As someone personally familiar with the events of that time, I would concede the author’s primary contention that India ‘took over’ Sikkim, but this was an inevitable and integral part of evolving contemporary historical processes. Apologies are not necessary. This book, first published about thirty years ago and recently reissued, is a highly emotional and brazenly partisan presentation of the Chogyal’s case, by a close personal friend of the then Sikkim monarch. Every Indian action and policy is viewed a priori as motivated by malevolence in the book. Its title, ‘Smash and Grab’, would have been appropriate to describe China’s conquest of independent Tibet, but the process in relation to Sikkim was much more prosaic—a long, meandering, somewhat bumbling and less than efficiently executed constitutionalist integration of Sikkim into the Indian Union.