The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : India's Nepal stand driven by concern for Maoist danger

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Friday, Feb 04, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

India's Nepal stand driven by concern for Maoist danger

By Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The principal concern driving the Indian Government's policy towards King Gyanendra is not democracy but how his palace putsch is going to affect the Royal Nepal Army's counter-insurgency operations against Maoist rebels.

There is anxiety about the future of multi-party democracy there and even consternation over the fate of political leaders, but these are largely derivative — not ideological — concerns. What bothers New Delhi most of all is the likelihood that now that the King has cast aside the protective buffer the political parties provided him, the Maoists are likely to increase their influence.

For the Manmohan Singh Government, the Maoist challenge in Nepal is fast emerging as a key security concern. The National Security Adviser, M.K. Narayanan, for example, has said on several occasions in the past that the Naxalite movement — given the linkages between the Indian groups and the Nepalese Maoists — is the biggest threat confronting the Indian State. Though the Maoists in Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere have origins deeply rooted in the socio-economic realities of the impoverished countryside, New Delhi is anxious to deny them the boost any Maoist advance in Nepal would inevitably provide. The only hitch is that as much as Nepal watchers here would like to believe King Gyanendra has a plan to make the Maoist insurgency go away, no one believes the strategy he has adopted has any chance of success.

The promise of a more determined and effective military campaign against the insurgents cuts no ice because the King himself controlled the RNA all along. Indeed, the Indian Government had hoped that the King would get the RNA to adopt a "pro-active policy" in dealing with the Maoists and had provided as much as Rs. 450 crores in military assistance to this end over the past three years. In particular, New Delhi wanted the Nepal Army to go out on aggressive patrolling in rural areas and secure the Biratganj industrial zone and lines of communication so that the Nepalese economy was not subject to disruption by the Maoists. But this did not happen. And now that the King has put the squeeze on the parliamentary parties as well, the perception here is that the RNA personnel will increasingly be pressed into policing duties in Kathmandu. This will weaken the military drive against the rebels and help forge links between the Maoists and the other parties, especially at the grassroots level.

For the past three years, the scenario the Indian Government envisaged was one where both military and political pressure would force the Maoists to accept some kind of compromise, a "soft landing" within the ambit of Nepal's system of constitutional monarchy. That is why — unlikely though it was given King Gyanendra's resentment of the 1990 Constitution — New Delhi advocated a "united front" between the palace and the parties to deal with the political aspect of the problem, and greater coordination between the RNA and Indian security forces on the border to deal with the military aspect.

Hope shattered

The King's coup has shattered the Indian hope for a political compromise and left only the military option on the table.

Despite its reservations about the King's strategy, however, it is clear that the Manmohan Singh Government is not going to terminate its military assistance to the RNA or exert other forms of overt pressure to force King Gyanendra to reverse course. The only change in the Indian stand has been to drop broad hints that by going down the path of open confrontation, the King is jeopardising the very institution of monarchy.

The Indian Government's statement on the coup paid obeisance to the "twin pillars of multi-party democracy and constitutional monarchy" but in calling on him to rethink his strategy, New Delhi was signalling its belief that King Gyanendra was cutting the ground under his own feet. Officially — and unrealistically — India still believes there can be a soft landing for the Maoists within the constitutional monarchy, that there is no mutual exclusivity. But like most Nepalis, Indian officials know that if the King keeps moving in the same direction, he will make himself more and more irrelevant. For the past 50 years, support to the monarchy has been a cornerstone of India's policy towards Nepal. Today, however, New Delhi has begun to think about the possibility of a Nepal without a King.

For the moment, the key to Nepal's political future, at least as far as New Delhi is concerned, continues to lie in the ability of the King and the RNA to prosecute the war against the Maoists.

If King Gyanendra manages to demonstrate a greater effectiveness in running the counter-insurgency campaign than the Deuba Government did, India will be willing to go along with his three-year timetable for the restoration of multi-party democracy.

But if the Maoists make military advances — or their demand for a Constituent Assembly wins broad-based support — all bets are off as far as what the Indian strategy would be.

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