardens, toward a range of mountains he could not see.

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