Hijacked By The Big Brother

Chakra Prasad Bastola has not had a good day. As foreign minister of Nepal, it has fallen to him to pick up the pieces of Indo-Nepal relations, reduced to tatters after the December 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines aircraft from Kathmandu. Take away the Indian tourist from Nepal and you take away 31 per cent of that country's earnings from tourism.

Bastola had hoped that his visit would help in convincing India that the hijacking was just an unfortunate accident. To his dismay, the Indian political leadership is listening to him cautiously and the bureaucratic leadership, not at all. He's tired, upset and bewildered. And also a little angry at being made to beg.

 

This India is very different from the place where he lived for almost a decade: first as a student learning to make a revolution from Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and B P Koirala; and then in Bhagalpur jail.

We have a date for dinner, but only moments before he's received news that the flight is scheduled to take-off earlier. If I don't mind, can we meet in his room where he's playing host to his daughter? "Order some Chinese food," he tells Surinima who is studying fashion design at NIFT and is clearly the apple of her father's eye.

I'm both amused and enchanted by this transformation. Fifteen years ago, when we first met at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bastola was passionate about overthrowing the monarchy in Nepal by co-opting the Indian people into that struggle. At that time his thesis was unique: That in Nepal at least, the Socialists were the only real revolutionaries because the Marxists had become appendages of the king.

Now, he's modified his views but not changed them. He asks in a roundabout way if there is a special relationship between the Indian state and the king of Nepal: "Why did both the Prime Minister and the President of India ask me to convey to the king that he was invited to India? We respect the king ourselves, but shouldn't our Prime Minister be invited first?"

Nepal is extremely sensitive to signals of this kind. The movement for democracy in Nepal was run almost entirely from Indian soil. And Indian security agencies sometimes forget that Nepal is an independent sovereign nation. No one who knows this better than Bastola. I beg him to recount _ yet again _ the story of the plane he helped hijack from Nepal. He does.

Soon after the liberation of Bangladesh, the exiled workers of the Nepali Congress operating from India decided to arrange money to buy arms. An aircraft carrying Rs 35 lakh belonging to the Nepalese treasury enroute from Kathmandu to Biratnagar was hijacked by Nepali Congress worker Durga Subedi to Forbesgunj, Bihar where two activists _ Sushil Koirala and Chakra Bastola _ were waiting to whisk away the money for disbursal among various NC supporters. Some weeks later, Bastola was hauled into jail for being an accomplice to the hijacking. The Emergency was on and he was in jail for 18 months. When the Janata Party came to power in 1977, the case against him was held in abeyance.

By now Bastola's political guru, B P Koirala felt he'd had enough of India _ the annexation of Sikkim coming as a particularly rude shock. Was it correct for India to annexe a sovereign nation just because it was a feudal monarchy? What should the socialist position be?

In 1983, B P Koirala died. If he'd lived seven more years, he would have seen the beginnings of the United People's Movement for democracy led by veteran Nepalese leader, Ganesh Man Singh. An interim government was installed which conducted the elections but Bastola, ironically, lost that election. He was named ambassador to India. His appointment was held up because of the case against him, but it was withdrawn and Bastola became Nepal's ambassador.

Our dinner has arrived, but Bastola has to leave. He looks longingly at Chicken Hong Kong, shovels a spoonful of fried rice into his mouth and bids me a hurried goodbye. I continue to eat slowly, wondering why, when Indians and Nepalese are so like each other, they should be so suspicious of each other.