Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Ideology takes a back seat


Wednesday, October 01, 2008

New Delhi had a Plan B just in case combative Maoist guerrilla leader--elected--Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Nepal Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ sprang any political or diplomatic surprises on his first official visit to India. In the mid-1990s, the only other Communist Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr Manmohan Adhikary, on a similar visit, was expected to rock bilateral relations. He chose not to do so and Prachanda followed suit even after he and his party had said many unpleasant things about India not too long ago.

Never has any Nepali Prime Minister attracted so much attention and curiosity as Mr Dahal who spent eight of his 10 years underground around Delhi and Haryana while in Kathmandu, a human rights activist and Maoist sympathiser, Mr Padma Ratna Tuladhar, was being passed off as the elusive leader. Shock and awe, the literal translation of ‘Prachanda’, were cultivated through anonymity and fiction.

His first overground visit to New Delhi was in 2006 when as leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) he told the Hindustan Times summit that the Maoists had abandoned the armed struggle for multi-party democracy. His every word and step was monitored carefully but no one ever dreamt that he would become Prime Minister. How we got this wrong is another story.

The Maoist brush with India started early. They realised that India would not allow a military conquest of Kathmandu and power could not flow from the barrel of the gun. Top Maoist leaders would frequently refer to India as ‘expansionist’, ‘imperialist ‘ and ‘colonialist’, warning their armed wing that ultimately they would have to fight the Indian Army.

Ignoring this stark reality, military hardliners led by Mr Dahal launched in 2005 the impossible Battle of Khara in far west Nepal against the Nepal Army — a modern day Charge of the Light Brigade — that ended in the biggest debacle of the war. It was the turning point of the people’s war and victory for the pragmatists favouring joining the political mainstream. India facilitated the political union of constitutional forces against monarchy and the election. This did little to woo the Maoists.

The anti-India tirade was maintained. In fact, it picked up in the run-up to the April election. Nine of the Maoists’ 40-point demands advocated in 1996 and recrafted for the election manifesto were India-centric, targeting unequal and lopsided treaties, especially the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, Gorkha recruitment in the Indian Army, border encroachments and iniquitous use of water resources from rivers emanating in Nepal.

The revival of the ‘equidistance policy’, an euphemism for the China card, figured prominently among the pet peeves. In an interview on Nepal television, Mr Dahal underscored the need for China balancing India in Nepal. His visit to China before India after being sworn in as Prime Minister raised hackles in New Delhi though officials pretended it was business as usual. His Defence Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa Badal, former Deputy Commander of the PLA, has just returned from China with a $ 1 million military aid package.

After the recent floods in Nepal and India caused by Kosi, a river rising in east Nepal, Mr Dahal called the 1954 Kosi Treaty a “historic blunder”. The anti-India faction of the Maoists has called for an economic policy that looks beyond India. Party hawks had directed Mr Dahal to get the 1950 Treaty scrapped and ask India not to interfere in Nepali politics.

Maoists have reason to be angry with India. It was New Delhi that declared Maoists a terrorist organisation even before Nepal did and arrested their top leaders. But for the Indian Army’s military assistance and expertise to the Nepal Army, the PLA ran a good chance of reaching Kathmandu. Only King Gyanendra’s absurd coup forced the termination of the supply of military hardware to the Nepal Army but by then it was a bridge too far for the Maoists as the Army was fully fortified, backed by adequate reserves.

India’s unarticulated deterrent was not lost on the Maoists. Even after Jan Andolan II in April 2006, New Delhi, ignoring the people’s uprising against the palace, intervened, persisting with its twin-pillar policy of constitutional monarchy and multi-party democracy when the first pillar had collapsed.

Maoists have never forgiven India for delaying the end of Monarchy and not crediting them sufficiently for the historic transformations in Nepal. What is worse, India’s National Security Adviser told a television channel after the Maoists’ stunning success in the election that India was used to working with the routed Nepali Congress Party and wasn’t actually expecting the Maoists to win. The list of Indian omissions and commissions is long.

Fortunately for India, Mr Dahal’s coalition partners — three Communist parties and two Madhesi parties from the Terai, one of whose leaders is a former Maoist — and the Opposition Nepali Congress helped moderate the Maoist agenda for Mr Dahal’s visit. The lessons from Khara, three years of the peace process and the ultimate aphrodisiac, power, have taught Mr Dahal flexibility and pragmatism and turned him into a sophisticated politician.

The irony is how both the Maoists and India, at loggerheads, may settle down to accepting the compulsions of geography and ground reality. India made all the wrong calculations on the Maoists, Mr Dahal and his flock targeted Delhi. India is now engaging not just the Maoists but also other political parties. A number of Track I initiatives have been held in Patna, Delhi and Banaras as part of proactive diplomacy though New Delhi has lost much ground in the security sector.

Will the conversion of the Maoists into a political entity have a sobering effect on Indian Maoists and other separatist groups with which they had linkages? There is, therefore, great relevance of the ongoing peace process for Nepal, the region and the rest of the world.

Several challenges remain. Maoists continue to figure on the US Terrorists Exclusion List, now downgraded to Group of Concern even while Mr Dahal met President George W Bush in New York earlier this month. Taming Maoist hardliners and making others give up their bad habits will be as hard as taming Nepal’s turbulent waters that wreak havoc in India. As India lives in the spill-over zone of Nepal, New Delhi will remain a key stakeholder of the peace process and stability of the Government.

Sphere: Related Content

No comments: