Keep out the Maoists

To foreign governments, South Asia must appear as a poorly evolved place. Of the seven countries that comprise it, at any given time, as many three or four exhibit serious signs of instability.

Whether or not it is right to characterise them as failed states is probably a definitional quibble.

But the fact is that, at different times and in varying degrees, several of them are shaken by tremors high on the political Richter scale. The latest to join the gang, as it were, is Nepal.

With this, the number of countries on India's borders with major unresolved internal difficulties comes to four. This may not have mattered very much had it not created serious security problems for India. But it does. India needs to deal with them in the manner that it sees fit.

Nepal poses an especially difficult problem. Thanks to reasons that are well known, it has failed to develop into either a stable monarchy or a stable democracy.

True, its encounter with democracy is of relatively recent vintage but neither the political parties (of which it had as many as 44 at one time) nor the monarch has shown that they can work out a system that allows both to carve out their relative roles.

Indeed, the monarch has often worked at cross-purposes with his governments; and the politicians have shown no signs of understanding that if they don't hang together, they will hang separately. That, in fact, is what had happened. The king has dumped them and taken over.

This, too, may not have mattered very much in the overall scheme had it not been for two things: one, he has shown himself to be incompetent and two, he has no control over three-quarters of his country.

The rest is ruled, for all practical purposes, by Maoists. These are groups seeking reform and redressal under a single ideological banner.

By and large, the most popular outcome of the current crisis, both in Nepal and internationally, would be the ouster of the monarchy once and for all. But who will take over then?

This is the issue that confronts India. A takeover by the Maoists will mean an easy entry for China into an area from which it has hitherto been locked out. A takeover by the army will not work without the monarchy being retained to provide a fig leaf of continuity.

And there seems to be no immediate prospect of popular democracy being restored, or indeed of effective popular government. In short, all the possible outcomes are unviable.

India, therefore, has no choice but to patiently and simultaneously work on different formulae aimed at keeping the Maoists from taking over the remaining part of Nepal. That

will have to be the guiding principle of Indian policy in Nepal, at least for the time being. In the medium term, it must strive for the restoration of democracy because that, in the end, is what will make for better security.