(2 of 4)
Making Friends. The shadow of China for centuries has loomed over the Himalayas as a threat to its southern neighbors. But not until Red China's "peaceful liberation" of Tibet in 1950 did India worry much about Chinese designs on Indian territory. Said Nehru: "A border that had been dead has now become a live border." India tried to buy Red China off by championing its admission to the United Nations, opposed all U.N. attempts to condemn the Chinese for their conquest of Tibet. The feeble Indian good-neighbor policy only encouraged the Chinese to look southward with greater interest. "Tibet is the palm of the hand, and the Chinese have it," says one Indian. "Now they want the five fingers without which the palm is useless." The five fingers (see color map) are Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the North East Frontier Agency. To the Chinese, all five stick out like sore thumbs.
LADAKH (pop. 80,000), Kashmir's northeast bulge, is the sorest of all. A high, arid plateau with a jungle of peaks rising out of it, Ladakh is claimed by both India and Pakistan in their acrid dispute over the control of Kashmir. Indian defence forces must thus be on the lookout for both the Chinese and the Pakistanis. Polyandry is the most widespread feature of Ladakh society; when a woman marries a man, she often marries his younger brothers also. When the eldest brother dies, the widow can divorce the younger husbands by tying her finger to a finger of the corpse, then snapping the string.
NEPAL (pop. 9,500,000) is an independent kingdom that economically and militarily is virtually dependent on India.
But repeated sorties by Indian-backed and -based rebels against the Nepalese government have strained relations with India so severely that King Mahendra for the first time was making overtures to Red China. Already the Chinese have agreed to build a road between Nepal's capital city of Katmandu and Lhasa in Tibet. Backbone of the Nepalese economy is the employment in the British and Indian armies of the 20,000 tough little Nepalese Gurkha soldiers; from their annual pay they send home $5,000,000—equal to a fourth or more of Nepal's yearly budget.
BHUTAN (pop. 700,000) is an autonomous Indian kingdom whose foreign affairs are administered by India. Red China chooses to ignore this arrangement, has offered economic aid to the Bhutanese directly. Primitive and virtually roadless, Bhutan was first opened up to the outside world in 1959; the country has only two doctors and about 20 pharmacists. India has sent a small military training mission into Bhutan to modernize its ragtag 10,000-man army.
SIKKIM (pop. 140,000) is an Indian protectorate, but it, too, has been offered aid directly by the Chinese, who bypassed New Delhi. A dollhouse country with 4,000 species of rhododendrons, it rests beneath the world's third highest mountain, 28,216-ft. Kanchenjunga, Sikkim's "protecting deity of the snowy ranges." The country has no newspapers and permits no lawyers to practice because the government thinks that lawyers are far more trouble than they are worth. Sikkim's heir apparent, Maharaj Kumar Palden Thondup Namgyal, 38, is engaged to 21-year-old U.S. Socialite Hope Cooke, but he will not marry her until 1963 because all 1962 has been judged as astrologically unfortunate.