Delhi visit of Nepali leaders
First look of ‘Shubha Love’ released
It would be wrong to single out the leaders of Madhesh-based parties for trying to appease the Indian establishment. Arguably, it was the subservience of our past government heads, all from Pahade community—each of them keen to cement his position at the top with New Delhi's blessings—that inadvertently invited the third economic blockade. Just before the promulgation of new constitution, among the notable visitors to Delhi were Messrs Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Sher Bahadur Deuba, two former prime ministers. Till date they have not divulged what was discussed during their deliberations with top Indian leaders. The Indian establishment now says that these leaders didn't live up to their promise. What had they exactly promised, if anything? And what is keeping Dahal and Deuba from coming clean? The global norm is to maintain a minute of such high level bilateral talks so that individual actors can later be held to account. But when it comes to deliberations between our political leaders and their Indian counterparts, most of it, it seems, is by design kept off the record.
This will also surely be the case with political discussions between the Madheshi leaders who are now in New Delhi and their Indian counterparts. Nepalis will once again have to depend on the (often unreliable) leaks to the press. But even before that we need to question the motive of Madheshi leaders. What made them ditch their scheduled talks with the Big Three on Friday night and instead go to the Indian Embassy for an audience with the Indian Ambassador? Now the same Madheshi leaders have all trooped to New Delhi when they should ideally be busy negotiating possible constitutional amendments. Whatever their underlying motive, the message that has been given to the Nepali people is crystal-clear: The Madheshi leaders believe solutions to their problems will be found in New Delhi, not Kathmandu. Now if they come back to Nepal and a deal is finally agreed for amendment of new constitution, it would appear as if New Delhi has, once again, dictated the terms of engagement in Nepal. And this time the Madhesh-based parties will have to shoulder the bulk of the blame.
The Indian establishment should also have learned its lesson by now. It should have learned that cultivating personal ties with individual Nepali leaders is, ultimately, fruitless. Otherwise there should have been no better person to do its bidding in Nepal than the current Nepali prime minister, KP Oli, who was until recently reputed as the UML leader closest to the Indian establishment, and even its intelligence agencies. Yet India seems determined to continue to cultivate personal ties with Nepali leaders so that it can create divides in Nepali polity and play in the vacuum. This old colonial policy of divide-and-rule, predictably, fans many anti-India flames in Nepal. Delhi must change its old mindset. Coming back to Madhesh-based parties, they seem to have lost faith in their ability to mobilize people. This is why they resorted to the self-defeating policy of blocking vital imports into Nepal—and now their collective pilgrimage to the Delhi durbar. We believe Nepali people are more than capable of finding solutions to their problems. But that is apparently not what our political leaders believe.
