Sunday, May 30, 2021

Grossed Out By That Net Gain

If all official India can do these days on matters concerning Nepal is to ‘take note’, it has good reason. There seems to be no meeting point between the three broad strains of opinion. Restoration of the Hindu monarchy and statehood, the establishment of a Hindu republic and maintenance of the existing dispensation with enough tinkering to suit New Delhi are not ideas that can easily be reconciled into coherent policy.
So Nepalis are left scratching their heads over what the parade of former Indian ambassadors are saying about developments here. When the dean of that fraternity writes, we read. But Shyam Saran seems propelled by a higher urge. As foreign secretary during that tumultuous April 15 years ago, his sleight of hand led directly to the mess Nepal is in today. If the ‘Shyam Saran Doctrine’ has any connotation on this side of the border, it is hardly complimentary.
That awareness impels Saran to defend himself. “The abolition of the [Nepali] monarchy is a net gain for India and the government must firmly and unambiguously declare that it does not support the revival of the monarchy, which has already been rejected by its people,” he wrote the other day. Tempting as it is to contest that sentence at multiple levels, let’s desist and focus on the ‘net gain’.
Those two words let on more than what Saran might have intended. Just as King Gyanendra – in Maila Baje’s humble opinion – had no roadmap for Nepal when he took over full executive control on February 1, 2005, Saran’s prescription lacked focus. Intending to break a tightening deadlock, the monarch dared India to do the unthinkable: cobble together a coalition of the mainstream parties and the Maoist rebels. Saran took on that challenge firmly and faithfully.
Here’s a hypothetical. Saran arrived as ambassador in late 2002, after King Gyanendra had sacked the Deuba government the first time to begin the first phase of his direct rule. Nepal was unlike Indonesia, where Saran was serving as ambassador. Nor could his tenures in Mauritius and Myanmar be of much help. What did help him was an uncanny ability to sniff out information and act on it. During the second ceasefire and peace talks with the Maoists, Saran found himself quite busy tracking down sources and anything of substance. King Gyanendra, irked by Saran’s snooping around, was said to be quite straightforward with Saran about a newly reassertive palace’s intentions. Maila Baje guesses that the monarch – in his polished yet pointed style – put India’s ‘unofficial’ Nepal policy on the top of the agenda.
So, on the morning of February 1, 2005, when Saran had become foreign secretary, he was prepared to take on the monarch’s challenge. “[T]he monarchy in Nepal, at least since King Mahendra’s accession in 1955, has always tried to distance Nepal from India and promoted a nationalism which takes hostility to India as its main driver,” Saran wrote the other day. It is not unnatural for a smaller nation’s assertion of independence to be perceived as hostility by the bigger neighbor zealously intent on asserting its influence. Saran sought to perfect that sentiment into strategy and feels duty-bound to defend it.
Granted, Saran could be speaking about the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. A bitterly divided New Delhi could have gone along with Saran’s ploy of subcontracting Nepal policy to Sitaram Yechury et al. in exchange for their silence on the United States. How far Saran was committed to anything beyond a republican Nepal became immaterial because Prime Minister Manmohan Singh got parliamentary endorsement of the nuclear deal through legislative legerdemain. Since Yechury and Co. could still claim to have opposed the deal, they didn’t badger Saran or the Indian National Congress for duplicity. For us, the 12-Point Understanding was terrible enough. The departure from that document – which Saran precipitated – opened the Pandora’s Box even Girija Prasad Koirala had been warning us about.
So, was the abolition of the Nepali monarchy a net gain in terms of India’s new quasi-alliance with the United States? Under Bush Jr., Obama, Trump and now Biden, the optics seem good. But deeper down?
A ‘net gain’ for India in Nepal? If so, why is Saran so grossed out in the remainder of his article?