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2 India caught in a ring of
fire By Dhruba Adhikary
KATHMANDU - Reflecting growing anxiety in
New Delhi about ongoing conflicts in the
neighborhood, a leading Indian publication, India
Today, led its May 28 edition with a cover report
headlined "Neighbors on fire". Pakistan, Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal are four countries
covered by the magazine.
Although they are
very much part of the South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the publication has
conspicuously left out three countries:
Afghanistan, Bhutan and
Maldives.
Perhaps New
Delhi thinks these three can't afford to
antagonize the rulers of India.
Political
instability of an unprecedented kind has gripped
the South Asia region, and the reasons for this
range from armed insurgency to communal animosity
and political obduracy thereof. Fears are being
expressed that rapidly unfolding events and trends
might place the basic principle of - and popular
faith in - democracy at risk. Does India, the
world's largest democracy, stand to gain from such
a scenario? How will it be useful to India, not
very far from China, to watch transparent
political systems turning into opaque regimes in
countries in its vicinity? Anyhow, when its
immediate neighborhood is on fire, what should be
India's reaction?
New Delhi, of course,
could take some pleasure if it were discreetly
assisting those responsible for setting the fires
in the neighborhood. The other alternative, as the
publication suggests, is to start worrying about
the fallout for South Asia, where India is a
dominant power. "India must ensure," said Aroon
Purie, the chief editor of India Today, "that it
plays a part in making sure its neighbors are able
to put out their fires."
In other words,
India should help neighbors to help themselves -
confine its role to that of a facilitator. It
should play the role of mother India, not that of
a big brother. But it seems unlikely the Indian
establishment will do this, and New Delhi is
sensitive whenever issues in public debate involve
the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry
of Defense.
This is explained in a book,
Making News, published in 2006. In a
chapter contributed by Rajdeep Sardesai, a noted
television journalist, there is a description of
how journalists who do not want to toe the
official line have to run the risk of being called
anti-nationals. He tells how journalists are
expected to "follow hook, line and sinker what the
ministry is saying".
Unlike other issues,
matters involving foreign relations are not
regularly discussed in Parliament. Officials find
it expedient to convince their political masters
that it is beneficial to keep issues in the domain
of external relations and diplomacy secret, in
effect taking the agenda away from the public on
whose behalf the government is expected to be
working. This is what India is today, decades
after renowned American scholar John Kenneth
Galbraith (1908-2006) said India was a functioning
anarchy. (He also served as US envoy in New Delhi
under president John F Kennedy.)
India
Today has culled the opinions of experts
criticizing the authorities for "ad hoc-ism". One
is Brahma Chellaney, a strategic analyst, who
said, "It is odd that Delhi does not have a clear
neighborhood policy." It means that India has
conducted its relations in the neighborhood in a
haphazard manner without any coordinated,
clear-cut policy since it ceased be a British
colony in 1947. These include the wars with
Pakistan, the clash with China, support to the
movement to "liberate" Bangladesh, the annexation
of Sikkim, and the landing of Indian troops in Sri
Lanka to protect the Tamil population. And, in a
more recent case, pitting Maoists, democratic
parties and the monarchy against one other -
thereby destabilizing Nepal.
Indian
Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon admitted, in
front of a New Delhi audience on April 10, that
South Asia "remains one of the least integrated
regions in the world".
Should not India,
the largest country in the region - and currently
the chair of the SAARC - do some introspection
where its measures have failed to create a
conducive atmosphere to build "interdependencies",
as Menon alluded to in his speech at the Observer
Research Foundation?
There is a need for
dispassionate study to find out why India's
relations with Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and
Nepal have remained less than cordial. Surely,
India alone cannot be right and others all wrong.
As has been pointed out by experts - and
tacitly admitted by authorities - New Delhi is
working without a policy on its neighborhood. It
ostensibly is guided by assumptions, presumptions,
perceptions and intelligence reports that are
inherently flawed because of preconceived
motivations. Menon, as quoted by India Today, said
diplomacy "is to get other people to do what I
want but get them to think that I am doing what
they want".
Since Menon is the head of
India's diplomatic service, it would be fair to
assume that the country's envoys - be they in
South Asian capitals or elsewhere - perform their
roles on this basis. This leads one to consider
what Indian Ambassador Shiv Shankar Mukherjee in
Kathmandu - and in the border town of Birgunj -
has been doing.
In earlier times, the
Maoist leadership waging a war against the Nepali
government was led to a believe that Delhi was
acting for their benefit. Once the Maoists decided
to join mainstream politics and become a part of
Parliament as well as the government, Indian
diplomats found it expedient to entice one or two
breakaway Maoist factions and extend them support,
on the basis of which they have launched a
separatist movement in the southern plains called
Terai. One of the leaders at the forefront of this
"Madhesi" movement, Upendra Yadav, is a Maoist
renegade who in 2004 was arrested on Indian
territory with two of his comrades.
New
Delhi quietly handed over the two to Nepali
authorities but set Yadav free while he was still
in Indian territory. There is a widely held
perception that Yadav, who physically resembles
the people of the nearby (to Nepal) Indian state
of Bihar, is being used to sustain a hate campaign
against Nepalis of "hills" origin.
This is
presumed to be based on an Indian interpretation
that most Maoists are of "hills" origin, and that
by getting them evicted from the plains India can
keep its porous borders safe and also prevent the
Maoist movement from spreading to adjoining Indian
states. Clearly, it is an attempt to create a
buffer within a buffer - which is Nepal. It is
becoming clear that Yadav is being groomed to take
a role akin to that of Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's in Sri
Lanka.
If Prabhakaran can obtain Indian
support for his fight for a separate Tamil state,
Yadav's expectations for similar support from New
Delhi for a "Madheshland" look logical. Some
analysts tend to see these initiatives as an
example of the double standards that India has
applied for decades, citing military repression in
Kashmir, the northeast and elsewhere to quell
separatist movements.
The Indian stand on
the Maoists has been inconsistent. When the Indian
Foreign Office was led by Jaswant Singh, New Delhi
labeled the Maoists as terrorists. Later, it
reversed this approach and started to assist them,
despite their violent methods. More than 13,000
lives have been lost in the decade-long insurgency
that began in 1996.
Yet New Delhi was
instrumental in making them a party to a 12-point
agreement with the Nepali Congress-led front of
seven political parties. One agreement led to
another, and eventually the Maoists fully joined
the constitutional process, finally becoming a
part of the interim government on April 1 this
year.
But now India sees them as a deadly
menace, a sort of Frankenstein's monster. But the
stinging question is: Who supported them so that
they could be where they are now? The Maoists have
ambition, as is evident from this observation of
top Maoist leader Pushpa Kamala Dahal, aka
Prachanda, reproduced in the May 18 report of the
International Crisis Group: "Even if we are a
small country in South Asia, we think our
revolution can have impact all over the world."
Prachanda stresses the "great" experiment
Nepal is about to undertake, saying that the
country will be a beacon of hope for the
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