When Kathmandu Valley was still known as Swoniga (three cities), back in the medieval Lichhavi-Malla era, the plains of Hindustan did not send diplomats or spies, they sent royalty to rule. This is how the Lichhavi arrived, from nearby Tirhut and later the Karanatik dynasty of Mallas.
The unifying king Prithvi Narayan Shah instructed his followers and successors to be wary of the East India Company, then galloping across the Indo-Gangetic plain in conquest and about to swallow Avadh. He chastened the British with devastating defeat at the battle of Sindhuli Gadi in 1767, and it was only after the Kathmandu Durbar under Bhimsen Thapa became territorially ambitious in its eyes that the Company Bahadur waged war. The guerilla tactics of the Gorkhali fauj were no match for the heavy ordinances deployed by the Viceroy, and Kathmandu sued for peace.
The Treaty of Sugauli (1815) not only reduced Nepal to its present size and shape, but it also extracted concession in the form of a residency in Kathmandu, and that is when, for the first time, the consolidated southern power became a player in the Nepali polity. The political actors were in thrall of the British Resident at Lazimpat (from ‘lodging part’, according to some) and Lainchaur (‘lain’ from ‘civil lines’) and the sheer military power he represented, and they were not above using it to benefit when it suited them.
This proclivity continues, with Nepali politicians cosying up to Indian interlocutors (diplomats and otherwise) while in power, and turning virulently anti-Indian when out. The best example today is the Maoists leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, always taking matters to an extreme, who would not blanch to write supplicatory letters to Indian intelligence agencies, and yet dig trenches to ward of an Indian invasion, derisively term the Indian rulers as akin to deities.
The polymath diplomat Henry Houghton Hodgson was the quintessential Machiavelli of Kathmandu, playing a delicate game of supporting and warning various factions in the Durbar even while treading a fine line with Lord Auckland, the Viceroy. Safe passage to Banaras, upkeep in the holy city as a useful political pawn, was one tool often used. Hodgson it was that set the tone for Indian influence on Kathmandu politics to the present day, even though individual ambassadors may not have a sense of history and the legacy of their expansively wooded Lainchaur precincts.
Hodgson supported the rise of Jang Bahadur, who, following his visit in 1850 to Queen Victoria’s England (and then France) as the first South Asian ruler to do so, decided that siding with the Company was geopolitically the best thing for Kathmandu to do. He subsequently led a Gorkhali detachment to Lucknow and Banaras and returned with British favours that included the return of the Naya Muluk lands of the Tarai (besides looted Avadh jewellery). The Rana era started by Jang Bahadur evolved a policy that simultaneously included implacable xenophobia and absolute subservience to the colonial power.
During the Rana era, there was relatively little for the Resident to do, because the Ranas had assured the longevity of their own dynasty by ensuring fealty to the British, including the sending of Nepali soldiers to fight in the two world wars, besides the second and third Afghan wars. The Nepalis, thus, made an easy shift in focus from Banaras to the capital of British India that was Calcutta.
The political economy
Since the medieval era till the late Rana era, the Valley’s economy was overwhelmingly north (Tibet) oriented, while the geopolitical radar pointed both north and south. Following the Younghusband invasion of Tibet of 1903-1904, which also deployed Gorkhali soldiers, Kathmandu was forced to pivot almost entirely to the south in terms of commerce and political relationships. The British became central to Nepal’s worldview.
The lasting gift of the Ranas to Nepal, utilising all the goodwill they had amassed with the British colonial powers which of course enriched them beyond belief, was to negotiate a dramatic new treaty, sign the Nepal-Britain Treaty of 10 December 1923, which had the British accepting Nepal’s sovereign status. The country was lifted above the level of princely states of the Subcontinent which were much richer than Kathmandu, and made a one-of-a-kind power within the otherwise colonised Subcontinent. This, in turn, would provide protection when the point of acquisitive Indian Independence arrived.
The shift of the colonial capital from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1938 pushed Kathmandu into a new era of uncertainties, with the security of Bengali cosmopolitanism overtaken by the New Delhi’s unabashed imperialism, whoever the rulers may be. India’s transition from colony to self-rule meant that the nuanced relationship informed by culture and history was dumped for a power relationship.
But there were some possibilities of tempering New Delhi’s hubris. Young political activists saw that Rana rule would not end unless the British were out of India, and enthusiastically joined the Indian independence struggle, developing deep links, as equals, with emerging India’s political class.
However, Independence made the Indian rulers – politicians as well as members of the civil service – don the mantle of the departed colonials. Imperiousness was what marks that point of view, till today other than the odd diplomat or politician. On the other side was the obsequiousness exhibited by the latter generation of Nepali politician, which was bound to give the Indian interlocutors a sense of empire.
Turning point
The turning point in the relationship between Indian and Nepali politicians can be said to have occurred in 1950 at a meeting between the newly anointed Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his erstwhile fellow-revolutionary Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, still a freedom-fighter against the Ranas. When a DC-3 aircraft loaded with money looted from the Rana customs point at Birganj landed in at Safdarjang Airport in Delhi, Nehru had the aircraft surrounded by security and the cargo confiscated. Later, at Teen Murti House, the livid prime minister confronted Koirala.
The I-know-better attitude of Nehru towards Nepal has since been adopted by successive prime ministers right down to Narendra Modi – bar perhaps the internationalist and regionalist I K Gujral – and of course the ambassadors, diplomats and the head spooks and minor apparatchiks.
The modern Indian state got its taste for intervention in Nepal through Nehru’s example. The lower minions who followed up included an Ambassador CPN Singh, a Bihari aristocrat and civil servant who flew DC-3 aircraft himself between New Delhi and Kathmandu as part of the negotiations that brought the Rana regime to a close. My grand-uncle Narendra Mani Dixit, in his unpublished memoirs, writes of the Indian interventionism that he says he saw during his time as a key foreign policy advisor of the Ranas.
During the Rana era, the super-elites of Nepal invested in the aura of ‘forbidden kingdom’ and kept the colonial officialdom wowed, much as Bhutan does today in its dealings with New Delhi. While Nepali politicians and diplomats alike are from plebian backgrounds, perhaps the most effective Nepali ambassador to India was Bijaya Shumshere, about as elite as you could get them in the mid-20th century, who was there for the tightrope walking when the Rana regime fell to the Nepali Congress democrats. (He died through accidental electrocution in the Barakhamba Residence, which remains a prime property owned by the Nepal Government in New Delhi.)
While Nepali sovereignty was left intact in the course of India gaining Independence, this did not mean that Indian influence did not play a role in the outcome. The Ranas were so weakened that in formal ceremonies the prime minister was seated as equals with the Indian ambassador. Nehru made a charade of three-way talks between himself, the Ranas and the Nepali Congress, whereas he foisted an interim government in Nepal with a Rana as Prime Minister and the NC in secondary positions. An Indian bureaucrats attended and guided Nepal’s cabinet meetings, and India placed radio listening posts to monitor Chinese activities in more than a dozen areas in the hinterland.
The severely weakened Rana regime, just before it fell, signed a treaty of peace and friendship with India in 1950, months before the regime fell. Under the circumstances, while it has got a consistently bad press for being an ‘unequal treaty’, it must be considered a good deal for Nepal – for conceding Nepal’s sovereignty, and laying out reciprocal obligations as would be between equals, even though by now matters have overtaken the treaty. The document talked of each country taking permission from the other while buying arms from third countries (this clause obviously has been voided by both sides), coming to each other’s support in case of aggression, and equal treatment of citizens. In fact, an accompanying letter allowed Nepal exception on the last clause, as a concession to the difference in the size of the two economies.
The one that got away
Nehru continued to micromanage Nepal, often at the behest of the Nepali leaders who kept reaching out to him to resolve issues – the depth of management can be seen in published letters between Nehru and BP’s half-brother and competitor Matrika Prasad Koirala. Indeed, it was when the Ranas fell that the Indian political clout was flexed for the first time, and it was fortunate that several factors played a part in keeping sovereignty intact. They were the strictures of the 1923 treaty which was difficult to evade, the pre-existing camaraderie between the Indian leaders and Nepali revolutionaries as well as the liberal leanings of Nehru meant that – despite the misgivings of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel – Nepali sovereignty was respected even as Junagarh, Goa and Hyderabad fell.
Till today, there is little-disguised amazement among Indians from various parts who visit Nepal, with the unstated line, “How did you guys manage to get away?” Indeed, Nepal provides a refreshing change from the larger countries of South Asia, for being a country of heterogeneous population and a size that ensures the citizens are not too far removed from the Centre. While there are enough inherited issues of mal-development, marginalisation, exploitation and Kathmandu-centricism, in the context of South Asia as a whole Nepalis have the possibilities of making the ‘nation-state’ work more than elsewhere – and not just because it is the oldest in the Subcontinent, having been put together in the 1730’s.
As long as Nepal was an absolute monarchy, the understandings and adjustments were made at the highest level between Narayanhiti Royal Palace and 7 Race Course Road, so there was little place for diplomats – or intelligence apparatchiks – to do. The Royal Nepal Embassy at Barakhamba Road was little more than a post box of the royal family, and government secretaries negotiating with Indian counterparts never had much leeway, forever waiting for instructions from the Royal Palace Secretariat.
The fall of absolute monarchy in 1990 was something demanded by the Nepali people. But the show of political solidarity by Indian politicians including Chandra Shekhar was important, and is used by many kneejerk analysts to cry ‘Indian interventionism’. The fact was that it was the People’s Movement which ushered democracy and the new Constitution of November 1990, but it is also true that the new polity with its multiple power-centres provided space for Indian diplomacy to engage, and for the as well as the spreading tentacles of the Indian intelligence, particular R&AW and IB.
Right hand, left hand
Nepal became a playing ground for all kinds of Indian players, and in hindsight, it becomes clear that so many roadblocks in bilateral relations have to do with the fact that one hand of the Indian state did not know what the other was doing – down the timeline this is seen in the rise of the Maoists (when some agency seems to have been involved in training the rebels), the Indian blockade of 2015 (where someone decided to teach Nepal a lesson for going its own way to adopt a new Constitution) and the latest India-Nepal tangle on the ownership of the Limpiyadhura-Lipu Lekh stretch north of Kumaon (where the Indian Army’s plans to inaugurate the road to Lipu Lekh was not communicated to South Block).
In the democratic era since the 1990s and continuing, India got active in influencing Nepal in various ways, from relatively benign to nefarious. One effective tool was to send the children of Nepal’s politicians and senior bureaucrats to Indian colleges and institutions of higher learning, from college to medical studies to ayurvedic studies, depending upon the influence and importance of the supplicant. Medical treatment of political leaders has been a potent tool for New Delhi to get its way. Beyond all of this, India exercised an enormous amount of soft power across the open border, from being an aspirational democracy that Nepalis looked up to for decades, to the fact that India was the destination for the youth seeking quality higher education.
Gradually, a rock-solid point of view developed in the Nepali polity that you had to get ‘Bharat dahina‘ if you wanted to move ahead in politics. Within its own geopolitical space, with the rise of Chinese interest in Nepal still years away, Nepal was in a unipolar space where New Delhi’s goodwill became essential for success in politics. While Nepal had evaded the fate of Sikkim and inherited a better historical deal that Bhutan vis-à-vis New Delhi, India maintained an ever-stronger lock-hold on the Nepali polity.
The close embrace of India helped develop an opportunistic anti-Indianism in Nepal, to be used by politicians, particularly those out of power. At points it would seem that India was all-power and all-capable in pulling strings and levers on Nepal, often getting ‘credit’ for things it had no role in. Further, from the Kathmandu perspective, it was as if the Indian foreign policy was entirely focused on destabilising and intervening in Nepal. The more likely scenario was that New Delhi was so preoccupied elsewhere that the intelligence agencies ran amok, helping develop anti-Indianism, while the policy makers in New Delhi remained completely oblivious until after the damage was done.
Maoist approach New Delhi
The rise of the Maoists in Nepal gave different wings of the Indian state further space to play. While it does seem that at least one wing of the Indian security establishment actively worked to impart training to some Maoists, other parts of the Indian establishment sought to take advantage of the weakening of the Nepali state. When challenged on Maoists having a free run of India to make forays into Nepal, Ambassador Shyam Saran told this writer: “We can’t locate our own Maoists, how do you expect us to keep track of yours? India is a big country.”
The decisive entry of Indian intelligence into Nepal happened at the hands of the Maoists. The Nepal Army, which had kept out of the fray for six long years while the Nepal Police very inadequately tackled the Maoists, finally picked up the gun, and after a few debacles gradually got the upper hand. The rebels felt the heat and began to look for a way out. Once a schism between the supreme Pushpa Kamal Dahal (‘Prachanda’) and chief ideologue Baburam Bhattarai (‘Laldhwoj’) had been patched up, with the latter rescued by Indian intelligence, the two leaders wrote a letter to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking for a hearing.
National Security Adviser to Prime Minister Singh, Brajesh Mishra, directed the Maoist duo to write to the Intelligence Bureau, an instruction which they dutifully complied with. Before long, the Dahal and Bhattarai had a deal with India’s spy-masters, and thereafter the Maoists had the run of India without any harassment, finding it easy to make forays across the length of the Nepali border. Meanwhile, the leadership frolicked in Gurgaon and Noida.
This deal between the Indian establishment and the Maoists meant that the leaders of the democratic parties of the Nepal, too, then had to deal with Indian intelligence, if they were going to talk to the Maoists. The Indian apparatchiks had got into the inside track of the Nepali polity.
The 12-point deal with the Maoists that led to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2006 was negotiated between the Maoists and UML and NC leaders in and around Delhi. It was obvious that Indian authorities were in the know, but it would be excessive to say that India brokered or directed the deal, as some self-flagellating Nepali analysts would have you believe. The reason the 12-point deal was vital, even if it was negotiated under the foreign aegis, is that at the time in 2005, and average of 30 Nepali citizens were dying every day at the hands of fellow Nepalis.
When things get difficult, Nepal’s politicians relied on their links among the Indian political class. Indian princelings and royal families connected to Nepal’s Ranas or royalty have always been for lobbying: from the Scindias of Gwalior to the Maharaja of Mayurbang, to Karan Singh. Very few Nepalis had access to the higher echelons of power in Delhi, and one of the few who cultivated the top rung was the businessman with royal connections, Prabhakar Rana, whose passing two years ago has been a loss in terms of links to the Delhi establishment.
Jai Prakash Narayan’s followers, Lohiyaites, CPI-M leaders, all were active at one time or the other, maintaining links to Nepal and acting as go-betweens when required. During the 2015 blockade, while there was goodwill all around from Mani Shankar Aiyar to the late DP Tripathi it was at the urging of the Indian Army (with its large contingent of Nepali citizens in the Gorkha battalions) that is said to have been decisive in ending the Blockade.
Micro-manipulation
Before long, the activism of intelligence got transferred to Nepal, where the Embassy’s diplomatic function was eclipsed by all manner of micro-management of politics by agents even as the country got into the difficult phase of constitution writing. When we say India was micromanaging affairs in Nepal, it rapidly came to mean micro-manipulation by Indian intelligence.
Having made themselves comfortable in Nepal, the Indian apparatchiks began to realise that they could actually have a handle on running a good-sized country, which was likely not possible in the South Asian neighbourhood, or elsewhere. And so, with the blessings of the PMO in New Delhi, the spies went outward, and wayward. Perhaps the leadership in New Delhi felt that the perceived security threat represented by the open Nepal-India border required ‘handling’ Nepal differently than any other country, but in the end adventurism came back to haunt India. The Blockade led to a stiffening of the spine of the Nepali state, made Nepal look for the northward passage for commerce and connectivity, and made the Indian nemesis K P Oli the prime minister through an overwhelming mandate.
The question that has not yet been answered is, how a spy agency can function when spooks function openly in Kathmandu as if they were diplomats. The utility of a spy agency is said to be when it remains hidden, with full deniability. Yet in Kathmandu the agents strutted about, the only thing they did not do is give out visiting cards that said ‘Station Chief’. The intelligence-wallahs were by the very nature of their calling not accountable for what they wrought, forcing the political and diplomatic forces to pick up after the mess they had created.
Further, they had access of slush funds for which they were not accountable, and there was talk of plots and flats being purchased in Chandigarh and Lucknow on the basis of funds meant for Nepali ‘recipients’. In the meantime, Nepalis themselves were confused by multiple messages coming out of India, from a plethora of acronyms – MEA, IB, R&AW, PMO. Who was in the driver’s seat?
Constitution writing
Things got out of hand as the Constitution writing got underway and the one can imagine that the Indian diplomatic corps became perturbed by what was being done in India’s name. In the meantime, the Nepali politicians had no choice but to engage with the intelligence fellows, either the station chief in Lainchaur or the R&AW or IB bosses who came on secret visits without doing much to hide their presence or activism. Once again, one might ask, what is the use of a spy agency that does not stay undercover? Does that actually make them more benign?
Ever since the predictability and stability of the royal regime was ended, first in 1990 and once-and-for-all in 2006, the Indian establishment has been seeking a surefire means to control Nepal’s rollercoaster politics. When they got to make policy, the so-called spies thought the Madhesi fold could be used to the purpose of controlling Kathmandu. Thus, somewhere along the way, Indian intelligence got it into its head to utilise Madhesi politicians of Nepal, doing great injustice of regarding the entire cohort as fifth columnists. The possibility of violence across open border, money and ratcheting up of populist narrative made sure that the politicians got in line.
With Nepal going in for writing a Constitution, some extraordinary mind in a New Delhi cubbyhole decided to use the opportunity to create a ‘buffer’ for India by proposing a One-Madhes-One-Pradesh formula for federalism as it pertained to the plains. Any demographer, geographer, anthropologist or sociologist – let alone a politician – would have said that the idea was crazy, to have a strip that is 500 miles long and merely 20 miles wide along the stretch of a Tarai so full of demographic, linguistic diversity, and which were connected to the hills directly to the north. Forcibly, this was made the main plank of Madhesi politics, picked up by civil society and politicians alike. A lot of energy was used up before the first Constituent Assembly collapsed in 2013, to neutralise this odd demand which seems so nonsensical in hindsight.
The Indian consulate in Birganj was made a hub for playing politics rather than facilitating commerce, and the liaison office in Biratnagar that was opened after the Kosi embankment breach of 2008 was kept open for years after its use was over. The injustice done to Madhesi politics by overt Indian intervention has not been remarked enough, but the repercussions are evident to this day. While there is no doubt that the Madhesis have felt the double-whammy of identity loss as well as economic marginalisation by the Kathmandu-centric state, there is no doubt that the Indian policymakers were trying to exploit this disgruntlement for their own perceived purposes.
Back in Kathmandu, the Indian Embassy became a player even in the mid-level appointments to government positions, the police, and other government institutions. The Embassy was able to utilise its influence over the seven-eight main Indian multinationals in Nepal, who were the main advertisers in media, to dictate to the media houses so that it would toe New Delhi’s line. In the meantime, during the time of Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa, India even got the go-ahead to get directly provide development aid to recipients across the country without going through the Ministry of Finance, which all other donor governments and INGOs were required to do.
The outsourcing
While many have remarked that during the 2000s, the US began to outsource its Nepal policy to India, the more cruel reality was that Indian establishment itself had outsourced much of its Nepal policy to the intelligence agencies. One worry that I remember having during the worst period of spook adventurism was this: given that the best and the brightest applicants to Indian officialdom joined the IFS, IAS and IPS, in that order, what would be the fate of Nepal now that it was saddled with the spy agencies. Indeed, who but the most unaware would think of something as outlandish as one province along the entire stretch of the Nepal Tarai, or the enthronement of Lokman Singh Karki at the CIAA? Would fools wade in where the more circumspect feared to tread? And given the large amounts of financial outlay, who was to say that this money would even be spent in Nepal, given the lack of accountability? With much of the funds actually repatriated back to Indian pockets and bank accounts, this would not even help Nepali liquidity.
Besides the attempt to co-opt Madhesi politics, Indian intelligence in coordination with the Embassy tried to control Nepali politics through the appointment of Lokman Singh Karki. Activists who saw it for what it was organised against the appointment. But that was the time when the influence of Indian intelligence was at its peak, and the entire political class from the opposition leaders to the prime minister and president blanched. The term they all used when challenged as to why they agreed to Karki’s appointment was “badhyata” that they had no choice.
Due credit
To give them due credit, the politicians of Nepal were responding to reality when they rolled with the punches that the Indian political, diplomatic and intelligence establishment threw at them. Besides, for all the pressures to kowtow to India, the political careers of individual politicians required them not to be seen as doormats for India – only the Madhesi politicians were not given that privilege for the tight embrace that the Indian apparatchiks kept them in. It can be said that Nepali politicians had to have double the political acumen of those elsewhere.
The idealised world for a Nepali citizen was one where India evolved into a benign neighbour to be dealt through regular diplomatic and political channels, rather than an interventionist big brother who cared little for Nepali sensitivities. Incongruously, it was India that made this situation come about through its overreach during the Constitution-writing and the slapping of the five-month blockade in 2015 and into 2016.
When the time came, after the failure of the first Constituent Assembly, and for the second Constituent Assembly to adopt the Constitution, the Indian establishment decided that the date should be pushed back to provide more accommodation to what it stated were Madhesi concerns. Then Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar was sent as a personal emissary by Prime Minister Modi to stall the proceedings, and he came with a viceregal attitude and was roundly rebuffed. When the final negotiations were to be taken on the constitutional text, the key players kept their telephones switched off to avoid frantic calls from Lainchaur.
The Constitution was promulgated, but New Delhi did not take it well. It merely ‘noted’ the adoption of the document, and it would be another four years before it would deign to congratulate Nepal on Constitution Day/National Day. To show its displeasure, and indicating the lack of intelligence about Nepali society’s sense of self and its resilience, New Delhi imposed an economic blockade on Nepal. Much worse, the apparatchiks suggested that the blockade was actually by Madhesi activists blockading the rest of the country and fellow-Nepalis.
Due understandable pressures, some Madhesi politicians and activists brashly insisted that it was they who were at the Raxaul-Birgunj bridge blocking traffic, which did not explain the miles of trucks stranded across the border in Bhairawa, Biratnagar, Nepalganj and Kakadbhitta. Indian media went along with the fiction of a Madhesi blockade, and so the world was made to believe, and it took another couple of years before New Delhi analysts began to concede the reality.
The response of Nepalis to the Blockade was a turning point in modern Nepal’s geopolitical stance and status. Whereas Nepalis have often risen to prove their ability to preserve or restore democracy, the blockade was the first time that their positioning on an international affair, and they gave a decisive message which emboldened the politicians. The public was willing to suffer nearly half a year of extreme hardship after the earthquake – because they knew that India was in the wrong. The Indian Blockade also accelerate Nepal’s moves to open up its northern border for commercial connectivity.
On the whole, Nepal as a country emerged stronger for having passed the test with unity and resolve. The question that remains till today is whether the intelligence operatives and the ‘operational wizard’ they report to, viz. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, have understood the sea change that occurred under their command.
KP Oli, Chair of the UML party, stood his ground unequivocally at a time when the Nepali Congress as the other large party was not even willing to utter the term ‘Indian Blockade’, as was also the case of so many members of the Kathmandu civil society. Such was the fear of New Delhi’s long hand, and the many ways it could affect your life and career. For this, the unified Communist Party of Nepal (with the Maoists in tow) was rewarded resoundingly in the 2017 elections of 2017.
After the Blockade was lifted, the relationship was rebuilt, and Modi and Oli began having easy conversations. But then in May 2020, once again the two countries were taken to the brink with the Lipu Lekh Crisis. It was a comedy of errors with tragic outcome, once again indicating the Indian establishment’s complete lack of knowledge or care for Nepali sensibilities, even though the country carries such a vital strategic importance for India.
War of the maps
The Survey of India published a new official political map so as to display the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir, but even as it angered China with regard to Aksai Chin, the publication highlighted once again for Nepalis the fact that the area where India kept its Kalapani garrison as well as the entire Limpiyadhura Triangle was shown to be in India. But matters only took a strident course in Kathmandu after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, with great publicity, inaugurated a track built through the territory claimed by Nepal.
Indian Army Chief M M Naravane then insinuated publicly that Nepal was being put up by China to raise the Lipu Lekh issue, setting off an uproar in Kathmandu. It has taken nearly eight months for things to cool down enough for the general to make a goodwill visit this week to Nepal, long delayed by Covid-19 and the fallout of his remark.
Interestingly, it seemed that Nepal-India might have come to an agreement on the withdrawal of the forces at Kalapani, but now the Nepali political forces arrayed against KP Oli (led by Dahal) insisted that Nepal publish a map showing the Limpiyadhura Triangle. With his back to the wall, KP Oli did publish the map and had the Constitution amended so that the national seal included in the Constitution also signified the change. Even as bilateral relations plummeted, and as Modi prepared to lay the foundation stone at Ayodhya (Uttar Pradesh), Oli ruminated whether the true Ayodhya might be in the Chitwan region of the central Nepal plains.
One would have been forgiven for thinking if there was ever any going back on the bilateral relationship. But with the passage of time, new global realignments, and increased Chinese activities along the Himalayan frontier, Modi seems to have decided to make up. The ice was broken with Oli picking up the phone to greet him Modi on the occasion of India’s Independence Day on 15 August. Modi told Oli he would be sending a special emissary to Kathmandu to talk matters over.
When the emissary did come, it turned out to be Samant Kumar Goel, head of the external intelligence agency R&AW, leading a team from various wings of the Indian government. Modi pulled a fast one, and sent a spy-master as emissary that Oli could not possibly refuse to meet. In Kathmandu’s over-charged political cauldron, it became a matter of glee that Oli had been forced to openly meet the head of India’s external intelligence agency. Cutting off the nose to spite the face has been a longtime preoccupation of the Kathmandu intelligentsia.
The deputation of the R&AW Chief to Nepal was a decision of Narendra Modi, and it reflects upon his exclusive way of conducting foreign policy out of the PMO via his national security adviser Ajit Doval rather than through India’s huge foreign service superstructure. He could have sent Doval himself as emissary, or any number of political leaders, but he decided to send an intelligence chief – whose brief is to work underground even if here he was being asked to do an above-ground foray.
The fact that the delegation arrived while Vinay Mohan Kwatra, Indian Ambassador to Nepal, was in New Delhi for consultations itself speaks volumes in terms of South Block’s place on the foreign policy totem pole. It seems credible, that the arrival of Goel in Kathmandu signalled a power struggle on Nepal among the various institutions of India, and it is unfortunate that R&AW seems to have been selected.
Prime Minister Oli did his best under the circumstances by opening up about the meeting with the R&AW Chief through his press advisor Surya Thapa. Others who did meet Goel were busy putting out press notes denying meeting him.
One could say that because the R&AW Chief came as a special emissary of the Indian Ambassador, and that he came openly on a special Indian Air Force aircraft, meant that he was conducting diplomacy rather than espionage. However, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the trip has damaged the fabric of bilateral relations, and the Nepali public is once more made wary.
Oli has enough to answer for in relation to poor governance despite a unique opportunity to govern, but it is in appropriate for him to be saddled with the blame for meeting an emissary sent by the Indian Prime Minister, who happened to be the external spy agency chief. Meanwhile, the commentariat in Kathmandu gleefully sought to expose Oli for meeting the Indian spy chief, whereas the ire should have been directed towards Modi for having sent Goel in the first place. Oli could not have refused to meet the designated emissary.
Whenever India intervenes, Nepal reacts. It is necessary for this unique bilateral relationship across the open border to go back to being political and diplomatic, and not intelligence agency-driven. India should have learnt the danger of allowing the spooks of questionable competence to run rough shod over Nepal. If they could focus on Nepal, New Delhi’s opinion makers would concede that the main problem with Nepal – the evident tilt towards China, the anger towards India – was something foisted by New Delhi via the Blockade of 2015.
Nepal is a natural friend of India and the cultural bonds are strong, and they go deep. But Nepal is also an independent, sovereign nation-state. When there is transparent communication between the two countries based on the conduct of politics and diplomacy, Nepal will have the space to develop its democracy, make its own mistakes and to learn from them.
India needs a stable Nepal for its security as well as the economic growth of the border regions. If New Delhi regarded the regions of Purvanchal and north Bihar more sensitively, it would find that it is in its interest to let Nepal develop without interventionism. That will happen when New Delhi starts looking at Nepal through the eyes of Champaran, Gorakhpur, Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur.
New Delhi’s lack of attentiveness to Nepal is what feeds grievances here. This has led to intervention during constitution-writing, in blockading, and in Modi sending an intelligence chief as emissary to Kathmandu. The inattentiveness seems so deep that India does not even know it is hurting itself in the process.
from Nepali Times https://ift.tt/3exHFWW
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