India and Sikkim

THE SINO-INDIAN BORDER DISPUTE, now entering its tenth year of smoldering hostility with occasional eruptions, inevitably has had a significant impact upon India's relation with the three small monarchies on its northern border-Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Over the course of the past decade a new accommodation has been painfully achieved with Nepal, which promises substantial stability for the future. The process of redefining India's relationship with Bhutan is not as far advanced as that with Nepal, but the broad outlines are already visible, and a mutually satisfactory solution can be expected. Sikkim, on the other hand, has so far enjoyed only limited success in its prolonged dialogue with the government of India over redefinition of the relationship between the two states. This is not surprising, perhaps, as Sikkim occupies what may be the most strategic and exposed position in the incredibly complex and volatile frontier region between South Asia and China. Not only is Sikkim the major channel of communication between India and Tibet under normal conditions, it is also the connecting link between the predominantly Hindu culture of the central Himalaya and the Buddhist and animist communities in the eastern Himalaya. Sikkim's historical background is another factor complicating its relations with India and making changes in its status more difficult to accomplish. The British government of India usually preferred tacit understandings and implicit commitments with the buffer states on the northern rim of the Indian empire. A unique combination of circumstances centering around the efforts to open Tibet in the latter decades of the nineteenth century finally led the British to establish a formal protectorate over Sikkim, one that was later recognized by China in the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of i890. This did not entirely remove the ambiguity with regard to Sikkim's international status. Sikkim was never a feudatory Native State in the precise meaning of that term in British India, but neither was it independent or even internally autonomous. Obviously the British were under no great compulsion to clarify the situation in the absence of effective challenges to their predominant position throughout the eastern Himalaya. This carefully contrived but informal process for manipulating the three buffer states on the northern frontier was both inadequate and inappropriate

Geography · Political science · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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