Mapping conflict

Territorial dispute will test Indo-Nepal diplomacy

The unanimous approval by Nepal’s lower House of Parliament to change the country’s map to include territory claimed by India represents a failure of the Indian diplomatic establishment. This issue has been a festering, if low-intensity, dispute since the 1990s but the proximate reason for the current flare-up dates back to November last year. That is when India issued a map showing how the former state of Jammu & Kashmir had been split into two Union Territories included Kalapani. Nepal objected, claiming Kalapani as its own territory but sought talks. In May, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated the 75.54-km Kailash-Mansarover Road in Uttarakhand, which linked the Indo-China border with the rest of the country. The link included the Lipulekh Pass, which too Nepal claimed.

A review of the facts suggests that Nepal’s claims are admittedly weak and Ministry of External Affairs Spokesman Anurag Srivastava has correctly described them as an “artificial enlargement of claims” that are “not based on historical fact or evidence”. Nepal’s government appears to be citing maps dating back to the days of the East India Company to bolster its claims even though more recent agreements and developments, including with China, clearly recognise the territory as Indian. A 1954 trade and transit agreement between India and Tibet, for instance, lists Lipulekh as part of India, a fact Nepal disputed only in 2015. Though India has strong claims, the government’s response has been leaden-footed and inadequate. It did not, for instance, respond to Nepal’s request for talks, nor did it agree to a visit from a special envoy. Talks, India had said in May, would resume only after the battle against Covid-19 was over. Though that statement also hoped that Nepal would create a “positive atmosphere” for talks, gratuitous comments by a garrulous Chief of Army Staff suggesting the move was a prop for Indo-China rivalry would not have helped lower the political temperature. Mukund Naravane may be correct in that current Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli may well be waving the China card at India at a time when both countries were in the thick of a stand-off over encroachments across the Line of Actual Control. This is not, however, a position India should officially countenance.

The issue points to a misreading of realpolitik in the region. Depending on the goodwill of a shared Hindu heritage has its limits, as does the flexing of big-neighbour muscle. Indeed, India has played an unwitting role in the ruling Nepalese regime’s China tilt, adding an element of complexity to the Indo-Nepalese relationship. The unofficial support to the 2015 border blockade by Madhesis, people of Indian origin inhabiting Nepal’s Terai border, caused a humanitarian crisis, which encouraged Nepal to push at the open door of closer alignment with China. Trade and transit treaties were rapidly signed between Kathmandu and Beijing thereafter. That particular crisis also demonstrated the weakness of the Indian establishment’s intelligence/diplomacy complex in failing to anticipate vital constitutional changes that led to the problem in the first place, even though they had been months in the making. The wages of neglecting Nepalese relations across the political spectrum are implicit in the unanimity of Nepal’s parliament across multiple fractious political divides. Despite the historical strength of its claims, negotiating from here will be tricky for India.