Sunanda K Datta-Ray
The Free Press Journal
August 9, 2014
If there is one thing Nepal’s Maoists share with Nepal’s monarchists, it is that both are equally touchy about their sovereign rights. The outstanding success, therefore, of Narendra Modi’s two-day trip to the landlocked Himalayan country is that he seems to have succeeded in exorcising the spectre of Sikkim, which lies like a shadow over India’s relations with all its smaller and more vulnerable neighbours.
That makes it possible for India and Nepal to work together to open the new chapter in bilateral relations that Modi as well as Nepal’s Maoist leaders, Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai, desire. Power generation, tourism, agriculture, communications, trade and transit, culture, everything the two sides can think of for bilateral cooperation, can be hostage to this fear of a bigger neighbour’s hegemonistic tendencies.
I don’t mean the Nepalese fear anything as crude as another takeover operation. But there are many ways of exercising control over a landlocked country, and neglect can be as counter-productive as excessive attention. It seems unbelievable that the Indo-Nepal Joint Commission hadn’t met for 23 years until Sushma Swaraj’s recent visit to Kathmandu. Nor has any Indian prime minister visited Nepal since Inder Kumar Gujral did so in June 1997.
Gujral probably managed India’s relations with the neighbourhood better than any other prime minister. He thought of asymmetry in these relationships as a moral imperative and not just as a rewarding strategy. He believed that the bigger country was morally obliged to give more. That was what J R Jayewardene, the Sri Lankan president, had said in Dhaka when the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation was launched in 1985. “India, the largest in every way, larger than all the rest of us combined, can by deeds and words create the confidence among us so necessary to make a beginning.”
Gujral tried to live up to that. Since it is suggested that India-Nepal relations should be modelled on India-Bhutan ties, it may be worthwhile recounting an incident that took place during his first visit to Bhutan as minister-in-waiting to V V Giri, who was attending King Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s coronation. The year was 1974 and many leading Bhutanese still nursed unhappy memories of the assassination of the king’s uncle and the kingdom’s first prime minister, Jigmie Dorji, 10 years earlier, and the turmoil that ensued. One of these personalities who had suffered in 1964 refused to meet Gujral at a coronation reception, flouncing away instead with an angry, “I have nothing to do with Indian ministers!”
Such petulance was highly uncharacteristic of the normally phlegmatic Bhutanese who are normally nothing if not tactfully deferential to India’s rulers. But the man who would later devise the Gujral Doctrine was unfazed. I don’t know how thoroughly Gujral had been briefed on Bhutan since he was there only for protocol reasons, but he was an instinctive diplomat and his spontaneous response to the rudeness was humane and statesmanlike. “There’s bound to be a residue of bitterness,” he murmured, “when affairs of state impinge on private lives.” My Bhutanese friend had been exiled and had, by all accounts, suffered considerable persecution.
Normally, the Druk race is so inscrutable that it is impossible to say what memories of past injustice still rankle. The Nepalese are culturally more Indian and, therefore, more volatile, more given to displaying their emotions. My book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, quotes an excited young Nepalese diplomat exploding in 1973 that India had Sikkim for breakfast and planned to have Bhutan for lunch and Nepal for dinner. “But we’ll give you indigestion!” he thundered. There were street protests in Kathmandu then and frantic Nepalese appeals to the US to underwrite the kingdom’s independence.
Outwardly at least, all was calm in Thimphu. However, the Bhutanese quickly, if quietly, repealed a law that made the monarchy’s continuation dependent on a legislative vote of confidence. Otherwise, they continued to swear by India. So I wasn’t at all surprised some months ago when Bhutan’s ambassador to India, my old friend, Maj-Gen V. Namgyel, chose the launch in Delhi of a revised edition of Smash and Grab, to speak spiritedly of how much his country trusted and relied on its best and closest friend, India. Cynics might feel this replicated the placatory Graeco-Roman tradition of calling the Black Sea, which was notorious for its storms, Euxinos Pontos or the “Hospitable Sea”.
Unless properly handled, similar sensitivities can mar Modi’s ambitious hopes of a “new chapter” in Indo-Nepalese relations. Nepal is in a state of flux. People are still not absolutely certain the Maoists won’t renege on the commitments they made during Bhattarai’s prime ministership, and take up arms again. Some fear they might secretly be in league with China, which is investing in hydroelectricity projects on the Trishuli and Seti rivers, and is suspected of planning to extend the Tibet railway to Nepal’s northern border.
At the same time, people wondered about possible links between Nepalese royalists and elements in the Sangh Parivar who have always been sympathetic to the Himalayan country’s Hindu allegiance. Indeed, Modi’s hour-long puja at the Pashupatinath Temple might have been seen as genuflecting to an identity that was associated with the monarchy and which today’s political establishment has discarded if he had not deftly laced politics with religion and folk beliefs to call for stronger cultural bonding. His explicit support for a federal democratic republican constitution also helped to remove misgivings about Indian support for the deposed monarch. The offer of a new look at the 1950 Indo-Nepalese treaty was especially welcomed, since it indicated India is prepared to forgo historical privileges for a more equal partnership. This, too, has a Bhutanese parallel, since, at Bhutan’s request, India agreed to revise the 1949 India-Bhutan treaty, giving up the right to “guide” Thimphu’s foreign policy.
All this may have been possible because Modi and Sushil Koirala, the Nepalese prime minister, didn’t meet for the first time in Kathmandu. Their dialogue began when Modi brilliantly invited all the SAARC leaders to his swearing-in ceremony in May. Including the young Nepalese he has befriended in his team to Kathmandu and starting his speech to the Constituent Assembly there in Nepali, were other inspired diplomatic overtures. It’s in these small ways that India can help to generate the confidence in its neighbours that is so lacking that some of them quietly welcomed Pakistan’s acquisition of the bomb as an equaliser that would help to stabilise the regional power equation.
It’s now up to India’s professional diplomats to keep up the momentum of the bilateral relationship. There have been too many instances of imaginative political initiatives being killed by South Block’s calculation, negligence or ham-handedness. We must keep our fingers crossed that some foreign service official with British pro-consular delusions doesn’t undo Modi’s good work in Kathmandu.
