E-Kantipur

Nepal-India relationship discussions rose like cyclones in Kathmandu over the last few days. Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai’s four-day official visit to India coincided with the “India-Nepal Festival of Literature” organised by the Indian Embassy and Nepal-India BP Koirala Foundation in tandem with the apex body of SAARC writers based in Delhi. from 20-22 October 2011. I helped with seminars and Nepali poet Manu Manjil of Itahari arranged poetry readings for two evenings at the wonderful milieu of Patan Museum. A three-day meeting of Nepali and Indian scholars and poets opened up avenues of relationship that transcended time and space. But in some sessions addressed by the likes of professor Lok Raj Baral, former Indian envoy Deb Mukharji and others, the bottom-line of two countries’ relationship were addressed in candid language. Clearly, the two occasions foregrounded the subtleties of the Nepal-India relationship, which despite big avalanches that have occurred occasionally, continued to be functional.

Just as the last slides of Nepali artist Ragini Upadhyay’s art prominently and Indian artist ArpanaCour’s art exclusively were projected on the screen, Baburam Bhattarai returned from his visit to India. Just after landing, he spoke about his achievements, and promised to dispel doubts about the Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (BIPPA) signed between Nepal and India on October 21 in India. There he could hear faintly the sound of protest raised outside by no other than his own comrades, some Maoist cadres called bymedia as those belonging to the disgruntled Mohan Baidya faction. The youths were there to greet Bhattarai, their own party vice-chairman with black flags. That demonstration, though small, was unprecedented. No prime minister was ever greeted by his own party cadres beforewith black flags at the airport in Nepali history. That does not bode well for the Maoist party as a “unified” communist force. One would guess the party is heading for a split or if it remains under one organisation at all, it will be a historical political organisation of uneasy bedfellows. For a party with a revolutionary past that entered a new mode of history less than half a decade ago, such penchant for mutual antagonism cannot stay without affecting the overall structure of politics. It assumes greater meaning at a time when the time for making a draft of the constitution is running out.

Nepali trade and business organisations and some economists have welcomed the deal. But what is irking one faction of the Maoists and some Nepali Congress and UML leaders is that such agreements would burden the Nepali side with liabilities that they would not be ableto meet, and the very unpredictability of the occurrence of incidents. But behind this psyche there may also be an underlying logic—no investors in Nepal shall be guaranteed protection and Nepal government will bear no liabilities for any investment risks that might occur under adverse conditions. “That is fine, but who would come to invest here?” questioned a businessman the other day. The Maoist lawmaker and scholar Hari Roka says no country today would invest in other countries without such agreements. Roka’s figures show that India has signed BIPPA with 88 countries in the

last two decades and China has signed with 133 countries. Roka sees Nepali politicians’ ignorance and a habit of protesting without going deep into the subject. He calls it protest for the sake of protest (Kantipur, October 24).

These debates are interesting, however. In the days to come, the complacent politicians and economists, business communities and citizens like us will have to discuss these questions however unpalatable they may be. How long can you maintain the minuscule size of the pie and continue to theorise modalities about sharing and stealing it (I mean by resorting to camouflaged corruption deals) under different pretexts? How long will this pie last? But would this agreement open up uncalled for problems, if so what would be the nature of these challenges like? How long can Nepal continue to send the Nepali youths to work under the scorching heat of the desert to make seven thousand rupees a month?

The high-level committee will review the 1950 Treaty, eminent persons will take up cudgels to strengthen Nepal-India ties, agreements about supply of electricity will be made effective and Nepal-China areas of cooperation will be discussed, too. But Bhattarai’s agreement has introduced a challenge that both supporters and detractors of the deal will not be able to ignore even after Bhattarai quits. But that challenge will not go down in history as Bhattarai’s gaddaari but as a theme that Nepal cannot ignore anymore now. Other attendant political questions will be discussed alongside that but Nepali governments and politicians should, as Hari Roka says, study and work with the currents of times.

Sung Ho Kim in his Cambridge book Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (2004:2) says a long dormant civil society emerged and reasserted itself after crisis of the Keynsian economy, the “collapse of the communist bloc” and “third world democratisation.” He warns about hasty conclusions that people draw at such times. The Western capitalist logic of the “demise of history” turned out to be such hasty conclusion. Nepali civil society had begun to reassert itself following the collapse of the power of monarchy in Nepal, but became weak afterwards. But as the challenge posed by new agreements and arguments about going forward come, the role of civil societies as educators, rebels and peacemakers will be very important.

We concluded our literary meeting by discussing issues that go beyond the current problems but are not indifferent to them. When South Asia was bleeding from partition in the last years of the forties, Nepal remained calm, poor, and its people subdued by its Rana rulers. The freed India saw it as a space and time to turn to for forgetting the experience haunted by the spectre of history and its traumatic effects. If India and Nepal work with that sense of history, Nepal will remain the land that India saw it to be then, and which it should work to keep peaceful and progressing. And Nepal should learn to trust India and freely discuss mutual matters. The debates that have started should be free, open and constructive.

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