Editorial
Both China and India must now ponder whether institutionalizing a special mode of conduct in relations with Nepal will propel the necessary stability in the country to yield productive relations in the region. A king with the foresight of Mahendra who could deign rub wrong regional power aspirants by floating a ‘federation of trans-Himalayan kingdoms’ could have come much before the times. But even the manner with which King Birendra’s widely endorsed Zone of Peace proposal was junked ultimately by none less than Nepali politics speaks much of today’s wanton partisan politics that has yielded, instead, an MCC controversy amidst a global environment of unwanted competition threatening longstanding systems of international behaviour. The much-vaunted global village ensures that what is happening in Ukraine has global import and much hindsight is being re-explored to seek adjustments. It is not, perhaps, just the MCC that compels Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to come to Nepal Friday. By the time he leaves the country Sunday, he will have made sure that his visits to Pakistan and India will also have had meaning in Nepal. He will have known that Delhi will not have well received the memorandum of understanding he signed in Islamabad and, he will have done enough in Delhi to assure that regional collaboration is regionally productive to also assuage sentiments regarding his Kathmandu leg. His South Asian itinerary is itself a message. More productive cooperation assuring regional understanding is compelling in this disorderly milieu where a minor toe step wrongly directed can suck this part of the world into the vortex of international conflict. After all, we do realize that our politics has been long dragging us to this brink.
The Chinese foreign minister will surely have a packet of topics to discuss in Nepal given the recent political obsession here with the MCC. Our markets here are already in short supply of necessary consumer goods to which the country’s suppliers had gradually seen China as a source. Many bilateral projects and Nepali commitments remain at a standstill to which the Chinese side will surely have something to address. But just as his dealings in Pakistan will have come as a message to New Delhi to be pondered over in that Indian capital, his concerns expressed in Delhi will surely also have meaning in Kathmandu. Perhaps both Delhi and Beijing must do more to bring some sense in Nepali politics to enhance reliable conduct on part of Nepali counterparts that will enable its neighbours to boost cooperation to secure extents. The much espoused Indian ‘special relationship” with Nepal will have necessarily come into microscopic focus for reasons of today’s practicability even for China as, for both India and China for that matter, longstanding aspirations in Nepal for a zone of peace which is not reflected in the populism of Nepali politics today. Let us face it, when we are now rediscovering who first diverted from Breton Woods, whether the U.S. did wrong to de-link the dollar from gold reserves and, by doing so we are revisiting Gadaffi’s assassination in Libya, why shouldn’t India’s politics probe the real causes of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir or, for that matter, Nepali politics ponder over the stir over Prakash Saput’s movie on the Maoist terror?
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