Diplomatic license
A confident Nepal confronts India
The Indian political establishment and bureaucracy hate to admit it. But India’s Nepal policy has undergone a forced and dramatic change thanks to China. Former Indian ambassador to Nepal, Ranjit Rae, may be wrong on some things but he is bang on in his assertion that after the 2015-16 blockade, the Indian establishment has been occupied with keeping Kathmandu in good humor, lest Nepal slides farther into the Chinese orbit. The over-promising and under-delivering India has been shaken awake. A cross-border oil pipeline quickly came up, and there is fresh impetus on all kinds of Indo-Nepal connectivity projects.
According to the Indians, Narendra Modi would have come to Nepal if not for President Xi’s Kathmandu trip. Perhaps Modi did not want to be overshadowed by Xi. But this cannot be the whole story. If the Indians were irked by the zealous welcome Xi was accorded in Nepal, they have not let it show. What we see instead is India’s greater readiness to make all kinds of concessions to Nepal: from offering it new transit facilities to keeping mum when Nepal erupted over Kalapani.
The Madhesis have been conveniently forgotten post-blockade. India now insists it is not competing against China in Nepal. When India tried to punish Nepal for daring to promulgate a national charter without its say-so, Nepal got closer to China. This rang alarm bells in New Delhi, even though the likes of Rae continued to maintain that China can never replace India in Nepal. Hence the rather acerbic Rae, who was also a firm supporter of the Madhesi cause, was replaced by Manjeev Singh Puri, an affable businessman with no ardent ideological moorings. If China wanted to be business-like in Nepal, so would India.
The Indian policy on Nepal is now geared toward accommodating Kathmandu after futile attempts to punish it for straying. We see something similar happening in Sri Lanka, as India tries to accommodate the newly-elected Rajapakshas, long known for their sympathies to China. In the Indian eyes, they were the ones who handed Hambantota to the Chinese on a silver platter. Yet the Lankans have elected them back to power and India has now accepted it as a fait accompli.
India is finding its options shrinking in this multipolar world, as it struggles to get even Bhutan, whose security it oversees, to toe its line vis-à-vis China. The recent by-elections in Nepal have showed the ruling NCP’s hold on Nepali politics is as strong as ever, and it will be sometime before the Nepali Congress or any other party can break the communist grip. India has no option but to deal with the communist leadership.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that under PM Oli, Nepal gets more respect from India than it ever did after the 1990 change. Try convincing Oli or the NCP that the outreach to China is counterproductive. Or that their efforts to revive SAARC is futile. An increasingly confident Nepal is opening up to the outside world. The days when Nepal was under India’s exclusive sphere of influence are gone. To their credit, the Indian political leadership and intellectuals seem to realize this.
