Who’s Playing Whom, Pray?

After a series of fumbles, the government explains that Samanta Goel, chief of India’s notorious Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), met Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli late at night as a special envoy of his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. That’s probably true, but not in the way we’re being led to believe.
Clearly, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have studiously refused to take ownership of the regime change New Delhi effected here in the spring of 2006. This is not entirely so because of their lingering affinity for Nepal’s monarchy and Hindu statehood. At the core is the wider BJP fraternity’s general abhorrence of RAW, which they see as Congress-created abomination.
Now, let’s be clear here. The BJP values covert/clandestine research, analysis and – yes – operations deemed so vital to advancing India’s national interest. Still, today’s establishment in New Delhi also views RAW as an instrument of subversion against the BJP.
Modi spent his first term reining in this ‘rogue’ agency, at least the parts he deemed such. How closely the restructuring of the institutional set-up of India’s defense and security apparatus has brought India’s premier external spy agency under that umbrella remains to be seen. Nepal is the litmus test, it would be fair to say.
By mid-2006, even a cursory reading of the 12-point understanding was enough to underscore its loss of relevance. Each subsequent compromise was merely a part of RAW’s sustained effort to maintain the basic applicability of Delhi Compromise II. Things could have changed in 2014, with the sweeping change of guard in New Delhi. But RAW persuaded Modi et al. that extending the gestation period was that was needed.
After the fiasco of India’s earthquake relief in 2015, the BJP’s patience was bound to wear thin. Then Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, who wanted Nepal to delay promulgating the new Constitution to address the demands of Madhesi groups, instead got an earful from the leaders of the Nepali Congress, Unified Marxist-Leninists and Maoists.
Now, Jaishankar, as the son of K. Subrahmanyam, the doyen of Indian strategic affairs, easily detected several messages lurking behind that message. Just how many games was RAW playing in Nepal? Before Modi et al. could figure that out, the unofficial blockade became a worse mess. Even the Indian Congress party, which had mounted an official trade and transit embargo in 1989-1990, began accusing the BJP of bullying Nepal.
Ultimately, it took the militaries of the two countries to work out a compromise. It wasn’t much of a one for the Indians, who engineered Oli’s ouster. And yet the public face of Nepali resistance went on to lead communists into a landslide electoral victory. He returned to the premiership to take his crusade into new cartographic and figurative heights.
Were Nepali leaders now listening more to the Chinese, Americans and Europeans? They didn’t need to find out. What Modi et al. knew was that if the Nepali political establishment listened to any Indians, they would have to be from RAW.
So Goel arrives in Kathmandu with Modi’s ultimatum. He wasn’t too bothered about the public glare and met everyone who he thought mattered. After all, his organization was on the line, too. Modi’s henchmen leaked information so selectively that we are now wondering whether Oli has been a RAW asset all along.
Goel’s other known Nepali interlocutor, Dr Baburam Bhattarai, had no problem. In fact, he has been elevated to the role of Oli’s putative successor. Modi et al. weren’t too focused on the other Nepali leaders Goel met. They are still denying having met India spook-in-chief.
RAW may have forced the Chinese, Americans and Europeans to reassess the respective values they have assigned to individual Nepali protagonists. The Chinese and Americans ambassadors spent part of the Dasain interregnum singing and cooking, respectively. It’s RAW that’s facing the greatest pressure – and from India’s generals, no less.
As the bilateral territorial dispute was escalating earlier this year, Indian Army chief Gen. Manoj Mukund Naravane said Nepal might have been acting at the behest of others. Because of the India-China border tensions, everyone thought he meant China.
Gen. Naravane subsequently sought to clarify his comment, which failed to gain traction here or there. He wasn’t terribly bothered, either. Otherness in Nepal, after all, has ever-broadening connotations.
The conventional wisdom is that India is itching for a fight with China. But what if the Indian top brass are merely interested in replenishing defense coffers, and not in a full-fledged conflict? Might this help explain why Gen. Naravane is all set to fly in with a straight face to accept Nepal Army’s honorary generalship?

Living Life As It Comes

Having hit the end of the road, the political class appears to have devised a devious turnaround plan.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s government demonstrated significant alacrity in defending China from accusations that it had encroached on Nepali territory in Humla district. The Nepali Congress, with no less ardor, continues to insist that the Chinese gobbled our land there.
To prevent the ‘China factor’ from splaying the ruling Nepal Communist Party’s already gaping fissures, top comrades have found a convenient ruse in the crisis in Karnali. If provinces need central intervention in such purely local issues as distrust in leadership, what good is federalism?
The stripping of the defense portfolio from Deputy Prime Minister Ishwar Pokharel has extended the diversion. Was Pokharel’s transfer to the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers aimed at appeasing the army, the Indians or Bishnu Poudel? Your guess is as good as mine. Pokharel, however, sees himself as having been entrusted with more expansive responsibilities. The logical next question is: Are Oli rivals Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Madhav Kumar Nepal really peeved or just pretending?
Externally, the equation is tightening. The Americans want our legislature to approve the MCC compact forthwith so that no future government would be able to wiggle out. Although publicly indifferent, the Chinese opposition is becoming more adamant in private. The Indians, unsure of the wisdom of enlisting Washington in their Himalayan conflict with China, want the two major global protagonists to duke it out in Nepal alone. But, then, New Delhi barely disguises where its preferences lay.
That’s enough to impel the Chinese to dig in their heels. There is a moral equivalence between a sliver of land in Humla and wider swathes along the Sino-Indian Himalayas. Since states big and small are equally sovereign, territory, too, cannot be differentiated based on size.
There has been no encroachment, Beijing has been insisting from the outset. Now it has produced satellite images seeking to prove the assertion. The Nepali Congress is not giving up. While training its guns on the ruling communists, the main opposition party knows the real target knows what’s being talked about. Concluding that the Humla dispute is New Delhi’s contrivance, the Chinese have candidly asserted that the Nepali Congress is a pro-Indian force. New Delhi may worry all it wants about how far Nepal’s premier democratic party’s loyalties have strayed from the land of its origins, Beijing won’t be guilted into doing anything it doesn’t want.
All this certainly cheers up our leaders. If the system collapses, Nepal’s post-2006 leadership can blame it on all the external contradictions that have accumulated since. Any secret letters that might have been exchanged with the 12-point understanding are not likely to see the light of day any time soon. Still, the Nepali signatories to Delhi Compromise II must have made a cluster of commitments before our regime changed. If the ambiguity of the enterprise is enough to bite India today, you can easily imagine the added disappointment of third parties resting on New Delhi’s guarantees.
In fairness, our leaders did try during the past decade and a half. Every step of the way, they negotiated a new compromise to save the preceding one just to uphold the sanctity of a flawed agenda. How long could the internal jugglery go on when the external patrons kept departing from the script? There must be a statute of limitations somewhere when it comes to violations of commitments long altered.
What will happen next? Nepalis have learned to live life as it comes. Who says politicians can’t do the same?

Flashback: Hardiness And Foolhardiness Amid A Contagion

Well before the onset of coronavirus pandemic, Nepalis were searching for ways of doing things differently. Socio-cultural stoicism may have played a part, but pollution, curfews, shutdowns, blockades and shortages had prepared us for a transition other parts of the world are finding hard to cope with.
How the Nepali state is functioning today depends on your outlook that was well entrenched before the onset of the global emergency. The international system may have proven to be a house of cards; we knew ours was one from the moment it was manufactured. That’s why we may be more resilient now.
The leadership rift in the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) in the midst of an international emergency becomes explicable, if not entirely palatable. Outrageous as the continuation of state-sanctioned corruption is, it is nevertheless understandable. Leaders who built a career in police lockups are more inured to lockdowns. Those who emerged from subterranean existence might not relish the return to distancing, but they are certainly capable of enduring it.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli has thrown the gauntlet. Unspoken but evident is his warning. This government will have to become more highhanded or simply hand over power to an institution that is innately so. NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal must have a lot on his mind. A sweeping Oli clampdown could encompass a postponement of the NCP general convention scheduled for April next year – a major roadblock to Dahal’s quest to attain sole leadership of the party.
Dahal might have relied on the main opposition Nepali Congress to thwart Oli’s authoritarian instincts, but party president Sher Bahadur Deuba has been looking for his own excuse to put off that organization’s convention. The smaller parties are still too busy searching for relevance to make a difference. Individual leaders like Baburam Bhattarai and Kamal Thapa are speaking from all sides of their mouths to see if anything sticks in the public imagination. Critics contend the former monarch is playing politics with his till and tweets. They should cut him some slack: he is, after all, the most aggrieved party in our hopey-changey reverie.
Geopolitically, things should have been clearer, especially with the Chinese having come out on the top for the moment. The mandarins, however, seem to be in a dilemma of their own. While they recognize that ideological affinity hasn’t exactly bolstered trust and confidence between the two communist parties, they also realize that the monarchy has tended to take Chinese support for granted.
Ultimately, the Chinese must decide, preferably with the Indians. Even then, the immediate task for Beijing and New Delhi would be to assuage the diminished Americans and Europeans who have barely recouped their investments in Nepal.
Much of the country is left rooting for the military – out of choice or compulsion. Yet we forget – or are forced to overlook – the fact that the institution couldn’t handle things when they were far simpler circa 2005-2006. (If anything, the generals were consistent then. In their confidence, they egged on the king to take full executive power. When things got out of hand, they nudged him to step down.) Is the transfer of the supreme commandership to a president from a king supposed to make such a big difference?

Originally posted on Saturday, April 18, 2020

Chinese Chequered

When you’re busy keeping a lot of balls in the air and trying to figure out what to do with the new ones coming your way, you look for help.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s government has found eager assistants in a section of the Indian media. These outlets, mostly close to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, want Nepalis to get all riled up over China’s purported land grab in Humla.
Both the pro-Indian and pro-American wings of the Nepali Congress continue to rake up the issue. Still, protests outside the Chinese Embassy haven’t gained much traction. The imperative of keeping Kalapani et al off the table and the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact on the national agenda is enough to drive the narrative.
The Chinese have brought some of this upon themselves. For long, they have operated in a low-cost enterprise here that owes its success to Nepalis’ relative unfamiliarity with their northern neighbor. What used to be a single litmus test over Tibet continues to swell over several issues. Today China wants firm commitments from Nepal on the Belt and Road Initiative, whose expanse is alarmingly imprecise.
Oli stuck his neck out really far over Kalapani et al. to prove Nepal’s commitment to exercising its sovereign choices. And all the Chinese can say is they sympathize with us but not enough to abrogate their 2015 Lipulekh agreement with India. We’re supposed to settle bilaterally with India what the Indians have already settled with the Chinese.
A neighbor that has paid so much lip service about safeguarding Nepal’s sovereignty mouthing platitudes is bad enough. When China is accused of having fiddled with border pillars, Nepalis go into shock. In that stupor, they tend to believe anything regardless of the source.
Since life is a trade-off, countries have no opt-out. The Chinese are itching to get into Eastern South Asia through Nepal. Or are they just waving the ‘Nepal card’ to increasingly smug Indians? Tibet and Taiwan are no doubt two blunt instruments New Delhi can wield against Beijing. What chance do they have in a three-front war?
Former Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal took great pains to promote his trilateral cooperation concept but got no support in New Delhi. Exasperated, Beijing came up with the ‘2+1 mechanism’ that it hoped to fine-tune with New Delhi for Nepal. Lots of Nepalis now joined the Indians rebuffing the idea. The hawks at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and the Global Times are still at it.
With the Indians and Chinese failing to agree or disagree on Nepal, the Oli government felt it needed to act. So it ordered the Ministry of Education to halt distribution to high school students of the 110-page ‘Self Study Material on Nepal's Territory and Border’, a Nepali-language book that includes a chapter on the campaign to reclaim disputed territory.
How much of a sop to New Delhi might this be when India wants us to withdraw our new map? Alone, probably not much. Hey, things might change if we could help amplify the logic of why – besides how – Indian troops came to be stationed in Kalapani. Chinese encroachments seem to provide good copy down south these days. If we’re good enough to the Indians, we might even get to keep our constitution along with the map.