The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : India and Nepal's insurgency

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 08, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

India and Nepal's insurgency

By Nirupama Subramanian

The survival of democracy in Nepal is important to India. But only that country's democratic political leadership can ensure it.

WHAT CAN India do to help Nepal deal with its Maoist insurgency? The question is sure to occupy centre-stage during the visit by the embattled Prime Minister of Nepal, Sher Bahadur Deuba, to New Delhi this week, days after Maoist insurgents carried out a successful blockade of the Kathmandu Valley. The answer is: very little beyond what New Delhi is already doing.

India, like the United States and the United Kingdom, provides weapons to the Royal Nepal Army in its battle against the insurgents. But Nepal sees this as an inadequate response. In Kathmandu, the perception is strong that the Maoists carry out their insurgency from safe havens in India where Prachanda, the chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists, his deputy, Baburam Bhattarai, and other senior leaders of the party are believed to live in hiding. Several commentators believe that were India only to crack down on these hideouts, the insurgency would be all but over. That New Delhi has not done so yet is seen as evidence of India's hidden motives in Nepal.

Such suspicion is part of the larger hostility and resentment in the attitude of the Nepali establishment towards India. Certainly, some of this is a result of India big-footing its smaller neighbour. Memories of the infamous economic blockade of Nepal by India in the late 1980s are still fresh in people's minds. Fresher still the tongue-lashing that Nepal received from India after the 1999 Indian Airlines hijacking for Inter-Services Intelligence activities in the kingdom and the absence of security measures at the Kathmandu airport that could have screened out the hijackers.

But the Maoist insurgency is a shared security threat for India and Nepal, and it is counter-productive for Nepal to attribute motives to what it sees as New Delhi's absence of interest in the problem. The Maoists are as anti-India as they are anti-Nepal. The insurgency could easily spill over the 1,700 km-long shared border between the two countries, considering the links between the Maoists and groups in India such as the People's War in Andhra Pradesh and the Maoist Communist Centre of India in Bihar.

Despite the direct threat to India, a military intervention by New Delhi is not a real option. India would gain little by getting embroiled in prolonged anti-guerrilla operations in a neighbouring country. In any case, the Nepalis, fiercely proud of their own military traditions, would not want Indian troops on their soil. The manner in which the Palace, which controls the Army in Nepal, reacted to suggestions of Indian military help to break the recent blockade by Maoists, is a useful pointer to which way the wind blows on this question. Any move to go against this would only give added voice to the anti-India constituency in Nepal.

Tightening the border regime beyond the stepped up vigilance is also impractical. Screening the thousands of people who cross the open visa-less border everyday for Maoist infiltrators would only amount to subjecting poor Nepali villagers, many of them fleeing the insurgents, to greater hardship. Nepal surely does not want that.

India can only insist, as it has been doing, that Nepal gets its act together on resolving the insurgency as quickly as possible. The Maoist insurgency has real economic and social roots. It is not a problem that can be militarily settled. But in order to resolve it, Nepal's fractious political parties need to show more unity of purpose than they have so far done.

In the last eight years, the Maoists, on the one hand, and the King, on the other, have exploited to advantage the divisions that exist in the Nepali political class. The conduct of political parties since the time Nepal's multi-party democracy came into being in 1990 has provided enough ammunition to the insurgents to show up politicians as nothing but power-grabbing dinosaurs, effete and incapable of doing anything to better the lives of the people. Ditto, King Gyanendra, who does not like the limitations of the constitutional monarchy and harbours ambitions for an active role in running the country.

The Deuba Government is a four-party coalition that includes Nepal's second largest political party, the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist). Appointed by King Gyanendra in May after months of street agitations for restoring the multi-party democracy he suspended in November 2002, the new Government presents a good opportunity for achieving a political breakthrough with the Maoists.

True, it does not have the same legitimacy as an elected government but it broadly reflects the composition of the Parliament the King dissolved in June 2002. But it suffers from the handicap that the biggest party, the Nepali Congress led by Girija Prasad Koirala, has not joined it.

A national consensus on how to deal with the Maoists would not remain a remote prospect were Mr. Koirala to put aside his differences with the new Government and work with Mr. Deuba. That would also help keep the political ambitions of King Gyanendra at bay.

The survival of democracy in Nepal is important to India. But only Nepal's democratic political leadership can ensure that. And for this, it must show statesmanship and a maturity of vision.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News Update

Stories in this Section

POVERTY OF APPROACH

REEL TROUBLE

The new foreign trade policy

India and Nepal's insurgency