On the 27th of November 2024, BOOM’s North East Facts Network organised the seventh Roundtable dedicated to the states of the NE region. The Sikkim Roundtable was attended by scholars, practitioners, activists, and social workers from the diverse communities belonging to the beautiful Himalayan state. They came together to discuss the intricacies of transitioning from an erstwhile kingdom to a modern republic and the impact of these developments on its communities and natural environment universally considered sacred and integral to the lives of the people.
Lepchas and the Teesta river conservation
Mayalmit Lepcha is an indigenous activist who has been actively involved in the Teesta River conservation. She started her activism as a young college girl in 2007 against the Dzongu mega hydel power projects. As part of the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT), she participated in the historic hunger strike that lasted for 915 days and demanded for the scrapping of the four megadam projects inside the Kachenjunga National Park. She has also actively worked for the land rights of the Lepchas, recognised as the earliest inhabitants of the land.
Sikkim is a major travel destination due to its breathtaking natural heritage and a large part of its economy revolves around tourism. Mayalmit too is a successful social entrepreneur and runs her own homestay. According to her, she wanted to send a message to the government that it was indeed possible to capitalise on the natural beauty of the Dzongu valley and the rich biodiversity of the state for an alternative revenue generation model to rely upon rather than endangering the lives and livelihoods of indigenous communities through hazardous and unplanned megainfrastructural projects. At the same time, Mayalmit brought to attention the urgent need for tourists to respect indigenous lands and environments, and refrain from polluting the place.
Sustainable architecture and urban development
Kailash Pradhan is a practising architect and a founding member of the Architects of Sikkim. Pradhan has also been politically active and has contested the Gangtok Municipal Corporation in 2021 and the Sikkim Legislative Assembly in 2024 as an independent candidate. He returned to Sikkim after completing his education with a set goal of defining “the architectural language” appropriate for contemporary Sikkim. When he first started out as a young architect, he realised that the government was developing infrastructure without any longterm vision in place. The hydropower projects, for example, came up without any clearly laid out hydropower policy.
Given its steep and challenging terrains, and being a seismic zone, urban planning in Gangtok was never an easy task. But in his 30 years of career, he noticed that the government has always adopted a top-down approach to planning neglecting the concerns raised by the public. Along with Architects of Sikkim, Pradhan was able to conduct a series of workshops for public consultations in Gangtok to raise awareness about mobility and traffic issues that urban Sikkim is facing at the moment. He approached the people on ground directly upon failing to get an audience with the government, and began broadcasting issues that he felt were a product of a mismatch between problems and development solutions.
Gender discrimination and domestic violence
Rosy Chamling, Professor and the Dean of the School of Languages and Literature at Sikkim University, Gangtok, highlighted the gap that exists between what human development indicator pertaining to gender and the lived experience of women in Sikkim. Her areas of interest are literary and cultural studies with particular focus in gender and folk cultures of Sikkim. She has been documenting the oral folk literature from Sikkim by organising translation workshop series at the University. In her segment, she referred to the high instances of domestic violence cases during the COVID-19 as reported by the NFHS, and contended that the high literacy and better social position or economic parity does not ensure women’s safety and well-being within their domestic or private lives.
According to Prof Chamling, her choice of working with folk literature has to do with the fact that “folk” belongs to preliterate and non-elite traditions, and as such, could be seen as a repository of marginalised voices including that of women and children. Even though Sikkim is governed by tribal and matrilineal customary laws, women do not occupy decision making positions. Despite reservations for women in education, jobs or politics, subjugation of women in the domestic realm continues to be a harsh reality that has to be addressed more seriously to bridge the divide between women’s status in public and private domains.
Regional media and challenging exoticisation
Karma Paljor, an Indian journalist and television news anchor started his career as a media professional in 2001. Since then he has been associated with prominent mainstream news channels including CNN-News18. He has received several awards for his role as a reporter and for his coverage of natural disasters since then. He co-founded Atvi Infotainment, a content creation company in 2018. The business verticals include EastMojo and Atvi Studios.
Karma points out that the Northeast has always been about narratives; that is, narratives that the rest of India wants to believe about the region being exotic, unchartered virgin territory, etc., often ignoring the conflicts and issues within. Since his return to his roots seven years ago, he has focussed on trying to understand these realities and unearth the complexities that challenge the simplistic view of the region as a whole. He also recognises that he has so far only as much as scratched the surface, and the next step of his career would constitute doing more stories for his home state of Sikkim. He believes that though Sikkim is a small state with a negligible population as compared to the rest of India, there are important stories to be told.
Media in transition
Pema Wangchuk is a veteran journalist and currently the Consulting Editor at the Summit Times. He has been working in Sikkim since 1994. Pema talked about the challenges and opportunities thrown up by transition within the media landscape. Being primarily a print journalist, he discussed the current predicament that the news industry faces when it has to compete with all other forms of media and entertainment for digital estate and attention online.
He believes that while electronic media has democratised the news-making process, it also brings with it unique challenges related to scope, access, and availability of resources, expertise and infrastructure that ultimately affected the credibility and quality of research that made traditional journalism effective. He is of the opinion that Sikkim has yet to fill the vacuum left by legacy and print media, and as such, people have a long way to go when it comes to figuring out how to deliver content sustainably using these new media.
Marginality and history of the Limbu community
Dr. Naresh Subba is an independent Researcher and is currently teaching at Sikkim University as a Guest Faculty in the Department of Political Science. He recently completed his MPhil and PhD from the Centre for East Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Apart from his area of expertise, that is, Japan-India relations, he is interested in regional history, especially of the Eastern Himalayas. In his segment, Dr. Subba tried to historicise how his ethnic community–the Limbus–became marginalised despite being one of the original inhabitants of the Eastern Himalayan region and the modern day state of Sikkim. According to him, colonial and postcolonial writings about Sikkim focussed largely on the royal clans and the subjects who served their interests. In this process, the Limbus despite having equal claims to indigeneity were sidelined.
He further explained the two historical timelines that contributed to the marginality of the current Limbu community. First, in the case of current day Nepal, hundred years after the Salt and Water Treaty of 1774, also known as the Limbuwan-Gorkha treaty with the then ruler Prithivi Narayan Shah, the land tenure and management of the Gorkha kingdom fell into the hands of tenant farmers by 1886, drastically reducing the landholding of the Limbus by undermining their communal landownership known as the kipat system. This also adversely impacted the development of the Limbu language.
The second instance, in the context of modern Sikkim, was when the first British political officer J.C White appointed an anti-Chogyal (Chogyal meaning “King” in Tibetan) council commenced demographic engineering by encouraging large-scale migration from Nepal. The Chogyal kingdom that passed the Revenue Order No. 1 in 1897 then responded by consolidating the rights and privileges of the Bhutias and Lepchas to counter the influence of Nepali influx, thereby, undermining the historical Lho-Men-Tsong-sum (Bhutias-Lepchas-Limbus) agreement that formed the foundational structure of the state of Sikkim, further marginalising the Limbus in the process.
During the second round of discussions where panellists speak about what Mainland India often gets wrong, Mayalmit Lepcha stressed on how she wished for people to understand that the landscape in Sikkim are not mere mountains, but for the indigenous communities, these were living sacred entities, an extension of their own families. These mountains and rivers are worshipped by the people as they are considered integral to the migration and afterlife of souls upon death in indigenous belief systems. The loss or destruction of these natural habitats cannot therefore be compensated in terms of money or capital.
Kailash Pradhan weighed in on the nature of development that Sikkim is currently witnessing, which according to him is not well-suited to its fragile geology and the microclimates that the state experiences. He therefore asked whether it was possible to grow from the inside out, as the outside in growth is already happening. Further, he asked the mainland audience to be curious about why Sikkim became part of India in the first place, which according to him has primarily to do with its strategic geopolitical location connecting it to Tibet and China. He also highlighted the darker side of Sikkim’s development owing to its relative prosperity. Architecturally, Sikkim is not a place where one should expect to find much of vernacular architecture as it was unabashedly materialist and consumerist. While urbanisation could be a good thing, the feudal past of Sikkim has resulted in a skewed welfare system, which he observed, was markedly different from the other states of the Northeast where societies are more egalitarian.
Adding to the structural analysis of the Sikkimese society, and after having highlighted the high incidences of spousal violence in the state, Prof. Chamling took her argument a step further by discussing gender and racial stereotyping to explain how Sikkimese people as a whole are stereotyped as “peaceloving”, and by extension, rather effeminate, lacking masculine aggression. According to her, the implications of class in most societies could be transcended by upward socioeconomic mobility. However, implications of rigid and deeply embedded gender stereotyping are harder to change or transgress despite upward mobility.
Pema Wanchuk was of the opinion that racist behaviour and attitudes are rooted largely in ignorance and a possible solution to tackle it was in providing positive counterstereotypes or by making “better introductions”. He gives the example of Baichung Bhutia who was able to do that. Negative stereotypes pose serious challenges when it comes to policy interventions. There needs to be concerted efforts on the part of the people as well as the state government to ensure that Sikkim is talked about and understood by the wider Indian community as a matter of policy. Addressing Prof Chamling’s point about gender, he acknowledged that while gender-based violence remains a universal problem, in Sikkim women’s marginalisation also had to do with the fact that they do not have an autonomous identity, their status often tied to the father or the husband (after marriage).
Dr. Naresh Subba cautioned the audience about the fluid nature of categories and ethnic identities during state formation and history writing, which he believes are regularly distorted by appropriation and misappropriation of terminologies. He gave the example of the Limbu community which at one point was not considered Nepali, but is classified as such today. These distortions continue to be exploited in electoral politics today, further aggravating social and economic disparities on ethnic lines. Karma Paljor ended the round of discussions by pointing out that though Sikkim enjoyed the status of being the state with highest per capita income in the country, it is not necessarily a “happy” place. It is also the state with the highest suicide rate in India. Available statistics also indicate that the population struggles with very high levels of alcoholism and substance abuse. There are urgent and complicated issues related to social justice and well-being that do not get adequate attention because of the government’s singular focus on the narrative of natural beauty and tourism.
These discussions were followed by an interactive session with the audience where each speaker fielded questions and provided clarifications. Despite being a small state, Sikkim Roundtable was well-participated. With this event, BOOM NEFN closes the Roundtable series that covers the seven different and lesser documented states of the Northeastern region other than Assam.
You can watch the recording of the Sikkim Roundtable here.