If you can bear to tear yourself away from the high drama around Anna Hazare for a moment, here’s a great alternative to stun your senses: Nepal.
When the world’s youngest republic finally chose Jhalanath Khanal of the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) to become prime minister in February, after 17 rounds of voting, there was great hope. Since Khanal was supported by the Maoists, Nepal believed the Constituent Assembly would finally be able to write a new Constitution, reflecting its amazing diversity and ethnicity, and the Maoists could honourably integrate at least 7,000-8,000 of its nearly 20,000 strong cadres into the Nepal army.
This would signal the end of the civil war that lasted a full decade until the “jan andolan” or “people’s revolution” of 2006, in which thousands of lives on both sides were lost.
But Khanal lost the confidence of his masters and quit on August 7. President Ram Baran Yadav gave the political parties an August 24 deadline to come up with a consensual name for prime minister, failing which the new man – or woman – would be elected by a majority vote in the Constituent Assembly.
Well, the deadline expired on Wednesday evening. India’s newest ambassador to Nepal, Jayant Prasad, flew to Kathmandu to take up his new job on Thursday. The ballot to elect a new prime minister doesn’t have a date yet, but we know that Baburam Bhattarai, a key Maoist ideologue and an alumnus of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (he was in Periyar hostel) and Nepali Congress leader Ram Chandra Poudel are in the fray.
Meanwhile, a powerful member of the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party, Zhou Yongkang, arrived in Kathmandu last week to reaffirm its undying friendship with Nepal, and immediately declared that “China hopes to share its prosperity and progress with the people of Nepal.”
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Clearly, the northern country is in the throes of a particular frisson of excitement. Nepalese commentators are talking about China’s “excessive liquidity” of $2 trillion and how Beijing could outsource some of its lower-end, labour-intensive industries to Nepal.
Clearly, it would be a win-win situation: in exchange for promoting its economy, Nepal would ensure a certain security cooperation. Meaning, the flood of Tibetans who pour into the Himalayan country annually from neighbouring Tibet – many of them on their way to India, the current home of the Dalai Lama – would be dammed up. As relations warmed up, Kathmandu would get a new route to access the wider world, via Beijing.
Now, this is not the time or place to wring one’s hands about China’s growing, dragon-like presence across South Asia or mournfully reiterate its “string of pearls” strategy – a phrase, if truth be told, was drummed up by an imaginative US researcher – or fulminate over Nepal’s native Maoist cunning that seeks to replace India’s primary position in the hearts and minds of the Nepalese with China.
My argument is that Delhi must share some of the blame for the deteriorating relationship with Kathmandu in recent years. Of course, the Maoists broke several promises, including on retaining a non-partisan character to the Nepal army. Of course, the Maoists weren’t able to transform themselves from a fighting, guerrilla force to a parliamentary party, where battles are fought not by bullets but by rapier wit, and power won not from a barrel of a gun but by the sheer force of the ballot box.
Clearly, India’s political class – which is totally at sea over how to deal with one hunger-striker in Ramlila Maidan – was unable to get a grip on how to deal with Nepal, or even worse, was hardly interested. So it left it to the bureaucracy in the ministry of external affairs to muddle through.
The moral of the story this month is that if India wants to assert its place in the neighbourhood, it has to use more than arrogance to convince the opposition. Whether the Maoists are bad or the Nepali Congress is good is a decision that the people of Nepal will make — not Delhi.
That is why it is important to reiterate the special relationship with Nepal this week. Not only do we have history and culture and religion in common, but also that sacred, indefinable thing called democracy. Both Baburam Bhattarai and Poudel know they have a duty to fulfil by leaning across ideological divides and fulfilling the mandate of the people.
So where does India come in? Well, Delhi remains the largest donor as well as the top investor into Nepal, notwithstanding the temptations offered by the Chinese. By offering to kick-start the Himalayan country’s faltering economy – in the massive opportunities offered by infrastructure, power, water resources and retail sectors – India would only be doing itself a favour.
If a new chapter has to open on Nepal-India relations, Delhi must ask what it can do for Kathmandu, not the other way round. Que sera sera.