High stakes low priority

It is not too late to retrieve India’s image with the future of Nepal

Pranay Sharma Delhi

It is an irony that India, which tried its best to make King Gyanendra accept the "ground reality" in Nepal, had almost missed the point itself. A determined mass demonstration threatening to storm the palace on April 24 finally forced New Delhi to use all its influence and exert enough pressure on the recalcitrant dictator to bow before his subjects. 

India is watching the situation carefully with many policymakers cautious about the SPA’s ability to bring the Maoists towards a conditional disarmament and into the mainstream. The worry is that they are armed, hold considerable sway over the countryside, and may not like to play second fiddle in the interim period to a constituent assembly.

The Maoists too are wary of the SPA falling for what could well be a ploy of certain conservative elements of the international community working in concert with the king. This will happen if the SPA delays the constituent assembly and toys with the idea of tinkering with the 1990 constitution. The position of the Royal Nepalese Army, firmly under the palace, is another cause for concern to the democrats in Nepal.

Any widening of the gap between the SPA and the Maoists will prolong the crisis in Nepal with the difference that instead of the king, the SPA will be facing the armed might of the Maoists. This will have a negative impact for India.

New Delhi’s role has caused criticism. For a country with considerable stakes in Nepal, India intervention came too late, and was not well-managed. The decision to send Karan Singh as Prime Minister's "special envoy" to Nepal was not really a wise one. Though there was some course correction done by the Indian establishment to the decision by dragging out the foreign secretary Shyam Saran from Thimphu and asking him to be part of Singh's delegation, it was not the perfect start to its crucial campaign in Nepal. A large section of Nepal’s democrats have always been wary of India's links with Gyanendra. By making the former maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir the "chief negotiator" in the current crisis in Nepal, the Indian leadership gave the wrong signal about where its sympathies lay.  

The fact that India was allowing Gyanendra to get away literally with murder (at the time of Gyanendra's speech on Friday April 21, 16 people had already been killed and scores of others injured in the firing by Nepalese security forces) became apparent from the haste with which New Delhi decided to "welcome" the monarch's proposal.

Predictably, the seven-party alliance and the Maoists in Nepal rejected the king's proposal and promise to return to democracy. And along with that came the disappointment with India and the anti-Indian feelings started rising among the demonstrators. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs had the tough task of fire-fighting. India, with its enormous connections with Nepal’s political task could have preempted the situation by sounding out a spectrum of Nepal’s public opinion on its intended steps.

"We are not siding with this side or that side. We are with the people of Nepal and we are for the return of democracy in that country," Saran said at a hurriedly convened press conference on the night of April 22. But the foreign secretary's observation came at a time when India not only welcomed the king's proposal but also hours after the Prime Minister re-emphasised on "constitutional monarchy" and "multi party democracy" as the two pillars on which Nepal's "peace, progress and political stability" depended.