The Raj lives : India in Nepal

Six decades after the British withdrew from the subcontinent, it takes considerable audacity to produce a book titled “The Raj Lives”. It takes much more when the country supposedly on the receiving end is one that actually never came under British colonialism.

Mercifully, there is much more than hyperbole in Sanjay Upadhya’s narrative of the political history of India’s troubled relationship with its northern Himalayan neighbor. The author, a leading Nepali journalist, offers a gripping chronicle of a nation’s experience intertwined with that of British as well as independent India. To rebuff the book as another anti-Indian rant Nepali academia churns out with some regularity is to lose sight of the pieces that, when put together, etch a tapestry of entrenched skepticism.

Innumerable organizations, officials and individuals on both sides of the border have expended much time, money and energy into examining why India-Nepal relations remain so touchy. Many “new beginnings” have been hailed over the years. Exhilaration has barely lasted long enough to engender meaningful action. The slightest affirmation of “special” relations on India’s part instantly sparks cries of hegemonism in Nepal.

It was fashionable for Indian analysts and commentators to blame Nepal’s lack of democracy for the virulent strain of anti-Indianism running rampant in the kingdom. But the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990 did little to end Nepali suspicions. In some ways, political openness exacerbated mistrusts.

History, geography, religion and culture have bound India closer to Nepal than to any of its neighbors. Pakistan and Bangladesh may have emerged from the same womb, but they acclimatized themselves to the turbulent world as independent nations. In landlocked Nepal, which borders India on three sides, relations became ever more controversial. Nowhere are they more so than in the political domain. Indeed, it would be fair to say that everything in the relationship is political.

Ordinarily, British India’s alleged transgressions against Nepal should not have mattered much to Indians; they were direct victims of the worst of the Raj. But in Nepal, perceptions are what ultimately matter – a point Upadhya emphasizes throughout. It is the inseparableness of the two Indias in the Nepali consciousness that gives the book its title as well as relevance.

India has been central to three democratic changes in Nepal since the 1950s. The Delhi compromise Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru mediated in 1951 among King Tribhuvan, the hereditary Rana premiership and the Nepali Congress was instantly denounced by Nepali communists as a “sellout”. India’s sympathy and support aided the collapse of the three-decade Panchayat Raj in 1990. Yet India’s actions were seen more as a machination to limit Nepal’s sovereignty. New Delhi’s initiative in 2006 to partner the mainstream parties and the Maoist rebels against King Gyanendra’s autocratic rule, too, was interpreted as part of an elaborate plot to perpetuate instability. 

Upadhya asserts that Lainchaur Darbar – which refers to the neighborhood the Indian Embassy is located in the heart of Kathmandu – has become an important player in the domestic politics of Nepal. Each Indian ambassador has been accorded in the Nepali media a status akin to that of a viceroy’s. The Indian Embassy, at least in the Nepali mind, has the power to make and break governments. And perhaps not without reason. 

It is a matter of public record that the adviser to King Tribhuvan used to attend cabinet meetings. Whether he really directed the government or drafted policy in any way is immaterial. The perception was enough to fortify the “nationalist” flank King Mahendra – Tribhuvan’s wily and ambitious son and successor – used to neutralize India-friendly organizations like the Nepali Congress.

During this time, Nepal seemed to defy conventional wisdom. While the world was anxiously pondering whether Nepal could be the next domino to fall to international communism, King Mahendra was cultivating Mao Zedong. His success owed much to ordinary Nepalis’ perception of India as the greater evil.

Upadhya offers interesting nuggets that could help put things in perspective for the average Indian reader. In the early 1950s, as Nepali politics entered troubled waters, politicians often took their quarrels to New Delhi and sought Nehru’s intervention. Back home, some of these same leaders would vie with one another to denounce Indian motives.

Nepali Congress leader B.P. Koirala had once lobbied against Nepal’s membership of the United Nations, ostensibly claiming that it was a dependency of India. When Koirala’s Nepali Congress won the first multiparty elections in 1959, Mahendra seemed reluctant to invite him to form the new government. Koirala sought Nehru’s intervention and became premier. Once in power, Koirala used the “nationalism” flank vis-à-vis Kathmandu’s relations with China.

Indian words and actions, to be sure, helped deepen Nepali suspicions. Nehru, during his first visit to Kathmandu, tried to dispel the image that India was dictating to Nepalis how they should conduct himself. Yet in a major public speech, he seemed to do precisely that. During three decades of palace rule, Nepali Congress operated from exile in India. New Delhi’s eagerness to use the exiles as a bargaining chip against the palace seemed to alienate sections within the Nepali Congress.

An Indian TV channel’s erroneous report accusing a Nepali passenger of being behind hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft to Afghanistan in late 1999 left many Nepalis scratching their heads in amazement. An official visit by the Indian Air Force chief in late 2000 to a country that did not possess an air force served to raise deeper questions across the Nepali political spectrum. 

Although Upadhya covers only the first year after the collapse of King Gyanendra’s regime, he has delineated how India may have lost some ground in Nepal and could lose more. China has stepped up its role in the country in an unprecedented manner. The recent electoral victory of the former Maoist rebels – who still espouse an avowed anti-Indian agenda – has presented a new set of challenges. Upadhya sees the Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindutva brigade as a major contender to restore Nepal’s status as a Hindu state, which it lost with the collapse of the royal regime.

Nepal has moved far ahead in the international arena since the 1950s. It hosts the secretariat of the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation and has served two stints as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, among other things. If Nepalis seek some overt Indian acknowledgment of this sea change, then they hardly can be faulted.

For India, crafting a credible and effective policy on Nepal requires greater prudence. Consider this supreme irony. During the decade-long Maoist insurgency, India was criticized by Nepalis and others for sheltering Nepali rebel leaders. China, on the other hand, was backing the monarchy politically, and then militarily as well, to crush the rebellion. Today, Beijing has increased its influence in the country on the back of the Maoists as well as the monarchists.

The growing influence of external players in the affairs of the world’s newest republic – many of them overtly inimical to Indian interests – requires us to gain a better understanding of the Nepali psyche. A new book, “The Raj Lives: India in Nepal,” has come as a useful resource.

The author, Sanjay Upadhya, a Nepalese journalist, explains how India has been a central feature in Nepali affairs since British colonial times. Kings and courtiers actively sought support from the British rulers for their machinations and then struck an anti-British posture to burnish their nationalist credentials. The practice continues to this day.

In the first half of his 350-page book, Upadhya echoes the general thrust of contemporary Nepali scholarship, which more often than not runs counter to Indians’ understanding of events. Thus, Jawaharlal Nehru mediated a compromise between the Rana shogunate, the monarchy and political parties in 1950 only to perpetuate Indian primacy by pitting each against the others. Indians know very well how, between 1960 and 1990, the monarchy and the political parties saw India as siding with their rival.

Upadhya brings the post-1990 period in interesting light. Relying on published material, mostly media accounts in Nepal, India and the West, the author creates a larger-than-life visage of India towering over every Nepali nook and cranny. Admittedly, New Delhi lacked coherence in its approach to Nepal and other South Asian neighbors since the mid-1990s, partly resulting from our own transition from Congress party dominance to coalition governance. From Upadhya’s vantage point, Indian policy often emerges as a rudderless enterprise, with various agencies working at cross-purposes. Mostly, though, New Delhi comes out as a macabre agent of destabilization.

The Nepali political class’s own history of squabbling and ineptitude, resulting in the frequent shuffling of prime ministers, is attributed to some diabolic plot originating in the Indian Embassy. The Maoists, who launched a bloody decade-long insurgency on a charter top-heavy with anti-Indian demands, appear as India’s creation. The Kandahar hijacking, which marked one of the low points of modern Indian diplomacy, is presented as an Indian design to expose the weakness of the Nepali security system.

Indian intelligence agencies allegedly masterminded the June 2001 palace massacre, which wiped out the entire line of King Birendra’s family, to check the monarchy’s growing proximity to China. Yet Gyanendra, the most anti-Indian of royals, happens to survive and ascend to the throne. New Delhi then somehow instigated Gyanendra to seize power in February 2005 only to instantly condemn him, in order to further destabilize the country.

Ordinarily, such bizarre parallel history need not be dignified with a response. The important fact here is that Upadhya has not created it; he has merely echoed what is considered serious inquiry in Nepal. India’s calm endurance of calumny erodes our initiative. During the 1990s, for example, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence actively strengthened its base in Nepal by infiltrating anti-Indian constituencies in all the major parties. India repeatedly sought Nepali cooperation in dismantling this network, but Kathmandu, even during the supposedly India-friendly Nepali Congress governments, dragged its feet.

After the overthrow of the royal regime in 2006, China has stepped up its ties with the Maoists as well as the mainstream parties. Today the Chinese demand action against protesting Tibetan exiles and the Nepali coalition government is ready to brave widespread international condemnation to appease Beijing.

India has high national-security stakes involved in Nepal. Apart from the Chinese angle, the precise nature of the Maoists’ ties with our own Naxalite insurgents and Northeastern militant groups remains unclear. The Gorkhaland agitation has opened up another vulnerable front. It is not difficult to foresee a multiplicity of other threats hostile Nepali public opinion amid the country’s general political fluidity would pose.

“The Raj Lives” lays bare the basic malady in the bilateral relationship. In the final chapter, Upadhya even attempts to scribble a prescription. New Delhi, however, must commence its own investigation.