Honestly speaking, India and Indians in Nepal are not thought of as our well-wishers. And for this, India itself is largely responsible. Take the case of newsprint hold-up of a publication house in Nepal a few months ago. Take the instance of a recent Indian Embassy ‘intervention’ in Nepali media and the never-ending border encroachment issue. Such excesses fuel the latent anti-India sentiments in the Nepali psyche, which burst at the opportune time. Recall the Hrithik Roshan episode of 2000. Kathmandu witnessed the death of four persons, including two school-going children, over the alleged anti-Nepal remark made by the Indian movie star in an interview with a television channel. Life was paralyzed in Kathmandu. Many Indian businessmen were attacked. The protest developed into an eruption of sentimental nationality. As a result, Ministry of Information and Communication had to issue orders and directives to all cinema halls in the country telling them not to screen any movie of the star. This is, in the most brutally uninhibited term possible, an example of hatred of Nepalis against India.
Why do we hate India? Or why does India intervene in Nepali affairs? Why cannot our leaders, when it comes to facing Indian authorities, see eye-to-eye and contradict them? It’s an open secret that Nepali leaders simply nod with the Indian authorities no matter how hoarse they cry against India in mass meetings and media interviews. I have studied, on television, some gestures with which Nepali politicians often respond to Indian officials. They virtually submit themselves while with them. Why does this happen? Surely, it is not just because they are a big and rich country. We have a neighbor in the north bigger and richer than India and with which we are comfortable.
It requires wit of history experts and acumen of international relations scholars to fully dissect the anatomy of this phenomenon of hatred against India. But a little historical awareness I own is enough for me to ponder on the root of revulsion against India. In fact, this hatred begins from 1816. Pre-1816, Nepal was an empire. It had annexed Kumaon and Garhwal and had expanded as far as the Satlaj river. But the defeat of Nepal in 1814-16 war and the subsequent Sugauli Treaty gave us a lot of wounds. Ludwig F Stiller calls the Sugauli treaty “a beginning rather than an end to Nepal’s time of troubles.” In The Silent Cry, Stiller even suggests that had Nepal not lost that war, we would have been free from the historical burdens of Kot Massacre and Rana Regime. The treaty halted the economic development of Nepal. It amputated western provinces of Greater Nepal and gave a psychic shock to Nepalis seriously weakening their self-confidence. Following the treaty, the permanent residency of British in Nepal was officially established and Nepal turned into a semi-British Protectorate. For the first time in history, Nepalis had to learn that there was some force far more superior and powerful than them and to which they had to submit. Henceforth, they could only respond with anger, frustration, and hatred. It made them diffident. Stiller calls this loss “Trauma of Defeat.” In the collective consciousness of Nepali psyche, this trauma thrives afresh.
After the Sugauli Treaty, Nepalis learnt that there was a force far more superior than them. Henceforth, they could only respond with anger, frustration, and hatred.
Trauma, by nature, leaves an emotional shock, often having a lasting psychic effect on the victims. The trauma of defeat in Nepal has taken the form of cultural trauma which occurs, according to a pioneer cultural trauma theorist Jeffery C Alexander, “when members of collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.” Trauma is undeletable from the community’s psyche. It takes root in memory, which passes from one generation to another.
It is this trauma, which is one of the deterrents of Nepal-India friendship. We do not regard Indians as our friends because we know that they, once the subjects of the rulers whom our forefathers had conquered, own the territory that once belonged to us. And on the part of India, while it has its own trauma of colonial rule and 1947 partition to attend to, it gloats over the fact that its formers masters, the Britishers, had once defeated the Gorkhali Empire. It imagines its former masters’ victory as its own and is apparently rationalizing its painful colonial past by attempting, by all means, to maintain the legacy of its former masters over this state. Neither India nor Nepal has freed themselves from this historical memory.
Trauma scholars suggest a way out of this seemingly irremediable trauma deadlock. They hold that victims have to unleash trauma by talking it out. It is a therapy. They also contend that if humanity is restored both between perpetrators and victims, all other biases and injustices can be won over and even cured. Such an approach will play a vital role in helping to reestablish harmony, brotherhood, and camaraderie between the two parties. But when these two victims (remember that India is perhaps a more serious trauma patient than Nepal) grudge over unalterable past and manifest the disappointments of the past through their present deeds and policies, it is likely to deepen hatred against each other and keep Indians and Nepalis from becoming brothers.
mbpoudyal@yahoo.com
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