Revision as of 21:11, 30 April 2015

The Indians and the Nepalese are one people living in two sovereign nations. Countless Gurkhas have laid down their lives defending India’s sovereignty and integrity. May the two brotherly nations always continue to respect and defend each other’s sovereignty and integrity.

Some recent bumps

India’s help to Nepal terrific, but don’t crow about it

Keshav Pradhan, TNN The Times of India | Apr 28, 2015

On many occasions, over-zealous Indian politicians and media spoilt whatever goodwill their government had generated in Nepal.

For example, the Gujral government, which graciously allowed Nepali entrepreneurs zero-duty export trade, got Delhi more ridicule than praise after the Indian media wrote extensively in its opposition.

A while later, a leading Indian weekly published "Nepal Game Plan", a collection of unsubstantiated information that associated many top Nepali politicians and entrepreneurs with Pakistan's ISI.

The projection of Nepalis as collaborators in the IC-814 hijack added more to their anger that later culminated into anti-Indian riots over the Hiritik Roshan episode.

The Hiritik Roshan riots of Dec 2000

Associated Press and Reuters/ abcnews

On Christmas night in Dec 2000 a rumour swept through southern Nepalese towns that Indian film star Hrithik Roshan had told an interviewer that he hated Nepal and its people.

None of the demonstrators in Katmandu said they knew anyone who had actually seen the supposed remarks Roshan made.

“We are protesting since the statement hurt the sentiments of the Nepalese and our pride,” said demonstrator Ramesh Shreshta, who conceded he had not seen the alleged interview.

He and others shrugged off Roshan’s denials, shouting “Down with Hrithik, down with Indian elements!”

Indian businesses were vandalized, and windows at The State Bank of India were smashed.

Roshan denied today ever making any comments against Nepal and claimed competitors are trying to ruin his reputation.

“I can name all the interviews I have given. All the tapes are there for anyone to see anytime,” Roshan told STAR NEWS television channel in India. “I have never spoken against Nepal or the Nepalese people, whom I love.”

He said he believed members of the criminal underworld may have been responsible for stirring the trouble.

Pratyoush Onta’s analysis

Two months later Pratyoush Onta would write ‘The Paradox of the Nepali Mindset: Hate India, Love India’ Himal February 2001.

Mr Onta first recounted—with clear disapproval—some of the slogans that the mobs had shouted in Decmber 2000:

You ask for proof that Hrithik actually said it? The people on the streets do not need proof!

Hrithik is India. India is our big brother. Big brother imperialist! Respect our sovereignty! Go home big brother India!

Anti-India means anybody looking Indian must not be spared. Is this the house of Mr so-and-so?

Mr Onta’s extremely balanced analysis of the Hrithik Roshan riots can be summarised thus, in his own words:

It is now clear that the actor Hrithik Roshan did not insult “Nepal and Nepalis” in any of his interviews. It is also clear that the rumour that started the whole trouble in the mid-Tarai Nepali towns was spread by someone who hoped to ignite a conflagration. Clearly, he got his wish, seeing the damage done to the national psyche after the Kathmandu riots of 26-27 December.

In the aftermath of this nerve-racking episode, the ‘anti-Indian’ nature of the rioting has received much play, both in the Nepali and Indian media. But of course it is much more than that, and to relegate it to purely a hostile outpouring against India and Indians would be restrictive and incorrect.

Indeed, there are several corrections to make at the outset. While international media reports suggested that all of Kathmandu Valley was ruled by mobs during those two days, the actual theatre of disturbance was confined to small pockets within Kathmandu town only. Patan and Bhaktapur, the other two cities of the Valley, remained calm. Even within Kathmandu, the demonstrations were restricted to the downtown areas of New Road, Ratna Park, Jamal, Thamel, Baneswar and Kalimati, without spillover to other localities. There were tyre-burnings in some locations along the Ring Road. The whole Valley was not burning.

In downtown Kathmandu (around New Road and Indrachowk), shops belonging to Nepalis of all ethnic and caste origins were attacked. Private property—irrespective of ownership demography—was destroyed… [It] was equally an …anti-property riot. A second striking aspect of the events of end-December was that they were opportune for the forces that want to put an end to Nepal’s experiment with political democracy. The violence … very soon became an anti-government protest. Apart from those affiliated to the various party-led student organisations, both the Maoists and royalists were out on the streets in force.

The Maoists were looking for newer ways to disrupt life in Kathmandu after their student wing had successfully forced all schools to close for a week in early December. The royalists who want the king to re-assume active power (so that they may get back to their authoritarian functions, under cover of the crown), for their part, have been using every opportunity to make the multi-party democratic establishment look more inefficient than it really is.

This was also an occasion for the small left parties to demonstrate evidence of their existence through street action.

The Nepali anti-India sentiment

No matter how we read the events of late December 2000, we cannot deny a strain of anti-India sentiments in Nepali society. ... It may surprise some, but the ‘anti-India’ sentiment does not have a permanent place even in the hearts of those who have shouted slogans against India on the streets or participated in supposedly ‘anti-India’ protests.

The Nepali anti-India sentiment is a deeply ambiguous one, and nowhere is this more true than among the leaders of the Nepali left. After all, they learned their Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, by and large, from Hindi translations of the original German, Russian and Chinese. And I would suppose that comrades Prachanda and Baburam acquire the guns and bullets for their Maoist platoons from the small arms racket in India.

In other words, the anti-India sentiment occupies only a particular (and limited) domain in the lives of the protestors and leaders alike. For, the same “anti-Indian” Nepali consumes Indian products profusely, travels in India on pilgrimage or pleasure as if it were his own backyard, and leaders in particular have no compunction in seeking help from the Indian embassy in getting sons and daughters admitted to Indian colleges and universities.

This paradox manifests itself in oft-visible acts of political opportunism. The need to portray themselves as opponents of Indian interests in Nepal is paramount for the political survival of small left parties, particularly when they do not hold the deciding balance in government coalitions. Take for example the case of Bamdev Gautam, present leader of the Communist Party of Nepal-Marxist-Leninist (CPN-ML), members of whose student wing led the riots in Kathmandu, and who upbraided a BBC interviewer on air for daring to enquire if he had proof of Roshan’s reported anti-Nepal statement.

Today, out of power and somewhat remote from it given his separation from the rump CPN-UML, Gautam tries hard to portray himself as anti-Indian. However, he did not have the diligence to vote against the overwhelmingly pro-India Mahakali Treaty signed some years ago. As someone who was himself some time a worker in India, Gautam may have tried to understand the kind of backlash anti-Indianism within Nepal can have vis-à-vis the hundreds of thousands of Nepali labourers in India.

Indian gatekeepers

The spatial distribution of the ‘anti-India’ sentiment within Nepal also deserves attention. This xenophobic attitude perhaps exists strongest in the large pahadi (hill) population that migrated to the Nepal Tarai since the eradication of malaria, and which lives in close proximity to the madhesi plains-people and the Indians close by across the border. The attitude may also survive to a smaller degree in the original inhabitants of the Tarai, the indigenous forest-dwellers who have been squeezed out of their habitats by homesteaders from north and south. However, in the wake of the events of late December [2000], it would seem that the hub of this hateful sentiment is within Kathmandu Valley itself.

The anti-madhesi sensibility of the original inhabitants of Kathmandu Valley was built up over history by rulers with a need to point at an enemy without. This inherited sensibility found occasion to grow in the ‘anti-India’ intellectual discourse of the Nepali left and of the proponents of the Panchayat regime (the nationalist vocabulary of these two strains are almost identical). It is because of this coming together of historical animosity on the one hand with the modern-day dogma of the Panchayat and the left on the other, that an ‘anti-India’ protest can transform so very easily into an “anti-madhesi” one. Although no one seems to quite know the dynamics of this slippage, this was how a protest against Hrithik Roshan quickly snowballed into a targeting of Nepalis of Tarai origin.

The “hate India, love India” Nepali paradox is also, of course, tied to acts of political opportunism in India. While the average Nepali is predisposed to ‘love’ India for the myriad of cultural and social links he has south of the border, his ‘hate’ is, besides the source already mentioned, stoked by the way in which the Indian state and establishment have targeted Nepal for various ills that are mostly India-specific. Take for example, the social currency given to the fiction that the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence is encouraged by the Nepali state itself to do mischief in the neighbouring Indian heartland.