By Sanjay Upadhya
After becoming the world’s first democratically elected Maoist leader, Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has moved swiftly to show how it will no longer be business as usual for the Himalayan nation.
Hours after taking the oath of office on August 18, Dahal announced he would visit China for the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games. This may not sound like a revolutionary move, until you consider that no Nepali leader has ever visited China before visiting India, the traditionally influential neighbor to the south. When President Ram Baran Yadav cancelled plans earlier this month to attend the opening ceremonies, citing domestic preoccupation, some Nepalis saw New Delhi’s hand. Some Indian newspapers characterized the cancellation as a snub to China.
Nepal anticipated renewed geopolitical pressures ever since the Maoists, who entered the peace process after a decade-long bloody insurgency against the monarchy, surprised pundits and pollsters by winning the largest number of seats in the constitutional assembly. That body abolished the 240-year-old monarchy in May, sparking a struggle for power among key political parties. Nepal’s international partners, meanwhile, have been scrambling to adjust their policies.
The United States, which still considers the Maoists a terrorist organization, has softened its stance. After the election results were announced, U.S. Ambassador Nancy Powell met with Dahal, opening Washington’s formal contact with the ex-rebels. The Bush administration subsequently clarified that the Maoists were on a separate list of terrorist organizations, implying they could not be equated with, say, Al Qaeda. Withdrawal of the terrorist tag, according to Washington, would depend on the Maoists’ behavior in power.
India, which once considered the Maoists terrorists but also gave them sanctuary, has mixed feelings. The Congress party government, which helped to create the alliance between mainstream parties and the Maoists that toppled royal rule two years ago, hopes Nepal’s experience would encourage its own Maoist insurgents to renounce violence and enter the mainstream.
The opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, tipped to win the general elections expected next year, was a supporter of the monarchy and remains virulently anti-Maoist. It has urged the Nepali government to recognize Hindi as one of the official languages. That suggestion is likely to alienate many Nepalis, who organized days of protest against Vice-President Parmananda Jha’s decision to take the oath in Hindi.
Both major Indian parties are apprehensive of the Maoists’ growing ties with China. A traditional supporter of the monarchy, Beijing had provided arms to the royal government to crush an insurgency that the Chinese said had tarnished the reputation of Mao Zedong. Following the collapse of the royal government, the Chinese moved swiftly to build ties with the former rebels. Several senior Maoist leaders have visited Beijing, as Chinese delegations continue to arrive in Nepal.
The pro-Tibet demonstrations gripping Kathmandu almost daily since March has heightened Beijing’s sensitivities on what it has long considered a volatile frontier. International human rights groups have attributed Nepal’s crackdown on those protests to sustained pressure from the Chinese. Rejecting those charges, Beijing blames non-Tibetan supporters of the Dalai Lama for fanning the unrest.
Prime Minister Dahal, who emerged in public only two years ago from decades in hiding, has little foreign policy experience. After the elections, he diluted his party’s earlier threats to abrogate a controversial peace and friendship treaty with India, ban Indian films and stop recruitment of Gurkha soldiers into the Indian and British armies. C.P. Gajurel, chief of the party’s international division, said the ex-insurgents would stop calling the Americans “imperialists” and the Indians “expansionists”.
Dahal insists he wants to maintain “equidistance” between China and India. That statement may have pleased the Chinese, but it has raised skepticism in New Delhi, which believes it shares “special relations” with Nepal based on a common religious and cultural heritage. Many in India, which has long asserted its own version of the Monroe Doctrine in South Asia, remain apprehensive of Chinese motives against the wider backdrop of their border dispute dating from the 1962 war. They tend to see Beijing’s activity in Nepal, as well as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as part of a long-term strategy to encircle their country and limit its influence.
In seeking to strike the right balance between the two regional giants, the Maoists inherit a challenge every ruler has confronted since the mid-18th century monarch Prithvi Narayan Shah united dozens of principalities into the modern Nepali state.
