A Himalayan Chess Game
When India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain in 1947, the region’s Princely States – including tiny Sikkim – became pawns in South Asia’s great power politics, as Andrew Duff explains.
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.
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