Reflections: The diplomat PM

It was a nice touch for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to include the young Nepalese he has befriended in his team to Kathmandu. It was even more diplomatic of him to start his speech to the Constituent Assembly there in Nepali. One hopes these tactful gestures and the enthusiastic response they evoked succeeded in exorcising the spectre of Sikkim which lies like a shadow over India’s relations with its smaller and more vulnerable neighbours.
I don’t mean the Nepalese fear anything as crude as another takeover operation.

But there are many ways of exercising control over a landlocked country, and if there’s one thing Nepal’s Maoists share with monarchists, it’s that both are equally touchy about their sovereign rights. Power generation, tourism, agriculture, communications, trade and transit, culture, everything Mr Modi can think of for bilateral cooperation, can be hostage to this fear of a bigger neighbour’s hegemonistic tendencies.

Neglect can be as counter-productive as excessive attention. It seems unbelievable that the Indo-Nepal Joint Commission hadn’t met for 23 years until external affair minister Sushma Swaraj’s recent visit to Kathmandu. Or that no Indian Prime Minister visited Nepal since Inder Kumar Gujral’s trip in June 1997.

An incident that took place during Gujral’s first visit to Bhutan as minister-in-waiting to V.V. Giri who was attending King Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s coronation comes to mind. The year was 1974 and many leading Bhutanese still nursed unhappy memories of the assassination of the king’s uncle and the kingdom’s first Prime Minister, Jigme Dorji, 10 years earlier, and the turmoil that ensued. One of these personalities who had suffered in 1964 refused to meet

Gujral at a coronation reception, flouncing away instead with an angry, “I have nothing to do with Indian ministers!” Such bad temper was highly uncharacteristic of the normally phlegmatic Bhutanese. As we’ll see later, they are nothing if not tactfully deferential. But the man who would later devise the Gujral doctrine was unfazed. He thought of asymmetry in India’s relations with smaller neighbours as a moral imperative and not a rewarding strategy.

I don’t know how thoroughly Gujral had been briefed on Bhutan since he was there only for protocol reasons, but he was an instinctive diplomat and his spontaneous response to the rudeness was humane and statesmanlike. “There’s bound to be a residue of bitterness,” he murmured, “when affairs of state impinge on private lives.” My Bhutanese friend had been exiled and had, by all accounts, suffered considerable persecution.

Normally, the Druk race is so inscrutable that it is impossible to say what memories of past injustice still rankle. The Nepalese are culturally more Indian and, therefore, more volatile, more given to displaying their emotions. My book, Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, quotes an excited young Nepalese diplomat exploding that India had Sikkim for breakfast and planned to have Bhutan for lunch and Nepal for dinner. “But we’ll give you indigestion!” he thundered. There were street protests in Kathmandu then and frantic Nepalese appeals to the United States to underwrite the kingdom’s independence.

Outwardly at least, all was calm in Thimphu. However, the Bhutanese quickly if quietly repealed a law that made the monarchy’s continuation dependent on a legislative vote of confidence. Otherwise they continued to swear by India.

So I wasn’t at all surprised some months ago when Bhutan’s ambassador to India, my old friend, Maj. Gen. V. Namgyel, chose the launch in Delhi of a revised edition of Smash and Grab to speak spiritedly of how much his country trusted and relied on its best and closest friend, India. Cynics might feel this replicated the placatory Graeco-Roman tradition of calling the Black Sea, which was notorious for its storms, Euxeinos Pontos or the “Hospitable Sea”.
Unless properly handled, similar sensitivities can mar Mr Modi’s ambitious hopes of a “new chapter” in Indo-Nepalese relations. Nepal is in a state of flux. People are still not absolutely certain the Maoists won’t renege on the commitments they made during Baburam Bhattarai’s prime ministership, and take up arms again.

Some fear they might secretly be in league with China which is investing in hydroelectricity projects on the Trishul and Seti Rivers, and is suspected of planning to extend the Tibet railway to Nepal’s northern border.

At the same time, people wondered about possible links between Nepalese royalists and elements in the Sangh Parivar who have always been sympathetic to the Himalayan country’s Hindu allegiance. Indeed, Mr Modi’s worship at the Pashupatinath temple might have been seen as genuflecting to an identity that was associated with the monarchy and which today’s political establishment has discarded if he had not deftly mixed politics with religion to call for stronger cultural bonding.

His explicit support for a federal, democratic, republican Constitution also helped to remove misgivings. The offer of a new look at the 1950 Indo-Nepalese treaty was especially welcomed.

All this may have been possible because Mr Modi and Sushil Koirala, the Nepalese Prime Minister, didn’t meet for the first time in Kathmandu. Their dialogue began when Mr Modi made the brilliant move of inviting all the Saarc leaders to his swearing-in ceremony in May. It’s in these small ways that India can help to generate the confidence in its neighbours that is so lacking that some of them quietly welcomed Pakistan’s acquisition of the bomb as an equaliser that would help to stabilise the regional power equation.

It’s now up to India’s professional diplomats to keep up the momentum of the bilateral relationship. There have been too many instances of imaginative political initiatives being killed by South Block’s calculation, negligence or ham-handedness. We must keep our fingers crossed that some foreign service official with British proconsular delusions doesn’t undo Mr Modi’s good work in Kathmandu.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author