For Nepal and India, the road ahead is difficult

Siddharth Varadarajan

Among the hurdles: The parties' lack of confidence, as well as New Delhi's anxiety over the U.N. involvement in the disarmament of the Maoists and elections to a constituent assembly.

Momentous though the events and accomplishments of the past few weeks have been, the struggle for democracy in Nepal is perhaps entering its most difficult phase only now. As the country moves towards elections to a constituent assembly, the ingenuity and wisdom of not just the Nepalese political forces but also of India will be put to the test. The choices each makes will help to determine whether the `April Revolution' reaches its final destination or disappears in the quicks and of palace intrigue and political cowardice.

Amidst the exhilaration and excitement of the people's movement in Nepal, India's momentary suspension of disbelief following Karan Singh's fatal meeting with King Gyanendra stands out as the one discordant note.

Whatever New Delhi intended, people in Kathmandu saw in both the choice of the special envoy and the subsequent Indian endorsement of the monarch's cunning first proclamation a sign that India cast its lot with the palace. To make matters worse, this syndrome of mixed signals - of `tough' messages delivered, sometimes in private, to an intractable monarch by envoys enamoured of kingship, or petrified of the Maoists - continued right up to the bitter end.

At a time when lakhs of people were on the streets protesting King Gyanendra's ploy of asking the Seven-Party Alliance to nominate its Prime Minister and take executive power, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told journalists accompanying him to Hanover that the king was acting in the "right direction."

He also needlessly endorsed the discredited two-pillar theory of constitutional monarchy being as indispensable to stability in Nepal as multi-party democracy. In the same unhelpful vein, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan chipped in from Germany that India might resume arms supplies to the Royal Nepal Army if the situation in the country continued to deteriorate.

Saran's eleventh-hour intervention - at a press conference last Saturday - that India stood with the people of Nepal and not with any royal pillar retrieved India's standing on the streets of Kathmandu. But unless the underlying problem which plagues India's Nepal policy is tackled, ambiguity is bound to crop up again.

India's Nepal problem has two dimensions, which are interlinked. First, New Delhi does not fully appreciate that a thoroughgoing democracy including a republic, if that is what the Nepalese want, will be good for India. Secondly, subsequent governments have allowed multiple channels of communication which amplify the existing policy dissonance in Delhi and create maximum confusion.

Instead of the Indian embassy and ambassador, acting on the instructions of the Ministry of External Affairs, being the sole conduit for messages between India and the Nepalese establishment and political parties, a large number of interlocutors and busybodies have involved themselves in the process.

There are the special envoys with their one-on-one meetings with King Gyanendra, where nobody else knows what is discussed. There are the Ministry of Defence and the Chief of the Army Staff, who believe in running their own lines of communication with the RNA.

Then there are tantric interlopers and Hindutva fanatics who further contribute to the radio clutter. More noise also comes from our legion of ex-rajas, rajvadas and `cadets' who have family ties with the Narayanhiti Palace and who intercede at crucial moments with the ruling party to ensure that India does not side with the people of Nepal.

Somewhere in the middle of this unholy mess are the intelligence agencies, which also appear not to know what India should be doing. For example, their agents turned a blind eye to meetings between the Nepal Maoists and the SPA, which were crucial to the mass mobilisation witnessed on the streets of Kathmandu in April.

But their boss, India's intelligence czar, worries endlessly about the security threat posed by the Maoists and is reportedly keen on turning the RNA's weapons tap back on again.

India might have muddled its way through the thicket of policy dissonance to emerge, finally, on the side of the people, but there is one major obstacle still to be overcome.

This is the official anxiety about allowing the United Nations to play a role in the implementation of the SPA-Maoist road map for peace.

Now that Nepal's Parliament has unanimously passed a resolution calling for elections to a constituent assembly, it is time for both Kathmandu and New Delhi to get serious about how those elections are to be conducted.

Since the Maoists are unlikely to surrender their arms until after the palace's military powers are neutralised, some kind of international supervision will be needed to provide assurances of a level playing field to all during elections to the constituent assembly and even while the body meets.

The Maoists say they are prepared to confine their armed fighters to the barracks under U.N. supervision pending elections and their eventual integration into a new national army along with elements of the RNA. Such a formula provides the only viable option for insurgency to end peacefully.

But without international oversight, this is impossible to implement. For obvious reasons, India cannot involve itself in this process and would not want the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) there either. Nor would India want the task executed by a `contact group' led, inevitably, by European countries which are part of Nato's overall command structure.

Courtesy: The Hindu