Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Prime Minister Narendra Modi struck the right chord by choosing to visit Nepal earlier this week, the first Indian head of Government to visit the landlocked Himalayan nation in 17 years. Modi was only living up to the promise he made when he invited leaders of the neighbouring countries at the time of taking office some ten weeks ago.
His first official visit as the head of new Indian government was to Bhutan, a gesture that has not gone unrecognized. He sent his Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj to Bangladesh to assure the government there that India stood by its commitment of warm and meaningful relationship with that country, a reiteration of a longstanding, yet often stressed ties between the two countries sharing a long eastern border.
Many have said that Modi should perhaps have given it a try in Dhaka by himself, but wouldn’t that have required the kind of high level ground work which the Sushma visit may hopefully have achieved. That, though, remains a moot point, given the fact that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s return to the Prime Ministerial office is suspect in many eyes, domestically and internationally. The election was boycotted by the BNP, led by the other Begum, Zia, a two time Prime Minister of the country like Hasina. But so far as India is concerned Mr. Modi has held out the olive branch to the country, the poll-time rhetoric which had seen him lambasting the Bangladeshi influx into neighbouring Indian States, pushed backstage for the moment.
A Srilankan visit, part of a know thy neighbour policy, would have been the next appropriate thing to do but it must obviously wait for the time being, given the concerns of our own Tamil parties and the BJP’s own desire to strengthen its roots in the South. A visit to Pakistan would, of course, be the icing on the cake, but must tragically remain a long term wish in the context of the uninspiring sluggishness of the Pakistani establishment. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has expressed his commitment to a viable, friendly relationship with this country but the promise made by the two leaders when they met at Modi’s swearing in ceremony, that the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries would soon meet preparatory to a summit meeting, has yet to get off the ground.
So much for our regional concerns. The Nepal visit by itself offered far too many challenges to Modi and his team. For the record it could be said that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did visit Kathmandu in 2002 but that was for the SAARC summit, with bilateral relations hardly addressed. In the years since, accidental Prime Minister I.K. Gujral’s, visit a good 17 years ago, occurred when the Maoist insurgency had plunged Nepal into turmoil for a decade, leading to the ushering in of republican era, far removed from the days of monarchy. And a long period it has been since.
Nepal subsequently has had popularly elected governments led by the Maoists, the Nepali Congress or combinations of assorted parties and has yet not been able to give itself a constitution, the first constituent assembly having failed and a second one now plodding towards one under the leadership of Sushil Koirala, a scion of the well known Nepali’s political clan. The 74-year-old Nepali leader exudes little energy, not surprising for a man battling cancer. And yet Nepalese hopes for stability and a constitution must rest on him and his party.
Prachanda, the once charismatic Maoist, who led the government after the fall of monarchy, did indeed broaden the base of Chinese-Nepalese cooperation (it was there even before but has flourished on an unprecedented scale ever since) but was rejected at the polls later, tainted by charges of widespread corruption and nepotism, his undoing.
The election of Koirala as the Prime Minister was preceded by a longish interim arrangement of governance headed by the Chief Justice of the country. With Koirala at the helm of affairs, the newly elected assembly is expected to give the country its long-awaited constitution, years after the monarchy was abolished.
This longwinded narration became necessary for me to put the Modi visit in perspective. For one thing it was necessary for the Indians to understand that Nepal has ceased to be the world’s only Hindu kingdom. It is a democratic, secular republic. That’s something which the failed first constituent assembly was agreed upon and has been adopted by the successor assembly as well. The second aspect and which concerns most analysts, is that China, unlike India, has never stopped increasing its area of influence, even in physical terms, in the country across our northern border.
In the period India virtually stayed away, the Chinese have moved in, pushing interests, infrastructure south of Tibet and Xinjiang. With the collapse of India’s earlier efforts to step up infrastructure along Indo-Nepalese border, China ventured into newer pastures along the 1400 km border with Nepal. Consider the fact that official exchanges between the heads of State or Government of Nepal and China took place 11 times since the last Indian Prime Minister travelled to Kathmandu. These 11 visits apart, the Chinese and Nepalese have exchanged ten other visits at the level of Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Ministers during the same period of time. China’s growing interest in Nepal is also bringing in more Chinese visitors than ever before to Nepal. And to improve road connectivity and boost trade via Tibet, China is set to open a new bridge at the Rasuwagadu-Kerung border this October. Until now, the Tatopani-Khasa border point was Nepal’s only gateway to China. The Kerung bridge will be a significant upgrade because this is where the Chinese are expanding their infrastructure, including railway tracks.
The Chinese, mind you, have been at it over the decades. I remember having had a run down what was then called the Tribhuvan highway, one of the smoothest road surfaces I had seen. It ran from Kathmandu to the Chinese border. Very much like the Karakoram road which the Chinese have built right across our Gilgit region of the former princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, establishing a proper road link to Xinjiang.
We will have to wait a few days to be able to make realistic assessment of how far Mr. Modi’s visit to Nepal has gone in repairing our age-old relations which have considerably suffered for nearly two decades. An Indian Ambassador need no longer touch the ruling monarch’s feet as our late envoy Mr. Shriman Narayan would do. We must learn to talk to our smaller neighbour as a friend and well wisher. I am not talking of sentimental stuff like Janakpur, Sitas birth place or Lumbini or other places linked to the Buddha. There is no escaping the fact that India’s new leadership is more in sync with the deep religiosity of the subcontinent. Nothing wrong with that. I do recall accompanying Narasimha Rao to the Pashupatinath temple complex and seeing him in deep meditation, accompanied in the ritual by the Namboodiri priests from Kerala, who were the Mahants, the keepers of the temple.
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