Word: sikkim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Himalayan passes toward India; it started building military roads right up to India's frontier; it laid down air bases within easy range of New Delhi and the teeming Ganges plain; it sent armed reconnaissance squads to undermine India's shaky border states-Nepal. Bhutan and Sikkim; it printed borderland maps that showed Indian districts as part of Red China. Nehru's reaction to all this (and to Red China's open call for "Asian unity" under Red China's leadership): an Indian army buildup a few hours ride back from the frontier...
Along the Indian-Chinese frontier, the longest frontier in the world between oppression and a democracy, Communist infiltrators are burrowing into the border states of Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim-which lie upon India's side of the great Himalayan battlement (see below). From this frontier, where ice-winds howl and lichen creeps around the tall mountains, an Indian Army Mission reported: "Long considered impregnable ... the frontier . . . [is] now looked upon as a possible route of infiltration, if not of invasion...
Some 4,000 troops of the Eighteenth Red Army line the vital Chumbi Valley between Bhutan and Sikkim. They are quartered in twelve barracks, and up to 50 new barracks are being constructed. To the west, Chinese garrisons at Gartok, trade center of western Tibet, and six other strategic locations threaten the Indians in Kashmir...
...China are infiltrating India itself. Indian troops have caught 300 in the past year. Some said they were deserters from the Chinese army. Others, disguised as lamas, beggars and traders, were riding brashly into India on the Tibetan caravans. Red Chinese troops cross regularly into Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim, cutting timber, surveying the passes, making contact with local Communists...
...government depots, and have twice tried to blast their way to power in bold but premature uprisings. Bhutan, which lies a full nine days' mule trek from the nearest Indian trading post, is heavily infiltrated by Red Chinese regulars who patrol across the border at will. And in Sikkim, a resident wrote to the London Spectator, "It will be only a matter of time before [the Chinese] start a movement for incorporation with Tibet...