Big Brother in Nepal

India is frittering away its political capital

The warmth generated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Nepal last year and India’s rapid aid response after the earthquake in April, presaged deeper ties. Three million Nepalis live and work in India and an open border via a 1950 “friendship treaty” has given India a natural advantage over China as a sphere of influence. Sadly, in less than a year, relations have deteriorated so much that senior Indian officials are met with black flags, TV signals from Indian stations are jammed and the social media bristles with anti-India rhetoric. The proximate cause of this surge in India-bashing is the fortnight-long agitation by the Madhesis, inhabitants of a strip of fertile and prosperous plain running along Nepal’s southern border with India, over the terms of the Constitution adopted by Nepal’s parliament last month. The Madhesis’ demands for more representation and autonomy have received tacit support from the Indian establishment in the run-up to the elections in neighbouring Bihar. Several people have died in the clashes — but it has been the week-long blockade of essential supplies at the border that has dangerously heightened tensions. It is widely believed that Madhesi protestors could not have imposed this blockade without India’s help.

Madhesi anger may well be valid, but the Indian security establishment’s transparently cynical exploitation of an extra-territorial controversy for domestic electoral gain — including urging Nepal to declare itself a “Hindu” country — is hardly exemplary statecraft for a secular country. It is also worth questioning the standards of Indian intelligence-gathering that the government was caught unawares by the terms of the Nepali Constitution. A more pro-active advisory role — one India had played relatively deftly in the 2000s — seems to have been warranted in the endgame of the Constitution-framing process.

To meddle in the internal affairs of a friendly neighbour with whom India needs to cooperate for watershed and environment management of the Himalayan ecosystem can scarcely be termed good diplomacy. India’s economic gains also could be substantial if it could successfully tap Nepal’s huge hydro-power potential. But, Kathmandu is desperately turning to its giant northern neighbour for alternate routes to access essential supplies and even exploring collaboration in other sectors. It was possible for India to impose a selective blockade on Kathmandu in the 1980s when the latter sought to buy Chinese weapons. Now the balance of power has changed drastically. China’s state-directed investment is steadily encroaching on countries around the neighbourhood — from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to Myanmar. And India appears to have frittered away a natural advantage. Kathmandu is only too willing to extend hydro-power concessions; Beijing, suffering a slowdown, is only too keen to look outward to stoke employment and jobs. Time for some old-fashioned diplomacy perhaps?