A schoolmaster like no other

The passing of three-time CM of Sikkim Nar Bahadur Bhandari marks the end of an era

In another world at another time, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, three-time chief minister of Sikkim, who died in a Delhi hospital last Sunday, would have been hailed as a freedom fighter. Denied that accolade, he might still be remembered for saying famously, “Sikkim has merged but will not be submerged.”

He was referring to suggestions that Darjeeling, now gripped by Gorkhaland frenzy, should be restored to Sikkim. The British pressured the kingdom to part with the district in the 1830s; independent India ignored Gangtok’s memorandum in 1947 asking for its return. Bhandari knew there was no going back in time. Darjeeling had evolved differently from Sikkim, and he didn’t want West Bengal’s highly politicised Nepalese to swamp the simple Sikkimese. Politics being the art of the possible, he had to make bigger compromises in respect of Sikkim’s status and its dethroned and dispossessed king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal.

When we first met in 1973, Bhandari was a good-looking young schoolmaster with a winning smile who said little. Lal Bahadur Basnet, a French-speaking former NCO who became Speaker of the Sikkim Assembly, had invited us to lunch. Bhandari had worked his way to pay school fees and buy books, collecting firewood for his schoolmaster in a West Sikkim village. I got to know him well, and remember the excitement at my baby son’s rice-eating ceremony in 1979 when he turned up unexpectedly at our bungalow in Calcutta carrying a bouquet of flowers. He was already chief minister.

Complaining the Chogyal didn’t help his poorer Nepalese subjects, Bhandari was initially drawn towards Kazi Lendhup Dorji and his Joint Action Committee (JAC). But his illusions lasted four weeks. An eloquent and passionate orator, he was soon advising crowds to take a hard look at the JAC’s members, motives and methods. If Sikkim’s Nepalese, Bhutiyas and Lepchas quarrelled, he warned, outsiders would exploit their differences and that would be the end of their country. Even he did not guess then how prophetic his words were.

It angered him when Bipin Bihari Lal, Sikkim’s all-powerful ICS chief executive and governor after the kingdom became an Indian state, dragged out and presented all the Chogyal’s old development schemes, which New Delhi had vetoed, as his own. It was not to encourage growth since no one bothered with execution, but as an excuse to distribute money. Many of Kazi’s 32 Assembly members — the Batisey Chor, Bhandari called them —waxed rich. 

The government refused to register the party he formed after severing links with Kazi. Sitting in the drawing room of the chief minister’s official residence five years later, Bhandari told me an amusing sequel. Apparently, outraged Sikkimese smashed 60 radio sets when AIR broadcast that his party had been trounced in the 1974 polls. But only one radio was destroyed after the 1979 election when Bhandari emerged victorious and Kazi’s party didn’t get a single seat. “It was in this very room” he chuckled, “and it was kicked to pieces by Kazini herself!” As chief minister, he forced Lal to eat humble pie in his first inaugural address to the Assembly, proclaiming that the 1979 legislature was “constituted after a free and fair election held in Sikkim for the first time under the auspices of the election commissioner in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution”.

Thanks to him, the wedding of Chogyal’s daughter in 1979 was almost a state occasion. Bhandari attended the ceremony and presented a khada to the Chogyal whom he called “the First Gentleman of Sikkim”. Seeing him walking at the First Gentleman’s funeral, I remembered Bhandari telling me about the injuries he had suffered when he intervened in a Gangtok students’ protest. “They were beating the students like anything,” he said. He, too, was badly beaten up by 500 policemen, who threatened to kill him unless he wrote a letter supporting Kazi. “When I became unconscious they took me to the Thutob Namgyal hospital.” Fearing Lal’s wrath, they turned him out when he regained consciousness the following afternoon. He suffered chest pains to the end of his days as a result of the thrashing. “I can’t easily walk uphill. I need regular hot packs and massages.”

Yet, he waved away his official jeep to follow the funeral cortege on foot as it slowly climbed the windswept heights of Lukshyama. It took four hours to cover six steep boulder-strewn miles to the last resting place of the chogyals. Bhandari’s death also marked the passing of an age.