Nepali chopsuey
Times of India


As always, India's to blame. No sooner had Prachanda quit as Nepal's PM after having precipitated a crisis by sacking the army chief who reportedly refused to toe the line by allowing 19,000 Maoist cadres to enlist than his comrade-in-arms, Baturam Bhattarai, accused India of having engineered the whole sorry mess, adding "It was an enormous blunder. It is going to cost India all the goodwill it earned."

That more or less sums up Kathmandu's perception of New Delhi: when something goes wrong, it's India that's the cause of it. Ever since King Tribhuvan, deposed by the Ranas, was helped by Nehru to reclaim his throne, Nepal has had not so much a love-hate relationship with India as a love-to-hate response. Whether it is the fine print of the Trade and Transit treaty between the two countries, or a casual remark by Hrithik Roshan, Nepal has been only too quick to react to real or imagined inequities and insults from India. On its part, it must also be said, India has not been a particularly good neighbour. New Delhi's attitude to Kathmandu can perhaps best be described as one of the affable contempt one shows towards a younger and smaller sibling: You're nice enough little fella, but don't get too big for your boots or you'll get a thwack over your head.

Though Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was prompt in clarifying that the episode was "internal to Nepal" and that India wished that country "well in its transition to a fully democratic polity", such disclaimers and clarifications from New Delhi are unlikely to assuage Kathmandu's Indophobia. While Kathmandu tries to cobble together another government, the Maoists could well take the battle to the streets and the countryside again, in a resumption of the murderous civil war that ravaged Nepal for 14 years.

The consequences of such instability will inevitably spill over the border into India, which has its own Maoist insurrectionists to deal with. However, New Delhi's hands are tied, mainly because of Kathmandu's persistent paranoia regarding India's hegemonistic intentions, suspicions of which have invariably caused the Himalayan ex-kingdom to play its so-called China card: raising the Beijing bogey to scarify its big, bad southern neighbour.

This time round, New Delhi should let Kathmandu play its China card. And then trump it by endorsing the idea of a friendly and mutually beneficial merger and acquisition by China of Nepal. Land-starved China has been leasing vast tracts in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa to grow biofuel and rice. But why go so far afield? Taking Nepal on a long lease would make more sense for Beijing, which over the years has consistently upstaged India in providing superior infrastructural services, like roads, and consumer goods, bicycles and toothpaste, to the former kingdom.

The thought of having the Chinese Dragon ensconced too close for comfort in Kathmandu might seem daunting for New Delhi. But such an arrangement, amicably worked out, might be best for all concerned. Democratic India has found it difficult, if not impossible, to act as a political mentor to Nepal without being vilified as an interfering bully. As its track record of suppressing dissidence in Tibet has shown, China will have no such qualms on this account.

Under the benign but no-nonsense authoritarianism of Beijing, Nepal would at last be freed of its unending internal strife and political wrangling and prosper economically, as indeed Tibet has done. India too could benefit from such an arrangement, which would not only bring stability across the border but might also be used as a bargaining chip by New Delhi for China to relinquish its claim to Arunachal Pradesh and refrain from using its veto to keep India from getting a permanent UN Security Council seat. In any case, Comrades Prachanda and Bhattarai should welcome the embrace of the Red Dragon, claws and all.

And to bring peace to the region, it would be great if Beijing could be induced similarly to take over its other great buddy on the subcontinent: Pakistan, along with Afghanistan.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4488365.cms