Let me begin with a simple observation: Narendra Modi’s visit to Sikkim was not unusual. That is precisely the problem.
What unfolded during the Prime Minister’s stay followed a pattern so familiar it has almost become ritual — the carefully choreographed arrival, the stage-managed optics, the warm words about beauty and culture, and then the departure.
What did not follow was anything resembling a serious engagement with the state’s deepest concerns.
And if you want to understand why that matters, you need to understand what Sikkim actually is — not the postcard version, but the political, ecological, and human reality of a small state that Delhi has long treated as a backdrop rather than a stakeholder.
The question worth asking is not merely what this visit achieved. It is why that question keeps being asked, visit after visit, year after year.
The Pattern Has a Logic
Sikkim is strategically sensitive, constitutionally unique, and politically complex. It shares borders with China, Bhutan, and Nepal. It has specific historical commitments written into the terms of its merger with India.
It has communities whose identity and representation remain unresolved at the national level. Any Prime Ministerial engagement with this state should, by that logic, carry the weight of those realities.
Instead, what residents witnessed was a visit that appeared designed primarily around projection. The prominence given to D. R. Thapa — placed visibly on the dais alongside the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister, and Members of Parliament, and featured during the roadshow — sent a clear signal.
The BJP, a party without a single MLA in Sikkim, was being amplified as though it were a governing force.
That is not optics in the casual sense. That is a deleiberate reframing of political reality, and it tells you something important about whose interests the visit was actually serving.
This is the logic of the pattern: Sikkim is useful to Delhi as a symbol. As a strategic frontier. As a clean, green, organic paradise. What it is not treated as is a state with specific demands that deserve specific answers.
What Was Not Said
The silence during this visit was not empty. It was pointed.
The long-pending demand for Scheduled Tribe status for twelve left-out communities found no mention. This is not a fringe issue — it goes to the heart of constitutional recognition, equity, and the identity of communities that have waited decades for acknowledgment.
The question of reserving the Lok Sabha seat for tribal representation, equally significant, was similarly absent. So was any serious discussion of the Inner Line Permit, which bears directly on Sikkim’s demographic and cultural future.
These are not issues that emerge suddenly before an election. They are the persistent, structural demands of a state that has been asking the same questions for years and receiving, in return, the same silence dressed in a new ceremony.
The Chief Minister, party representatives, and youth leaders reportedly denied any omission when asked. That denial is itself revealing.
When the political class of a state must insist that nothing was missing from a Prime Ministerial visit, it usually means that the most important things were.
The Ground Beneath the Spectacle
To understand the full weight of this pattern, you need to go beyond the visit itself.
In October 2023, Sikkim suffered one of the most devastating disasters in its recent history. A glacial lake outburst flood killed hundreds of people.
Evidence has since pointed to corruption that compromised the structural integrity of the dams that were meant to hold. As of today, not a single person has been arrested in connection with those deaths. The accountability that the families of the dead deserve remains entirely absent.
Sikkim is also not the paradise it is so frequently described as. Its lifeline — the national highway — is in a condition that would embarrass a state far less celebrated for its infrastructure.
Waste management remains a serious and unresolved challenge. The organic, green image projected outward bears little resemblance to the administrative failures that residents live with daily.
When the Prime Minister tells Sikkimese that their state is beautiful, he is not wrong. But beauty is not governance. And a leader who arrives to admire the view while remaining silent on the 2023 flooding, the roads, and the unaccountable deaths is not engaging with the state. He is using it.
Democracy in the Small Print
There is another dimension to this that deserves attention, and it concerns not just Delhi’s relationship with Sikkim but the health of politics within the state itself.
The Urban Local Body elections in Sikkim offer a troubling case study. Several candidates were declared elected uncontested. Sitting councillors were reportedly pressured to step aside. Independent candidates who did contest were subsequently persuaded to support the ruling party.
These are not the mechanics of a healthy democracy. They are the mechanics of managed consensus, and they raise serious questions about the space available for genuine political contestation in the state.
The relationship between the ruling Sikkim Krantikari Morcha and the BJP has added another layer of confusion.
Presented at times as partners, at others as adversaries, the two parties have conducted their relationship according to the logic of convenience rather than the logic of governance. The result is a state where even a veteran journalist like me, of over two decades, cannot tell you with confidence who is truly in charge.
That is not a minor admission. That is a structural failure of political accountability.
What a Visit Should Be
A Prime Ministerial visit to a border state with Sikkim’s history and complexity should be an act of serious statecraft. It should involve listening as much as speaking. It should result in commitments that can be measured, not images that can be circulated.
What Sikkim received instead was spectacle. A women’s reservation support march — organised just ahead of the PM’s arrival, in support of a Bill that was never actually passed — encapsulates the problem precisely. The performance of solidarity, untethered from legislative reality, staged for an audience that was never really the people of Sikkim.
I do not envy Narendra Modi the difficulty of governing a nation this complex. But difficulty is not an excuse for a pattern this consistent.
Twelve years of watching this Prime Minister has taught me one thing with some certainty: he is far more comfortable speaking to people than listening to them. He will tell Sikkimese what their state means to India. He will not ask them what India has failed to deliver to their state.
In that gap — between what was said and what was needed, between the spectacle and the substance — lies not just the failure of a single visit. It lies in the failure of a relationship between a small, strategically vital state and the government that holds its future in its hands.
Sikkim is not a backdrop. It has never been. It is time Delhi was made to understand that.
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