Rebooting India-Nepal ties:   & Next Door Nepal: Deuba’s diplomacy test

Rebooting India-Nepal ties:   & Next Door Nepal: Deuba’s diplomacy test

Context

• Nepal is run by a revolving door of political leaders who have weakened the polity and economy over the years, but who did battle the odds to promulgate a new Constitution.

India – China relationship

• With global geopolitics on the boil, and the Hindi-Chini relationship in free fall, it should be in India’s interest to secure its own neighbourhood,.
• New Delhi must use the visit of Nepal’s newly anointed Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, on Wednesday as an opportunity to hit the reset button on Nepal-India relations.
• Rebooting requires a cold and hard look at how Nepal was handled over the past decade, exemplified by the impediments placed in the writing, adoption and implementation of the Constitution.
• India played a valued role in ending the Maoist insurgency in 2006, but the period thereafter was marked by escalating micro-meddling in Nepal’s internal affairs.
• In Constitution-writing, there were attempts to define the new provincial boundaries according to Indian dictates pushing first an unwieldy and unworkable plains-only province, then a two-province formula.
• While keeping silent for years on Nepal’s post-conflict transitional justice process, in November 2015 India’s representative in Geneva cynically utilised the forum of the Human Rights Council to influence government change in Kathmandu.
• At the tactical level, New Delhi’s motives behind the heavy-handedness of the recent past may have to do with electoral calculations related to the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh polls.
• On the Constitution, the idea of a ‘buffer’ province is thought to have been floated either to prevent third country militant infiltration or to control national-level politics in Kathmandu.
• For the long term, Indian strategists may be seeking ways to get Kathmandu to allow the construction of high dams and deep reservoirs on Nepal’s rivers for flood control, navigation, urban use and irrigation in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Kathmandu perspective

• From the Kathmandu perspective, politically micromanaging Nepal could not have but backfired.
• Take the Great Blockade, which forced the Kathmandu political leadership to reach out to Beijing and sign a slew of trade, transit and infrastructural agreements with it.
• Once Nepal and India get past the era of interventionism as but a bad memory, the two can concentrate on the numerous matters that need concentration and resolution.
• An important issue is the open border itself, which is a unique joint heritage of the two countries.
• While it is Nepal’s Left that has traditionally demanded restrictions on the border, the call now rises from the Indian security establishment.
• The Nepal plains are suffering from massive floods that have also affected downstream areas across the border.
• Besides the spread of settlements, a prime cause for the severity is that the Chure (Shivalik) hills have been gouged of rocks to build elevated roads and levees just south of the border, leading to inundation in Nepal.
• A permanent bilateral mechanism is required to save the plains population of Nepal from suffering, which is ongoing as this is written.

Other matters

• There are many other matters pending between Nepal and India, much of it due to neglect by the Kathmandu intelligentsia.
• The rights of migrant Indian labour in Nepal and Nepali labour in India is a topic that rarely comes up.
• There are border disputes pending between the two countries at Susta, Kalapani and the ‘tri-junction’ of Lipulekh but Kathmandu has been timid in raising these matters.
• Nepal has since long planned to sell electricity to India once it has a hydropower surplus, and the completion of the much-delayed Dhalkebar-Muzaffarpur transmission line was supposed to facilitate that
• But along comes an Indian government directive that it will not allow import of electricity other than from power companies with more than 51% Indian equity.
• The arbitrary blockages and go-slow at Indian Customs at border points, the selective use of quarantine for the export of Nepali agricultural produce.