A villager in the Nepali hills, talking of a friend who had gone off to the Indian plains to work, will more often than not say that the friend went, not to India, but to Mughlan, the land of the Moghuls. If he went to join the Indian or British Army Gurkha regiments, the friend would be referred to as a Lahurey – the lexicographical antecedents being someone who went to Lahore to enlist as a soldier in Ranjit Singh’s army. Indeed, even after the overthrow of the Rana dynasty in 1951 and well into the 1960s, the Indian rupee continued to be referred to, even in folk songs, as ‘company’ of silver tola, issued by Company Bahadur Sahib from Calcutta’s East India Company. For a country founded as the kingdom of ‘Asli Hindustan’ in 1769, six years before the United States one may add and thus very different from Nawab- and Firanghi-ruled Mughlan, its administrative language is suffused with widely used Persian terms like adalat, kitabkhana, hukum and hajoor. The need is to demonstrate differences when little of it is real.

In these linguistic markers lie some hints as to how Nepalis see India and react to events down South, including the forthcoming Indian elections, which is what this essay will delve into. Nepal is one of the few countries in the world that avoided direct colonization and retained its political independence, but the cultural influence of Mughlan on its society and polity has been immense in reverse measure to its un-colonized autonomy. It is a love-hate relationship, where independence and affinity are in a perpetual dance of contradictions, where bristling anger at the faintest hint of real or imagined slight can lurk just beneath almost school-girlish fawning awe. In his study of political violence, social critic Ashis Nandy argues that the violence between similar people, as between two brothers at odds over family inheritance, is most pronounced because the need is to emphasize and demonstrate differences when little of it really exists, and a friendly embrace by one often becomes suffocation to the other. How Nepalis view the forthcoming Indian elections will be within this matrix of excessive familiarity and heightened fears.

National elections are rarely fought and won anywhere on issues of foreign policy; rather, they are fought on issues of local development concerns such as roti, kapda aur makan or sadak, bijli aur pani. Nonetheless, in India’s case, the degree of neglect of the neighbourhood (with the exception of obsession with Pakistan which makes the contrast even starker) is strange for a regional power with ambitions of global influence. An Indian professor recently asked what had happened with recent elections in Nepal and her query was prefaced by the remark that one could read more in the newspapers from Delhi about elections in Haiti or the Dominican Republic than about the momentous shifts in Nepal! At a Kathmandu seminar, a Bangladeshi professor, a former Mukti Bahini veteran to boot, remarked that while many like him were grateful for India’s help in liberating the country in 1971 (an event opposed by the US and China), today in the streets of Dhaka ‘at least fifty per cent of the people are anti-Indian while it is difficult to find a single anti-Chinese Bangladeshi.’ The same sentiments are expressed by Sri Lankans and Bhutanese one talks to privately.

 

This neglect on the part of Delhi has prevented its political class as well as its opinion-making public unaware of a dramatic rise in anti-Indian sentiments in otherwise traditionally friendly neighbours such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and even Bhutan. On the rare occasions that they do wake up responding to specific events, it is with alarm and hysteria, ready to blame China, Pakistan or the West for inciting anti-Indianism rather than their own malfunctioning policy. It has given China (mostly, and sometimes the EuroAmericans) an easy walkover in winning the hearts and minds of other South Asians. This Delhi myopia and the reactions they have invited are also making it harder for Indian businesses from expanding their market share into the neighbourhood arena. It is certainly detracting from India’s claims to membership in the ‘big boys’ club’ such as the UN Security Council, since the other ‘big boys’ are aware of India’s inability to take its neighbours along on matters of global debates, or even represent their interests.

 

When and how did India, the giant that bestrode the non-aligned world and stood as a beacon of alternative path to justice and prosperity to the post-colonial developing world since the middle of the last century, go wrong? And will the forthcoming ‘regime change’ in India after the April elections signal a return to that position of leadership or will South Asia see messier, squabbling, short-sighted coalitions that harbinger more geo-political marginalization and decline for India? These questions are of interest to those in India’s neighbourhood as they too grapple with emerging geo-political shifts. The emergence of BRICKS economies (I include Korea as a representative of the MIST countries that matter to Nepal) is an indicator of global power shifts; and what matters for countries like Nepal is the I-C part of the equation and whether its only vowel will come to prominence or will the silent ‘C’ effortlessly dominate the economic development scene. The red lines freshly drawn by a re-emerged super power such as Russia and an emerging one such as China, first in Syria and now in Crimea, are another indicator that signals the end of a unipolar world and EuroAmerican hegemony.

The present indicators and historical precedents are stacked against India, in terms of both economic and diplomatic/political developments. If in today’s world, global trade is a measure of a country’s geopolitical worth, consider these numbers: some 33% of all global container traffic is from five ports in China while the single largest port hosting container traffic is Singapore at 9%; the US, Europe and Japan together account for 29% (less than China); and India at only 1% is half of Malaysia or Thailand. Indeed, the backwardness of Nepal (as well as much of eastern UP, Bihar and the Indian North East) can be traced not just to its landlockedness and bad politicians but also to the Marxist trade union controlled and highly inefficient Kolkata port through whose pilfering longshoremen hands its exports and imports must pass, thus making them expensively uncompetitive.

Another incident early into Barak Obama’s presidency is also not lost on opinion makers in the neighbourhood. Soon after being elected, Obama went to China, almost hat in hand, an extravagant supplicant to the moneylender. Upon returning home, he ‘summoned’ Manmohan Singh to Washington DC where the only memorable event was a sari-clad American socialite crashing the state dinner given in his honour. The implications of this contrast are as sharp as that of the container trade.

 

News reports indicate that many Indian business leaders seem to lean towards Narendra Modi and his business friendly Gujarat track record. Business folks in the neighbourhood, including Nepal, are similarly hopeful of a more booming business if Modi wins the elections. His recent statements about the need to focus on energy and develop hydropower has excited those in that industry in Nepal; but it has equally alarmed social and environmental activists, for whom hydropower comes with heavy costs in these areas which Nepali and Indian hydrocracies have not managed to adjudicate fairly in the past.

Nepal’s water relations with India have a sad half-century history where it is not development per se but the vision behind, and the model of, its development that is hotly contested; and India’s upcoming new leadership might like to reflect on the failures of the past before engaging in any new adventurism. Indeed, when it comes to broader economic development and its models, India has an uphill battle to convince its neighbours to let it lead the way. Its own history of the last two decades militates against it, unless a new polity subsequent to the elections in May corrects it.

 

There is a need to reflect on this broader political economy of modern India, which is the ‘successor state’ of the British Raj, to understand where the perception and fears of the neighbours arise. This fact is blatantly obvious in the centre of Kathmandu where the Indian embassy today occupies the sprawling premises of the British residency which has been there since the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed a magnificent tree in the centre of the lawn is said to have been planted there by the English Resident (ethno-botanist and anthropologist) Brian Hodgson in the 19th century. (The British themselves have to make do with a modest plot adjacent to it for their embassy.) As a successor state of the Raj, modern India has also inherited the commercial and security ethos of the British and their Great Games, but with an opposite bathos of vision and psychology.

Despite the Gandhian village swaraj origins of Indian independence, India’s modern history is an alliance between Indian industrialists and the Nehru-led Indian National Congress’s protection of a closed market forged during the Indian independence movement some seven decades ago. It now seems broken, thanks to the rent seeking kleptocracy that the Congress-I polity seems to have degenerated into in the last decades. The Korean Chaebol or Japanese Keiretsu model of state-led capitalism seems to have been given up by India in favour of (to use Samir Amin’s expression) the ‘peripheral capitalist model’.

 

Seen from the neighbourhood, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, India in the 1990s gave up on non-alignment as well as Nehruvian socialism with its ethos of self-sufficiency which defined post-independence India for much of the second half of the 20th century. It is also no secret that in parallel with this shift, India’s elites, including its senior civil servants, have embraced the ideals of the US ‘Green Card’, if not for themselves then certainly for their well educated children. It is an indicator, in Toynbee’s terms, of a dominant elite giving up and dissociating itself from the land of its origins.

It is quite disconcerting for Nepalis and other South Asians to run into these eminences, with whom they had engaged with in their official capacities, in their retirement as Americans or Canadians with little or no connection to the land they served all their lives. (Other South Asians, Nepal included, suffer from this phenomenon as well, but it is more damaging for a pretender to superpower-hood.) It is equally disconcerting for Nepalis, who prefer balancing their interests with the demands of their two giant neighbours, India and China, to have to deal with very likeable and smart Indians more in international NGOs and development agencies than in Indian officialdom.

In the case of Nepal, especially after the ascendancy of China to the North, official India seems to have descended into mediocrity and India’s Nepal policy has been dominated by security fears rather than commercial development, which has tended to take a back seat. As an example, many Nepalis would point to the Mahakali Treaty of 1996 on developing the water and energy potential of this border river to the West: despite being signed with much hype and fanfare, it has remained in limbo for almost two decades. Nepalis can cite many other such incidents where development has taken a back seat to security concerns, the other notable case being the construction of the western section of Nepal’s East-West highway, the contract for which was wrested away through severe diplomatic pressure by India from the Chinese contractor (citing proximity with the India border) but whose actual construction then was delayed for almost two decades.

In a long-term sense, it is that delayed development and forced wallowing in economic stagnation which incubated the Maoist hotbeds in western Nepal. Bad development practices of the past have led to Nepali suspicions of India’s intent, and the question now is whether the ascendancy of a business lobby favouring Modi will see less procrastination and more speedy economic development (as the business lobby pines for) or speedy development but of the wrong kind (as the social activist community fears).

 

Nepal is also an example of where Indian leadership in neighbourhood muscle-flexing through the ‘regime change’ of 2005/2006 has gone horribly awry. While bad for neighbourhood stability so essential for economic growth, also of adjacent landlocked Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the political mess that republican Nepal is in today has also been a demerit for Indian diplomacy. This counter-intuitive narrative is essential to understand any new polity that may emerge in Delhi after the May elections, and needs some explanation since mainstream Indian (especially corporate) media has chosen to airbrush away such inconvenient truths.

 

Nepal’s encounter with the Westminster model of democracy, the model adopted by the successor state of the Raj and proselytized in neighbourhood countries, too has not been propitious for the country with its history of political independence in a unitary state comprising of 124 caste and ethnic groups speaking 103 languages. The first attempt in 1959 failed after some eighteen months and the blame is placed on an active King Mahendra, who introduced and experimented with an endogenous system called Panchayat democracy. While guided from the top, it did provide stability for some three decades and built most of the development infrastructure one sees today that is essential for a modern economy. King Birendra was forced to do away with it in 1990 following a year long economic blockade of Nepal imposed by Rajiv Gandhi upset by King Birendra importing Chinese arms to modernize the Nepal Army. In its latter years, however, the Panchayat degenerated into a cabal of cronyism that was increasingly cut-off from its grassroots.

The restored multiparty democracy of 1990, a plainly Indian model in sharp contrast with other models of political governance that Nepal could (and should) have adopted, soon fell victim to its own contradictions, there being two basic flaws inherent in it. The first was that a multiparty democracy without a strong tradition of party culture or a robustly independent, non-partisan civil service soon degenerated into fratricidal in-fighting cabals in every party. Fights between cliques and personalities, favouritism in the civil service, unending litigation in the courts to address political problems, bad water treaties with India and outrageously expensive projects with the international donors as well as the inherent corruption that went with it, quickly became the norm. Nepal saw some nine governments in the ten years between 1990 and 2000; and the seeds of the Maoist insurrection that was to ravage the country was sown in 1995, primarily (to quote a popular and colourful Maoist slogan) to fight a ‘bourgeois Parliament which is nothing but a butcher’s shop displaying a goat’s head but in reality is selling dog’s meat.’

 

The second flaw was more structural: in the Westminster first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all model, not only does the Parliament mathematically represent a minority of voters but, by allowing the legislature to give birth to the executive, it also fails in its check-and-balance separation of powers. The primary purpose of becoming an MP then becomes not a mere legislator representing a constituency and checking the excesses of the executive but an executive minister indulging in those very excesses, making even the opposition of parties outside the ruling coalition a joke. In the last elections in Nepal in November 2013, for example, the winning candidate in the Mahottari-4 constituency obtained less than the minimum required ten per cent of the votes cast and thus, while winning the elections and being sworn in as an MP, forfeited his deposit. He and others like him will serve as the poster boys for the boycotting Maoists who promise to burn any constitution drafted by the current Parliament that they argue does not truly represent the people.

On 1 June 2001, a Nepal that was already groaning under the double weight of a flawed Westminster model of parliamentary democracy and a raging Maoist insurgency, was dealt a third blow. The royal massacre by a love-crazed crown prince at a family dinner undermined the very legitimacy of the monarchy, constitutional though it may have been. In the vacuum that ensued in Nepali policy, various national and international forces played their hands to further their particular interests. And, judging by what has been said by the likes of Pranab Mukherjee (then defence minister) on Al-Jazeera TV, by what has been written by the likes of S.D. Muni of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, India – or rather (given that Indian politicians had no time for the non-Pakistani neighbourhood) its intelligence spooks – took a lead role in ensuring a ‘regime change’ in Nepal between 2000 to 2006 to suit its perceived interests of ensuring a more India friendly regime in Nepal. That adventurism has essentially backfired and, as described by a losing Madheshi politician recently, ‘We did not lose, it is India that lost!’

 

In the first stage, even while declaring the Maoists as terrorists (before the Nepali government had done so), the powers that be in Delhi provided a safe haven to them and their anti-Nepal activities in India after its Baburam-Prachanda leadership promised in writing not to harm Indian interests. This happened under the Vajpayee-led BJP government, with Jaswant Singh as foreign minister (and is colourfully described in a book chapter by Muni). In the next stage under the Manmohan Singh government, India’s success lay in its international diplomacy, in being able to convince both the Americans and the Europeans to unite behind India’s Nepal policy. The matters came to a head-to-head clash at the November 2005 Dhaka SAARC summit between King Gyanendra and the Indian foreign policy establishment over granting occupied Afghanistan SAARC membership (Indo-American proposition) versus granting China and Japan observer status (King Gyanendra’s desperate counter proposal to prevent a Kennan Doctrine type western encirclement of China using SAARC as the platform).

 

It was a quick unravelling after that. A colour-coded ‘Rhododendron Revolution’, that human rights and democracy NGOs are famous around the world for, ensued in Nepal after the agitating parliamentary parties and the insurgent Maoists were brought together in a 12-point Delhi deal at the end of November 2005. After a few months of street agitation and heightened Maoist bombings, as well as mediation by the former Maharaja of Kashmir, Karan Singh, as Manmohan Singh’s emissary, a regime change was effected that did away with the 1990 Constitution as well as (eventually by 2008) the monarchy in Nepal. What followed has been political instability, as diverse cliques brought together to overthrow the monarchy found it impossible to agree on anything else.

The first Constituent Assembly elected in 2008 for a two-year term failed to draft a new constitution even after self-extending its term four times and ignominiously collapsed in May 2012 without even being able to convene for a last sitting. A new Constituent Assembly was elected under the aegis of a chief justice-led interim government in November 2013 (cobbled up through strong Indian pressure) which artificially prevented the hardline ‘Dash’ Maoists from participating in the polls. It saw the same forces of 1990 (and the same leaders that failed the country then) back in power with the pro-Indian ‘Cash’ Maoists as well as the Madheshi parties cut down to size. But this dispensation groans and creaks along providing even less hope of being able to draft a new constitution or stabilizing the Nepali polity.

In all these shenanigans, the overt involvement of India’s intelligence agencies has been so openly blatant as to prompt Nepali Congress’s senior socialist politician Pradeep Giri to exclaim in exasperation: ‘All super powers engage in undermining the politics of their smaller neighbours to favour their concerns – why can’t you Indians do this more quietly and respectably behind the curtains?!’ The unending instability in Nepal has also forced the EuroAmericans to question the wisdom of ‘outsourcing’ their neighbourhood policy in Nepal in particular and the SAARC region barring Pakistan in general to India. The initial diplomatic success of India in getting the EuroAmericans (the self-styled ‘international community’) behind its agenda for much of the last decade has now flipped into a demerit, more so because a passive China has become diplomatically much more counter-assertive.

 

The forthcoming May elections in Mughlan, while far from seeing an overt debate on foreign policy, will eventually be judged for the kind of leadership it will throw up to oversee India’s march into the 21st century. Will it be one that can assume diplomatic to developmental leadership in South Asia and bestride the international arena once more as Nehru did in the 1950s? Or will it be one condemned to preside over a fractious and squabbling polity that, far from providing creative leadership in the neighbourhood, cannot even ensure that its own house is in order? Will India’s new leadership steer South Asia with seductive skills or will it opt for an overbearing coercive approach? Nepalis, together with the rest of South Asia, will be watching, analyzing, and judging very carefully.