Opinion Targeting India
Baidyas breakaway Maoist party has demanded that relations with Delhi be based on equality
Baidyas breakaway Maoist party has demanded that relations with Delhi be based on equality
On occasions,organised protests against certain decisions by India represent national cause in Nepal. But such protests have often been symbolic and of short duration. Between the 1960s and the mid-1990s,such protests centred round border disputes and the trade and transit rights of a landlocked country. But in 1996,when the Maoists launched a decade-long armed insurgency,Indias projection as a hegemonic power with the intent to colonise its small neighbour also became the core issue of Nepali nationalism and sovereignty as far as the leftist revolutionaries were concerned.
By playing a mediators role in bringing the Maoists and other major political parties together in 2005,India may have hoped to neutralise the anti-Indian worldview of the Maoists. But current developments send across a different message. The Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M),headed by Mohan Baidya Kiran,has imposed a ban on Hindi films in cinema halls and Hindi songs played on FM radio as a protest against cultural invasion. The party,which broke away from the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists (UCPN-M) in June,has also been preventing vehicles with Indian number plates,including goods carriers,from entering Nepal. This is exactly what the Maoist party had promised to do when it launched the insurgency.
Nepals major political parties have criticised the movement that may embitter relations,and it coincides with the stern instruction Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai issued to the home ministry to not let the agitators take the law into their own hands. But the imposed ban goes on. We are entitled to access to the ports as a landlocked country. Why should Indian vehicles alone be ferrying goods right up to our capital,denying our vehicles any access to Indian territory? Baidhya asks.
A fortnight before such the move,Baidyas party had submitted a 70-point charter of demands to Bhattarai that included the demand that relations with India be based on equality something Bhattarai himself had submitted to then PM Sher Bahadhur Deuba in February 1996. The end of insurgency brought the Maoists to the centrestage of politics and secured them Indias crucial recognition that the Maoists truly represented Nepals people notwithstanding their anti-India worldview. Bhattarai may not have disappointed India,but it seems both his party and the breakaway group continue to hold that worldview.
Baidya and his party accuse Bhattarai of succumbing more and more to Indias interest at the cost of Nepals. Bhattarai,perhaps the most unpopular PM after the 2006 political change,is not in a position to contain Baidya,since these are issues he himself authored once.
Yet,Bhattarais wife Hishila Yami,a politburo member of the UCPN-M and arguably among the few open defenders of her husband ,has hit out at Baidya with a double-edged criticism: This is a ploy to reach out to India for negotiation , she said.
In fact,the Indian establishments proximity to the Maoists in the past,the Maoists failure to transform themselves into a democratic force and peoples growing resentment against the Maoist leadership over their corruption and lack of accountability have created a situation that targets India for Nepals current political mess .
yubaraj.ghimire@expressindia.com
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