Nepal’s tryst with India

Not that he was solely responsible for the breakdown of constitutional rule in Nepal. The Nepalese political parties must accept a large share of the blame because of internecine rivalry and competing ambitions. Complicating the scenario was the armed Maoist insurgency that controlled many parts of the country.

Gyanendra exacerbated the problems by a personal ambition to rule the country. The wrong man was on the throne at the wrong moment in the country’s history. History has had its revenge and now the monarchy is in the dustbin.

For long, India believed that the two pillars of stability in Nepal were the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. This implied that if the Gyanendra aberration could be corrected somehow, constitutional monarchy in Nepal would be a stabilising force. Now it is not only Gyanendra who has gone, it is the institution itself.

Our reaction to this transformation in Nepal suggests that at some stage we abandoned the idea of a constitutional monarchy in Nepal as a pillar of stability. The question is why we believed in the positive value of a constitutional Nepalese monarchy in the first place and why we do not believe in it any more. Is it that earlier we were taking a position of convenience as we did not want to alienate the monarchy beyond a point and now too we are taking a position of convenience, since we want to alienate the Maoists even less?

Evaluating the past attitudes of the Nepalese monarchy towards India would hardly have given reason to support it as a pillar of stability for India-Nepal relations. The palace always felt threatened by our democracy, seeing the Nepali Congress as India’s instrument to undermine the monarchy. It nurtured the Maoist forces as a counter. It openly played the China card against us, to keep us off-balance and on the defensive. King Birendra qualified Nepal’s South Asian identity by recalling that northern Nepal lay beyond the Himalayas. To demarcate himself from us politically, he would define Nepal’s nonalignment as one between India and China. His proposal to make Nepal a Zone of Peace was to embarrass India. Relations were cultivated with Pakistan with the idea of poking India in the eye.

Sections of the press were assiduously used to sow distrust of India, often inventing instances of Indian high-handedness. Nepalese nationalism was deliberately directed against India by circles close to the palace. To limit India’s presence, no progress was permitted in developing large-scale joint cooperative hydro-electric projects.

The underlying factors complicating our relations have not changed for the better with recent developments; some have changed for the worse. Earlier, the Maoists were handy instruments of the palace; now they are their own masters. Negative approaches towards India can therefore be pursued with more conviction and less opportunism. The palace was acting out of a sense of vulnerability; the Maoists will act with the confidence of popular backing. The China factor could backstop even more strongly the policies of the new dispensation in Nepal. China too may want to further increase its influence in Nepal to control better Tibetan elements there following the failure of its policies in Tibet.

Prachanda’s statement that Nepal will maintain equidistance from India and China means pursuing a policy that has precluded a normal relationship with India that would recognise the compulsions of geography, economics, culture, religion and, indeed, enlightened self-interest. Nepal should have good relations with China; but “equidistance” distorts relations with India as it actually means positioning Nepal much closer to China than to India, given the much more substantial content of its relationship with India than with the other neighbour. It is this flawed concept that has conditioned Nepal’s flawed policies towards India in the past.

Prachanda’s call for renegotiating the 1950 treaty with India — which we do not need to reject — is an expected revival of old agendas of suspicion and mistrust. The open border with Nepal has, in practical terms, more disadvantages than advantages for India. Reversing this historical legacy would be moving in the wrong direction for emotional reasons. Apart from the practical difficulty on both sides of effectively regulating the border, instituting tight border controls and associated regimes will seriously hamper the existing people-to-people relationship that, between any two friendly countries, should be seen as a valuable cementing force.

Defence procurement arrangements with Nepal have a crucial national security dimension. India’s concern is not earnings for its defence industry, as arms transfers to Nepal are on highly concessional terms. As Nepal occupies a vital space in India’s overall security, especially after China removed a centuries-old buffer by occupying and militarising Tibet, it is normal for India to expect even Maoist Nepal to be a friendly country that respects its legitimate concerns.

The deplorable inability of India and Nepal to realise large-scale joint multi-purpose hydro-electric projects is not going to be remedied with the Maoists in the driving seat. For Nepal to graduate from a foreign aid, remittance and tourism dependent economy, it would need to develop its water resources assets. Energy hungry India is a ready market. But this has, over the years, become a highly politicised issue, around which have coalesced all the India-related grievances and suspicions of Nepal. India’s growing economy and the vigour of its entrepreneurs could be leveraged by Nepal to its advantage, but such thinking is unlikely to sway the Maoists. Even before this can happen, the Maoists will need to reassure the country’s own business class about their future policies so that investment and economic activity in general do not slow down, making poverty alleviation in Nepal yet more difficult.

The first dramatic step has been taken by the Constituent Assembly on an issue that had been settled beforehand. Issues it has to deal with now are highly complex, whether that of power sharing, of federalism, of integrating Maoist cadres into the armed forces or disbanding the terrorising Maoist youth cadres, of the churned-up Terai, etc. Faced with difficulties, the temptation to fall back on old reflexes and blame India for the country’s problems will always be there. The Maoists will have India as a scapegoat for their own failure if they sacrifice pragmatism to ideology. In Nepal, the roles of the actors may have changed, with new a cast of heroes, but the script for India has not improved.

The writer is a former Foreign Secretary who has served in Nepal

sibalkanwalgmail.com