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Nepal back in India's
embrace
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - India's plan to resume
military assistance to Nepal, suspended after the
February 1 royal coup, has nothing to do with
China's offer of support to the regime of King
Gyanendra, beleaguered by a nine-year Maoist
insurgency, say some security experts. Others
disagree.
"India and China are no longer
competing in Nepal or elsewhere," C V Ranganathan,
who served as India's ambassador in Beijing from
1987 to 1991, told Inter Press Service in an
interview.
Ranganathan, who is currently
on the executive committee of the independent
Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS),
said that not competing with India for influence
in the neighborhood has in fact been a "feature of
Chinese policy for some years now and is not
likely to recur in the near future".
Meeting on the sidelines of the
Asian-African summit in Jakarta at the weekend,
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apparently
told the Nepali ruler that the resumption of arms
supplies would continue, drawing sharp reactions
back home, including strong criticism from close
allies of the ruling Congress Party.
Most
importantly, India's two main communist parties
that provide critical outside support to the
minority, Congress-led United Progressive Alliance
(UPA) coalition, issued warnings against "resuming
arms supplies to a despotic king who suppresses
the elementary democratic rights of the people".
"The UPA government must realize that the
appreciation and goodwill it earned with its firm
stand in defense of democracy and popular
government in Nepal will disappear and it will be
held responsible for abetting the king's
authoritarianism," the Communist Party of India-
Marxist said in a statement.
"India should
refrain from doing anything that gives legitimacy
to the present regime - already the pressure from
India has shown results and if this continues
there is a chance for the restoration of democracy
in Nepal," said A B Bardhan, general secretary of
the Communist Party of India.
But denial
of arms to Nepal carries with it the danger of
allowing the Maoists to overrun the country and
there are signs that Pakistan or China would step
in to provide Kathmandu weapons, if India failed
to do so.
"A Maoist takeover of the
capital Kathmandu is, of course unacceptable, and
the worst case scenario," said Ashok Metha, a
retired Indian army major-general.
New
Delhi's extreme displeasure at the takeover by the
king and the sacking of the Sher Bahadur Deuba
government prompted Singh to cancel his attendance
at the annual summit of the South Asian
Association for Regional Cooperation scheduled in
Dhaka on February 6.
Since then, India has
been playing it cautiously and despite its almost
overwhelming influence over the "last Hindu
kingdom in the world", has preferred to coordinate
action designed to get the regime in Kathmandu to
speedily restore democracy with the help of
Britain and the United States - Nepal's major
donor countries.
"It [the resumption of
arms supplies] had to happen sooner than later,"
Mehta told reporters. "We could not have kept the
supplies blocked indefinitely, having undertaken
to modernize the Royal Nepalese Army we could not
back out."
Without doubt, Nepal is
probably the deadliest conflict in Asia with an
estimated 10 killings a day. So far over 11,000
Nepalis have died in the insurgency that began in
1996, with the Maoists showing no reluctance in
backing down from their battle to set up a
kingless communist republic in the desperately
poor country.
However, the geopolitics in
this area are intricate, with Nepal surrounded by
India, China and Pakistan. Nonetheless, India has
been playing the diplomatic game adroitly with
both China and Pakistan.
This month saw
high-profile visits to New Delhi by Chinese Prime
Minister Wen Jiabao, followed by Pakistan
President General Pervez Musharraf. Both leaders
indicated that they were prepared to put
long-standing territorial issues with India on the
back-burner and instead work for the development
and prosperity of their respective people through
cooperation with the Manmohan Singh government.
Immediately before Wen's visit to India,
Nepali groups - including the Pravasi Nepali
Sangh, Mool Prabha Akhil Bharat Nepali Ekta Samaj
and Nepali Jan Sampark Samiti - submitted a joint
memorandum to the Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu
expressing concern over reports that Beijing
planned to provide military and logistical support
for the king.
"We are concerned about
reports on the extension of full diplomatic
support by China to the unconstitutional move of
the king [to seize power in a coup]," the joint
memorandum said.
The memorandum also urged
Beijing to "support the democratic aspirations of
the people of Nepal for sustained cordial and
friendly relations between the peoples of the two
countries and not to recognize the royal
government".
But Wen's extremely cordial
visit left little room for doubt that Beijing
intended to interfere in Nepal, and this has given
India a chance to deal with the king on its terms.
"It is important that the king has been told [by
Manmohan Singh] what is expected of him," said
Ranganathan.
Indian television channel
NDTV24x7 managed to interview Gyanendra in Jakarta
at the sidelines of the Asia-Africa summit. "We
have agreed on certain things and we have got
assurances that they [military supplies] will
continue," the king told the TV channel, after his
meeting with Manmohan and Indian Foreign Minister
Natwar Singh.
Harsh realities remain.
India is obliged to supply arms to Nepal under a
1965 treaty and also it has open borders with the
Himalayan kingdom, which has allowed at least 10
million Nepalese to cross over to India and take
up employment and residence in this country.
Analysts like Raghavan and his colleague
at the IPCS, Dipankar Banerjee, a retired army
general, believe that India is caught between a
rock and a hard place on Nepal and would naturally
be encouraged by any sign from Gyanendra that he
was prepared to restore multi-party democracy in
his kingdom.
Said Suhas Chakma, director
of New Delhi-based Asian Center for Human Rights,
"India's greatest fear is having a failed state in
its neighborhood and it is in India's interest to
intervene in a constructive way."
India
also faces a Maoist insurgency in several of its
own states, especially in southern Andhra Pradesh
and Karnataka and in eastern Orissa, Jharkhand and
Bihar. But New Delhi prefers to regard this as
development issue and has refrained from
unleashing its army on extreme left- wing groups.
"In the absence of a democratic,
multiparty alternative in Nepal, a Maoist takeover
is likely and this is not something that the
international community, including India, will
like," said Ravi Nair, director of the South Asia
Human Rights Documentation Center.
(Inter
Press Service) |
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