The British would arguably have easily overrun Nepal had the country been all plains. In a flat terrain, there was no way Khukuris and muskets could have matched the modern British artillery. It was rather in the narrow mountain passes on the roads leading up to Kathmandu where Gorkhali warriors made life difficult for the invading armies. Combine these dangerous mountain passes with the as menacing malarial swamps, which the British had to cross just to get to the foot of the mountains, and the task of conquering Kathmandu became nigh impossible.
Robert D Kaplan—the famous foreign policy analyst who in 2011 was named as one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and author of such bestsellers as Balkans Ghosts (1993) and Monsoon (2010)—would agree. In The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, Kaplan makes a convincing case that even as the world is being supposedly "flattened" by forces of globalization and technology, the best predictor of a country's fortunes remains its geography. Take Nepal again.
Nepal is so much a part of the Indian 'sphere of influence' (Why, look at the map.), India won't allow any other power to play in its traditional backyard. It wants a complete and total domination. So when India felt, rightly or wrongly, that top Nepali leaders were cozying up to China in the lead up to the new constitution, New Delhi didn't even have to think twice about imposing a crippling economic blockade on its closest neighbor. But why is India so paranoid about the Chinese in particular? Geography again.
India and China share over 4,000-km border. But China does not even recognize the McMohan Line, the 890-km stretch of the border separating Tibet from India that was settled between British India and independent Tibet in 1914. The minor skirmishes in this unsettled border ultimately led the two countries to a war in 1962, which India badly lost. Since then India is spooked whenever it feels China is trying to increase its footprint in South Asia, and particularly in Nepal and Bhutan, the two countries India considers as firmly falling under its sphere of influence.
Even in the hi-tech world of 21st century, Kaplan believes, the best predictor of the state of affairs between countries, big or small, is to first to look at their political maps. All major conflicts in the world taking place right now—Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, even Europe after Paris—can be traced back to the inevitable clash between natural geography and artificial lines drawn up by western colonizers.
Kaplan finds it hard to think of Pakistan as one nation-state, for example. The northwestern province of Baluchistan has throughout its history been composed of self-ruling princely states. But post Indian independence, these states were arbitrarily clubbed together under a single Baluchistan province. Unsurprisingly, the Baloch people to this day struggle to identify themselves as Pakistanis. In their imagination, only the Punjabis to the east, who comprise nearly 60 percent of national population, are proper Pakistanis. So any attempt to impose Pakistani national identity on the free-spirited Baloch people, in Kaplan's view, is doomed from the start.
Some may make a similar case for Madheshis. The Nepali state under monarchy had tried to impose on them a distinct Pahadi national identity. But the Madheshis, living in the lowlands of Nepal bordering India, found more in common with people across the border than with the discriminating inhabitants of Kathmandu and other hill regions. The close kinship of Madheshis with Indians across the border, Kaplan would say, is largely a function of geography. Perhaps this is also the reason that Kathmandu has over time found it convenient to dismiss Madheshi aspirations for equal rights as 'Indian designs' to balkanize Nepal.
The centrality of geography in geopolitics, however, does not mean geography is everything. Kaplan believes actions of humans can at times be as important. When Germany got a raw deal at the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first world war, it made resurgence of German nationalism inevitable. But it needed the cunning and braggadocio of one man, Adolph Hitler, to harness the collective sense of German victimhood and push the world into the bloodiest war in the history of mankind.
So it would be wise, in Kaplan's view, to see geography as the primary factor in shaping both national and international characters of individual countries—but not the only factor. But it also would be foolish to believe, as Thomas Friedman does, that geopolitical boundaries are now irrelevant in a 'flat' world. Just ask a common Nepali who is being forced to undergo great hardship because he, despite being literally born into the lap of a regional behemoth, would like to retain his unique identity. His plight is the 'revenge of geography' writ large.
Kaplan believes the most likely places of future—geography-determined—conflicts will be Eurasia (the hard-edged Russian nationalism being cultivated by Vladimir Putin a factor) and the South China Sea (with the Chinese determined to minimize American presence in its watery backyard).
Kaplan's book is a timely reminder that geography matters as much in the age of GPS-guided precision missiles as it did when wars were rather announced by mounted horsemen.
biswas.baral@gmail.com
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