Why it is time for New Delhi to make Nepal feel ‘India-open’
Indian Express
Shubhajit Roy
December 20, 2017
Nepal’s political leadership has often felt that India uses
blockades of essential supplies to discipline the smaller country. With the
China-leaning Left Alliance winning Nepal’s elections, India will have to work
extra hard to repair the trust deficit
In October 2002, when Shyam Saran, then
India’s ambassador to Indonesia, was appointed envoy to Nepal, then National
Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra told him that his mandate was to bring the
monarchy and political parties together to “neutralise the Maoists”. The worry
in South Block was a possible “Red Corridor” into India.
This was a little more than a year after the
infamous 2001 Narayanhiti Palace massacre in Kathmandu, which left 10 members
of the royal family dead and Nepal’s monarchical polity in chaos. Saran was
India’s ambassador in Kathmandu for just 22 months before he became foreign
secretary, but India’s priorities changed.
“What began as a valiant and mostly
frustrating attempt to promote accord between the mainstream political parties
and King Gyanendra ended with us switching to a strategy of bringing the
political parties together with the Maoists to neutralise an autocratic
monarchy instead,” Saran wrote in his magisterial 2017 book How India Sees the
World: Kautilya to the 21st Century.
When the facts on the ground change,
countries and leaders have to change their priorities as well. So, as India now
watches with a sense of disquiet that Nepal’s elections, held between November
and December, have been won by the “Left Alliance” led by New Delhi’s
friend-turned-foe K P Sharma Oli, it must reinvent its strategy — just like
Saran did more than a decade ago, to accommodate the Maoists.
Oli, during his last visit to India in
February 2016 (the only one as the Prime Minister of Nepal) had sought to
repair the damage caused in the relationship. During that trip, he described the
acrimony between India and Nepal since September 2015 as “misunderstandings”,
and said that the “main mission” behind his visit to India was to “clear the
misunderstanding” and take ties to the same level as in 2014, when Prime
Minister Narendra Modi had
visited Nepal. That “misunderstanding” was not an ordinary one.
Nepal was faced with a massive economic and
humanitarian crisis from September to December, 2015. The reason was the
infamous blockade at a crucial crossing on the border with India, which stopped
fuel and food supplies to landlocked Nepal. The impact scarred the Nepalese.
While Kathmandu blamed India for the blockade, New Delhi sat by quietly, making
no efforts to ameliorate the situation, instead citing the law and order
situation in border areas which didn’t guarantee safe passage of trucks laden
with fuel and essential supplies.
This blockade brought back memories of
another blockade that had occurred in 1989 during Rajiv Gandhi’s term, when a similar negative leverage was used
after Nepal’s King Birendra imported anti-aircraft missiles from China. The
blockade then had lasted for a year, from March 1989 until April 1990.
Later, New Delhi’s hurried intervention in
Nepal’s constitutional process, by its support to Sushil Koirala against Oli in
2015, and by encouraging Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ to defect and align
with the Nepali Congress in 2016, led to Oli’s rise. In the last two years,
Kathmandu’s political class, led by Oli and others, used the blockade to rouse
anti-India sentiments, playing the China card during political campaigning.
With the Left Alliance in power, there will almost certainly be a more
pronounced tilt towards Beijing. Both Oli and Prachanda have indicated this in
their public statements.
The Chinese, on their part, have been
building a number of highways from the Tibetan side into Nepal. The Tibet
railway has now been extended from Lhasa to Shigatse, and could make its way to
Kathmandu. While India’s plans are moving at a glacial pace, Kathmandu’s new
regime may be tempted to play along to become a part of the Chinese One Belt
One Road (OBOR) project. It will be important for India to caution its
interlocutors in Nepal to not walk into the debt traps that Sri Lanka, Maldives
and even Pakistan have entered while dealing with Beijing.
While China will be the elephant in the room,
New Delhi will have to stop playing political favourites in Kathmandu and
engage with the widest possible political spectrum. Above all, it must repair
the trust deficit with Nepal and its leadership. Saran writes of an apt
solution, “The tendency in India is to regard Nepal’s dependence on India for
transit as leverage against it.
But any exercise of this leverage only ends
up intensifying anti-Indian sentiments… It reinforces the sense of siege that
Nepalis feel — ‘India-locked’, as they call it… a better approach would be to
offer Nepal “national treatment” on the Indian transport network, allowing them
the use of our roads and ports on the same terms as for Indian citizens and
companies. The effort should be to convince Nepal that they are “India-open”,
not “India-locked”.” It’s time for Delhi to make Nepal feel “India-open”.
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