Nepal's Maoists cry Indian foul play
By M K Bhadrakumar
For any Indian who ever felt intrigued as to why South Asian neighbors often
dislike his country, the past fortnight offered clues. Like in a Tennessee
Williams play, painful to watch as the plot thickens slowly and invidiously, as
protagonists begin tearing each other apart in quiet despair after love begins
to drain or threatens to flee, India and Nepal are still locked in an embrace.
Someone must do the merciful act of separating them; of making them behave as
they should - as two sovereign countries. Indian papers are full of interviews
by Nepal's former prime minister Prachanda, who claims he was deposed in a
concerted conspiracy by the Indian bureaucratic establishment. He repeatedly
claimed that at a time when the seasoned Indian
politicians who by instinct understood Nepali politicians and their native ways
have been out of Delhi on the grueling campaign trail in the current
parliamentary elections, the mandarins of the Indian bureaucratic establishment
settled scores with him and his Maoist party.
According to the Maoists, the Indian establishment has forced them out of power
in a virtual coup by rallying disparate political elements and vested interests
opposed to them in Kathmandu on various counts, including the Nepalese army and
Nepal's deposed king.
The Indian establishment is not generally known for such neat planning or
efficiency. But what matters is that in Nepali public perceptions, the
allegation resonates. Any Indian diplomat who has served in India's
neighborhood can tell that India carries the burden of a larger-than-life
profile. There is a wealth of misconceptions among India's neighbors about its
capacity to harm. The common perception is that India can be a ill-tempered,
self-righteous bully.
But the ungainly truth, as often happens, gingerly lies somewhere in the
middle. True, India can probably muster a quick temper and may even be capable
of doing mischief if its feathers are ruffled, but then, if its neighbors are
clever enough, they can pay back in the same coin.
Take Sri Lanka. In the early 1980s, Delhi took a deliberate decision to start a
quarrel with Sri Lanka's Western-oriented leadership in Colombo. Several
complicated factors led to the quarrel, including vanities at the leadership
level, but it overtly wore the look of a pale Indian variant of the Monroe
Doctrine.
Delhi wanted the unhelpful leadership in Colombo to be put in its place - like
the Maoists in Kathmandu who showed the audacity to warm up to China's friendly
overtures. Books have been written which graphically describe that Delhi
fostered the Sri Lankan Tamil insurgent groups as an instrument of foreign
policy to pressure the then Sri Lankan government under president J R
Jayewardene.
If so, Delhi truly underestimated the tenacity of the Colombo political elite
to hit back. The grit of small countries, which depend paramountly on their
wits rather than muscle to safeguard their autonomy, is something too hard to
believe. Before Delhi could count to ten, Jayewardene sought and won an Indian
military intervention in Sri Lanka to put down the very same Tamil insurgency
it thoughtfully fostered in the first instance. And, amazingly, in no time,
Delhi agreed to do the unthinkable - dispatch an expedition to intervene in a
neighboring country's civil war.
But Colombo soon made yet another neat somersault and the Indian military
expedition in Sri Lanka found itself to be the common target of the Tamil
insurgents and the Sri Lankan security forces alike. The result was that after
the loss of a few thousand Indian soldiers and the assassination of a former
Indian prime minister, Delhi wound up its expedition in Sri Lanka in shame and
ignominy and sailed home. But the story didn't end there.
The Colombo elite, having tasted blood, allowed Delhi a brief respite before
working on its vanities again and getting the Indian elite on its side even as
another bloody chapter of the civil war was unrolling. Some say the Indian
establishment was not so dumb-witted as made out to be, but was probably on a
brilliant Machiavellian act in assisting Colombo to vanquish the Tamil
insurgent army. Time will tell.
At any rate, if the Maoists are clever, they would do a Colombo act on Delhi.
It seems they may do just that. They are reaching out to a political formation
at the other end of Nepal's fragmented political spectrum comprising Nepalis of
ethnic Indian origin who are commonly seen as Delhi's proxy on the Nepalese
democratic chessboard - the Joint Madhesi Democratic Front (JMDF).
Quite possibly, the Maoists may have calculated that with their 230 members in
an alliance with the 83 members of the JMDF, they can be a force in the
601-member parliament that can spike the incipient plans of a ganging-up by
Nepal's status quo parties as a new non-Maoist coalition government. At the
very least, the Maoists are seeking to avoid political isolation.
But it could presage something more. The Maoists are evidently reaching out to
Indian public opinion as well over the head of the Indian bureaucratic
establishment. They are doing what the Colombo elite would have surely done in
similar circumstances.
At the very minimum, one has to be truly moronic to miss the point that the
Maoists want to play by the democratic rules; that they do not want to return
to the jungles and become guerillas again; that they are pragmatic enough to
cross ideological divides; and, quite probably, they want to be Delhi's
favorites in the corridors of power in Kathmandu. So, what is the problem?
The problem seems to lie in a five-letter word - China. The malaise bears a
striking similarity with the early 1980s when the Jayewardene government in
Colombo took to the free market with gusto, was favorably inclined to accede to
the setting up of a Voice of America transmitter within earshot of India, was
reportedly allowing in Israeli intelligence specialists, and was toying with
the idea of leasing out Trincomalee's fine natural harbor and its vast "oil
farm" built by imperial Britain during World war II as a naval base for the
Americans.
The supreme irony is that today Delhi is not going to lose sleep over any of
those daredevil things that Jayewardene likely contemplated. Today, a quarter
century later, India has not only taken to the market, but the current
government in Delhi, which is about to complete its term, subscribed to the
Washington consensus even after the Americans began losing faith in it.
The Israelis of course are all over India, with the visiting Israeli army chief
taken to Kashmir last September on a counter-insurgency tour and Indian space
scientists launching away Israeli "spy" satellites. India today not only
desires a strong US naval presence in the Indian Ocean (as a "counterweight" to
China) but aspires to be the US Navy's preferred partner. If Indians don't care
to listen to Voice of America, it is merely because they have chosen to watch
CNN.
Alas, the Indian strategic community's ire about the Nepalese Maoist dalliance
with China is a replay of the xenophobia that was prevalent in Delhi in the
early 1980s. True, China is taking an excessively high degree of interest in
Nepal. But that isn't because Nepal's biggest political party subscribes to
Maoism or because Beijing wants to add yet another "pearl" to its "string"
around India, to borrow the famous words of a minor analyst working for the
Pentagon which have become the hot favorite idiom among Indian strategic
thinkers.
The fact is that China is keen to plug the infiltration route of Tibetan
militants who travel to and from India via Nepal. It is a crucial issue for
Beijing. Unsurprisingly, China will go the extra mile to ensure there is a
friendly government in Kathmandu that dissociates itself completely from the
"low-intensity war" waged in Tibet by militants coming in from outside. Just as
China pays enormous attention to its Central Asian neighbors to ensure that
Uyghur militants from the outside world do not infiltrate the Xinjiang
Autonomous Region.
Kyrgyzstan may have a population less than five million, but when a Kyrgyz
dignitary comes calling, Beijing rolls out a red carpet as if US President
Barack Obama had arrived. That shows an acute sense of national priorities, as
a sizeable Uyghur community lives in Kyrgyzstan.
Therefore, it shouldn't come as a surprise that China has begun assiduously
courting the democratic leadership in Nepal. Or, that the Maoist government
began cooperating with China to clamp down on the activities of the Tibetan
activists who operated out of Nepalese soil through the past half-century.
China will not be deterred from befriending Nepal on the crucial question of
tranquility and stability in Tibet, no matter what it takes. The time is not
far off before Beijing offers Nepal a berth in the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. Indeed, China has the political will and the financial capacity
to offer to Nepal what Delhi could have offered through the past six decades
and failed to do - staking a common future as partners in economic development
and regional stability. China's reach is enormous today. It has just replaced
the United States as Brazil's top trade partner.
Countering the Chinese challenge in Nepal needs imagination, a coherent game
plan and a sustained approach on India's part. Muscle-flexing is not the
answer. Nor is diplomatic one-upmanship the answer or the pretensions by the
right-wing Hindu nationalist outfits in India that Nepal is their sequestered
pasture.
Antagonizing the Maoists will not be a smart thing to do, as they represent
historical forces that are on the ascendance and they will be around as the
dominant political force in Nepal, sure as the sun rises in the east. But there
are pragmatic ways in which the Maoists could be made to view Delhi as their
preferred partner. Arguably, the Maoists are themselves already intensely
conscious that they cannot do without India's cooperation.
Contrary to the Indian security establishment's earlier doomsday scenario, the
Maoists are not messing around with the radical left movements professing to
follow Mao Zedong's ideology which are active in something like 160 out of
India's 600 districts. That shows a high degree of sensitivity to India's
national-security concerns.
But what Delhi should scrupulously avoid is any interference in Nepal's
internal affairs. Let the Nepalese settle their squabbles themselves over
drawing up a new constitution and charting out their future. Leave it to the
Nepalese political parties to carve out their space on the democratic arena.
Political parties begin to die when they cease to be relevant.
The forces, which Delhi might have favored when Nepal was a "Hindu kingdom",
may no more be capable of representing the people's aspirations. India cannot
resurrect them. Let them die. Of course, it will be dangerous to encourage the
Nepalese army to harbor Praetorian instincts, either. South Asia has had enough
of armies.
India will always enjoy a huge advantage over China in cultivating Nepal - of
history, geography, culture, ethnicity, economy and social bonds and kinship.
Where India loses is that it cannot get its act together as a driving force for
Nepal's emergence out of abject poverty. That is the leitmotif of China's
challenge to India. The entire sub-Himalayan region will incrementally feel
gravitation toward China as Tibet surges forward at its present level of
economic transformation and Beijing shows a willingness to share the cake.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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