The boldness of Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s government in publishing a new political and administrative map depicting Kalapani, Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh as part of Nepal has taken the decades-long bilateral struggle to a new level symbolically and substantively.
While Nepal’s audacity is fraught with risks – evident as well as unanticipated – there are novelties on the Indian side as well. For one, the Indian media have grown belligerent based on what they consider to be their own set of facts. No less curious is the resoluteness coming from sections of Indian officialdom in refusing to discuss the issue. The professed determination of some of us to fight to the finish is matched by the other side’s unsophisticated display of their primacy and preponderance.
Indian accusations that Nepal is pressing its claim at the behest of the Chinese may be easily undermined by the fact that New Delhi and Kathmandu have been addressing the territories as disputed for decades. Yet the Indians have flashed their version of the China ca(na)rd amid the precarious COVID-19-coated global geostrategic fault-lines.
True, many prominent voices in India support Nepal’s claim, minimize – if not entirely refute – the China angle and resent references to our former status as the world’s only Hindu state. But they are simply drowned out by the dominant view amplified by the reach and rancor of Indian television outlets.
Traditional editorial writers and commentators are still counselling quiet diplomacy to prevent a further slide down a slippery slope. But those pleas are tagged with exhortations to ensure the restoration of India’s primacy in Nepal. Simply put, when Indians start raking up how Jang Bahadur Rana colluded with the British East India Company to suppress the 1857-58 Mutiny (which may Indians today call their first war of independence), you have to concede we have hit treacherous ground.
This does not mean we have reached the point of no return. Around the world, countries have longed lived with competing territorial maps, forcing third parties to clarify that their depictions do not endorse or undermine such claims.
If Indians today have security sensitivities in the Kalapani area that they feel far surpass our own vis-à-vis China, we can certainly appreciate that. But certainly not enough to renounce ownership of territory that we firmly and unequivocally believe belongs to us.
The people residing in the area may have mixed feelings about the dispute. Yet we cannot ignore how those feelings have been shaped by the reality that the territories have been under Indian occupation for so long.
Perceptions, though, work in many ways. For instance, implicit in accusations of third-party instigation is sometimes keen awareness of how benefits could accrue only to those who are not the principal belligerents.
Tortuous as the labyrinth may appear now, it may also contain the seeds of a solution. They can sprout only after the shouting match subsides. For now, though, screaming on may be good for both sides, if it helps to explain ourselves better to each other.
