Personal gain in focus at the cost of nation’s interest
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
POST-VISIT FIRESTORM
While prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ had promised his India visit to be of historic significance in the buildup to it, he had been hailing the visit as being highly successful even before he had landed back in Kathmandu. However, once in Kathmandu, the visit has come under close and widespread scrutiny and criticism in the parliament and outside. The visit has thus kicked off a firestorm of its own kind that in most other democracies would have called for him to step down.
“TAMED” NEPALI PM IN DIFFICULT DELHI
The criticisms concerned not only the PM’s intentional failure to raise the crucial issues facing the nation in its relations with India but also the ordinariness of what has been agreed upon with India. Prachanda is now the butt of criticism for the whole host of his seemingly Indo-servile actions leading up to the visit and during it. Writing in The Indian Express under the title of “Why ‘revolutionary’ communist PM Prachanda went to temples in India” (June 5, 2023) Nepal’s eminent journalist, Yubaraj Ghimire commented that his visit to India five months after being PM was for his own “political management.”
Referring to the communist leader’s pronounced religiosity as reflected in his devout act of puja in Indore, Ghimire further observed that Prachanda has not “transformed” himself but was only “tamed by hostile circumstances and politics.”
The one-time Maoist Supremo, Prachanda has, in recent years, seen his fortunes in the polls plummet precipitously even as his decade-long acts of crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of People’s War have come to haunt him with increasing ferocity. While there are hundreds of cases lodged against him in the International Criminal Court at The Hague, following his public confession of being responsible for the death of five thousand lives, his victims have now sued him in the Supreme Court of Nepal too.
There are also other more compelling reasons for him to be slavishly beholden to India. Initially, after joining mainstream politics and managing to emerge as PM with the most seats in the first Constituent Assembly he did pretend as being a genuine Maoist and even dared to visit China first, although under the pretext of watching the Summer Olympics in 2008.
The taming of Prachanda by India came at the 23rd Session of the Universal Periodic Review Working Group of Human Rights Council in Geneva in November 2015, where India raised the issue of transitional justice mechanism, its independence and prosecution of the rights violators and that was seen as a “huge shift in Indian position on transitional justice.” It showed that it was only India that had the necessary wherewithal to send Prachanda to The Hague.
Besides, Prachands owes his current premiership to India to a large extent. After NC emerged as the biggest party in parliament following the last election, NC president Deuba, reportedly at India’s behest, had gone back on his word to make his alliance partner Prachanda PM. That forced him to accept UML’s offer to make him a PM. However, Indian foreign secretary Kwatra soon landed in Kathmandu and engineered the situation in such a way that Prachanda was back in the NC-led fold once again. It was clear that while India had wished to see the more trusted, malleable and more loyal Deuba in the PM seat, Kwatra, under the given circumstances, had accepted Prachanda instead.
So, this time around, to make sure that India was fully pleased with his loyalty too, Prachanda would rather wait for an Indian invite for five long months, turn down China’s invite to attend the BOAO Forum and cancel at the last minute his visit to Qatar to address the Fifth Convention of Least Developed Countries. PM Prachanda is no longer able to sustain the charade of being a “Maoist” in the real sense of the term. So, there have been no holds barred this time around for Prachanda to make sure that India did take note of his unalloyed subservience.
THE VISIT, THE OUTCOME AND LONG-TERM DAMAGE TO NEPAL
While Prachanda has been going out of his way to beat his own drum about HIS grand welcome in India, people now compare his visit with those of Panchayat PMs who were all received by PM Indira herself at the airport. Prachanda the PM was received by a State Minister only to be later confronted with India’s national security advisor, Ajit Doval, in a previously unscheduled, impromptu meeting held in the hotel where Prachanda himself was to stay.
Although this is not how the head of the government of a sovereign country on an official visit to India is to be treated, it showed how India thought of Prachanda as Nepal’s PM a politician at their beck and call.
Viewed from this angle, the meeting with Doval was quite revealing. While the Indian leader was accompanied by the foreign secretary, Kwatra, their standard practice of foreign ministry representation in all diplomatic meets, Prachanda had his daughter instead twiddling with her mobile phone. Given his avowed subservience and the imperative to demonstrate his loyalty through difficult commitments to satisfy India’s punishing demands, he surely would not like to have a fellow Nepali official or politician witnessing what transpired in this rather secretive meeting.
But what was equally appalling was that the foreign minister NP Saud, a senior leader in the dominant party NC in the coalition, was in the delegation, and he allowed this unbecoming meeting between India’s national security advisor and Nepal’s PM to go ahead without any representation from Nepal’s foreign ministry. While it was a treacherous move on Prachanda’s part, it was also a dereliction of duty on the part of foreign minister Saud. It was the proverbial “first day first show” of the long-term damage done to Nepal by this visit.
The firestorm mentioned earlier is thus centered around not on what was achieved, because they were all ordinaries, such as the inauguration of a cargo train link, an extension of oil pipelines, renewal of longstanding trade and transit treaty, or academic relationship between two study institutions in foreign relations.
However, what should have been at the heart of such a high-level visit was not even given a mention. For instance, the EPG report that reportedly redefines the Nepal-India relationship has been languishing in Nepal with India refusing to even receive it. Similarly, the border issue that involves the return of the Kalapani region to Nepal too remained off the agenda. The problem of the high-value Gautam Buddha International Airport in terms of its air route over India and facility of instrument landing remained unaddressed too. Two major hydel projects were awarded to Indian companies without any bidding and even in the face of opposition by the hydropower professionals present in the entourage.
What also needs to be mentioned here is that PM Prachanda had a special gift for India in the manner of tributes paid regularly by a vanquished country to the victor. For instance, for many years before 1956, Tibet paid yearly tributes to Nepal even as the latter sent five yearly tributes to the emperor of China. Just a couple of hours before Prachanda became airborne for the visit, he had the president of Nepal RC Paudel approve the outdated citizenship bill that, among others, would give citizenship certificates to Indian brides married to Nepal grooms on arrival even as in a reverse marriage, Nepali brides married to Indian grooms must wait for seven years for it.
Inequality has always been the hallmark of Nepal-India relations to the disadvantage of Nepal. And the Maoist Supremo found it fit to put his own seal of approval to it.
However, it is not a healthy win for India. It is extraction. India has always dealt with smaller neighbor based on their extortionist policy: Whatever mine is mine, whatever yours is negotiable.
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