Nepal: Maneuvers, Military And Otherwise

By Sanjay Upadhya

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Nepal withdraws from the BIMSTEC military exercises India is organizing in Pune but participates in Chinese-led drills in Sichuan. Suddenly Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘neighborhood first’ policy is deemed dead.
A Nepali snub to India sharpened by a full kowtow to China? Looks so at first glance. And international headlines, sadly enough these days, are rarely made up of anything beyond first looks. They do fit the narrative established for the better part of a decade, though. China has gained extensive ground in what India has traditionally considered its exclusive sphere of influence.
Beijing doesn’t like to hear that characterization in public. Beyond a point, it doesn’t really seem to mind. New Delhi doesn’t like the storyline, in public or private. But it can’t stop moaning and carping.
Maybe Nepal is just doing what a sovereign and independent is supposed to do: exercise its options without fear or favor. Playing one neighbor off the other could be another way of describing it. But don’t blame Nepal alone here. Games have to have other players. Willing or otherwise, they are still participants.
Nepalis like to count themselves as citizens of one of the dozen or so oldest and continuously existing nation states. For most of their recent existence, they have been struggling to find their place in the region and beyond. The Chinese Qing empire and the British East India Company both checked the march of an inherently martial Nepal.
For all practical purposes, Nepal became a tributary of the Qing in 1792. In exchange, the Middle Kingdom promised Nepali protection from any third-party threat. When such a threat emerged from the British two decades later, the Qing refused any help. Nepal lost a third of its territory to the British in 1816. Nepali soldiers enlisted in the East India Company army and went on to help crush the 1857 mutiny, often called the first Indian war of Independence. Nepalis were active in both world wars. In World War II, the Allies got Nepalis firmly on their side, but not before a phase of active German and Japanese courting.
As the international system grew more complex, Nepalis went on to live through wider contradictions. During the Cold War, western democracies helped Nepal experiment with an alternative polity after it abolished multiparty democracy because they didn’t want the other side to make gains through the ballot box. The CIA used Nepal as a major staging ground for Tibetan insurgents as part of its effort to counter Red China.
During three decades of partyless rule in Nepal, Queen Elizabeth II visited the kingdom twice. French President Francois Mitterrand, US Vice President Spiro Agnew, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl were among the other leading world leaders who weren’t terribly bothered by the nature of the Nepali polity.
Zhou Enlai visited twice while Deng Xiaoping included Nepal in his first foreign trip after returning from his second purge to head post-Mao China. The Nehru-Gandhis and seat-warmers in between were regulars. The Soviets were quite thrilled at first but seemed to feel there was not enough room.
Nepal’s East-West Highway, built in parts by the Indians, Americans, British and Soviets is emblematic of the glory days. (Under four-power pressure, Nepal asked China to withdraw from the part of the project it was interested in.)
Then things came crashing down with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The post-Cold War decade saw Nepal embrace multiparty democracy so tightly, often with funding from those same western democracies, that it engendered a Maoist rebellion. Come 9/11 and the Nepali Maoists provided the excuse for the extension of the global war on terror. With the help of American and British military assistance, a monarchy badly weakened by bloody a palace massacre that wiped out the reigning king and the heir apparent, overran the democratic space. And in irony of ironies, the Chinese armed the royal army against the Maoist rebels, whose main leaders were housed and fed in India (which also officially supported the palace against the rebellion).
Today the monarchy is gone and most countries are hailing the Maoists as peacemakers. Of the three pillars of the new Nepal they created, secularism and federalism are on the defensive. As for the monarchy, it may not come back. But the last king continues to issue messages on national occasions and sometimes admonishes the government for not working for the people.
If all this is confounding, remember that Nepalis are still trying to figure things out. A cancelled Chinese project here or there in Nepal is not an indictment of Beijing’s massive Belt and Road Initiative. Nor can the withdrawal from Indian military drills be construed as an automatic snub to India.
Nepal’s links with India are too multilayered to wither under Chinese hard and soft power combined. Nepalis, moreover, know their history reasonably well to recognize the cool unsentimentality traditionally inherent in China’s external relations. But that won’t stop them from engaging northward to loosen the southern embrace. The search for geopolitical equilibrium may continue to be elusive. But that’s what has always animated the country.

‘Prime Pilgrim’ Modi in Nepal And the India-China Reset

By Sanjay Upadhya

May 12, 2018

It was always going to be impossible to view Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s May 11-12 visit to Nepal outside the prism of India-China relations. The defining feature, however, is not the rivalry between the Asian giants but their latest efforts at rapprochement.
Although Modi described himself as having arrived on his third visit to Nepal in four years as ‘Prime Pilgrim’, the two-day trip contained all the trappings of traditional diplomacy. Be they temples, felicitation ceremonies, or official talk venues, Modi used the right words and gestures to win over Nepalis still bruised by the unofficial blockade India had imposed in 2015-2016.
Officially a state visit, Nepali Prime Minister K.P. Oli deployed the full administrative machinery to ensure that Modi felt welcome. Modi left with abundant pledges of support to Nepal – in terms of specific projects and more general commitments.
While many in India and Nepal viewed Modi’s visit as part of an effort to shore up his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s prospects ahead of crucial national elections next year, the trip embodied the dynamics of politics, religion, economics and culture that have traditionally linked the two countries.
From this perspective, Modi’s affirmation that Nepal remained the first neighbor in India’s ‘neighborhood first’ policy sounds innocuous. However, it’s full current import can be gauged only when viewed against the triangular India-China-Nepal relationship that has been evolving since 2006, when Nepal began the process of transforming itself from a unitary Hindu monarchy into a secular federal republic.
 Most of those dozen years have witnessed an intensification of the traditional rivalry between India and China for influence in the Himalayan state. India has customarily considered Nepal falling within its exclusive sphere of influence. That assessment has had to contend with the reality that Nepal was the last tributary to the Qing Dynasty.
By most measures, China has outpaced India in the race for influence in Nepal. Oli himself is emblematic of the transformation. Once considered the most India-friendly communist leader in Nepal, he has projected an image of a staunch nationalist, largely based on pro-Chinese public expressions and policy platforms.
It was during Oli’s last tenure as prime minister that Nepalis faced the unofficial trade embargo. While the ostensible trigger was New Delhi’s displeasure over Nepal’s political transition pertaining to bordering regions, the wider spark was Oli’s eagerness to embark on China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Himalayan Moment of Truth
The weeks-long military standoff between India and China in the Himalayan border outpost of Doklam in 2017 marked a turning point in India-China relations. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, Indian analysts were quick to proclaim that China blinked. At some level, it was almost as if India had avenged its humiliating defeat in the 1962 war with China.
Yet post-Doklam developments have demonstrated the limits of hyperrealism in New Delhi’s and Beijing’s approach to one another. Of the three prongs underpinning their relations, both China and India have recognized the virtues of relegating confrontation behind cooperation and competition.
The uncertain role of the United States in Asia’s regional security environment has only been accentuated under the administration of President Donald J. Trump, allowing neither India nor China to make comfortable assumptions.
During the Doklam crisis, New Delhi witnessed the extent of loneliness it would have to endure if it decided in earnest to take on the world’s second-largest economy in place of cooperating with Beijing globally in feasible areas.
The Modi government’s polite curtailing of the more overtly political activities of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile which India hosts almost coincided with official Chinese media’s friendly counsels to Nepal to improve relations with India.
No less wary of the disruptive potential of American capers in an era of global flux, China has realized the downside of seeking to advance relations with countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh without taking India into confidence.
It may be a stretch to suggest that the Chinese may be toying with the idea of putting Nepal (and Bhutan) last in its South Asia policy, at least for now. That suggestion could be put to the test during Oli’s expected visit to China shortly. It would be wise to watch for how energetically Beijing reiterates – if it does so at all – its pledge to safeguard Nepali sovereignty and independence.

Xi, Modi and the Rest of Us

By Sanjay Upadhya

April 26, 2018

The hastily convened informal summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Wuhan has produced its predictable dose of analyses.
The commentariat has generally zeroed in on the wisdom, timing and possible outcomes, while also veering into questions of motives and relative strengths/weaknesses of the interlocutors.
The two Asian giants, however, have long illuminated the futility of that kind of thinking, as far as their bilateral relationship was concerned. New Delhi and Beijing have recognized the rudiments of competition, cooperation and – yes –confrontation that underpin relations between such civilizationally self-assured aspirants to great-power status.
As China and India rise together, it is in their mutual interest to make the ascent peaceful. Yet each recognizes the precariousness of that yearning. Satisfied that the basic logic of their bilateral relationship has taken the desired course, Beijing and New Delhi are now focused on securing that validation from external spasms.
When Xi and Modi look around their wider world, what they see must not be altogether pretty. Third countries may have complementarities here and convergences there that China and India can hope to benefit from individually. But those have to be weighed incessantly against the risks third parties can pose to the orientation of the Sino-Indian relationship.
A renewed commitment to resurrecting the Quad or rechristening the Asia-Pacific as the Indo-Pacific may have the power to annoy or even alarm China – but only up to a point. Granting concession after concession to China on fundamental matters amid tepid arm-twisting on matters India deems tangential can only encourage New Delhi to be more realistic in its expectations from others.

When ‘strategic patience’ meets ‘strategic autonomy’
The Chinese may be vociferous about their century of humiliation. Indians, while reticent to talk about it, are conditioned by a longer legacy of colonialism. So when Beijing’s ‘strategic patience’ meets New Delhi’s ‘strategic autonomy’, it can only animate their existing bilateralism.
When third countries mock Xi’s decision to extend his tenure or Modi’s Hindu-nationalism-inspired subsuming of the once proudly secular Indian state, neither needs to be outraged. For them, the best adjudicators are their own domestic constituencies.
Nor are Xi and Modi under any obligation to revise their definitions of constitutionalism, legality, sovereignty, nationalism, borders, a rules-based world order and the like based on which U.S. party happens to be in the White House or on the prevailing cultural milieu in the wider West. However, if the dysfunctions spilling over even start showing signs of upsetting the orientation of the Sino-Indian bilateral relationship, the imperative for action is clear enough.
The Wuhan summit may or may not yield anything tangible. But the Modi-Xi message to the rest of the world has been clear and its reiteration may be enough.