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.
