Time for India and Nepal to make up

Time for India and Nepal to make up

By, Kanak Mani Dixit, a writer and journalist based in Kathmandu, is founding Editor of the magazine, ‘Himal Southasian’

Context

• India-Nepal relations got strained when Nepal has released its map including Limpiyadhura, Kalapani, Susta and Lipulekh.

Fear of abandonment

• Right off the bat, New Delhi analysts must try and understand why Nepal does not have an ‘independence day’.
• From the Kathmandu perspective, Indian diplomacy seems increasingly unresponsive under the centralised control of the Prime Minister’s Office.
• The cause of the chasm that has opened up between Kathmandu and Delhi relates to the disputed ownership of the triangle north of Kumaon, including the Limpiyadhura ridgeline, the high pass into Tibet at Lipu Lek, and the Kalapani area hosting an Indian Army garrison.
• Nepal’s claim is centred on the Treaty of Sugauli (1815), whose language reads the “Rajah of Nipal renounces all claim to the countries lying to the west of the River Kali”.
• No agreement has superseded that treaty, and so no subsequent cartographic chicanery by the Company Sarkar or successor governments can undermine the 1815 document.
• Nepal Govt. conducted the 1953 national census in the Limpiyadhura villages, whose citizens also voted in the first democratic elections of 1959. Land records were kept in Nepal’s district headquarters of Darchula and Baitadi until access was blocked in the 1960s by the Indian base at Kalapani.
• Kathmandu responded with sensitivity to Indian strategic concerns before and after the 1962 China-India war by allowing the Indian army post to be stationed within what was clearly its territory at Kalapani and not publicly demanding its withdrawal.
• However, following the advent of democracy in 1990, the demand for evacuation of Kalapani gained momentum.
• Kathmandu’s diplomats deny the accusation of passivity over the decades, saying that as the weaker power, Nepal preferred quiet diplomacy and that Kalapani had never been off the table since talks began in the early 1980s.

Road to Lipu Lek

• From the time when a joint communiqué was issued in 1997 during I.K. Gujral’s prime ministership down to the present time of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the two governments have agreed that a territorial dispute exists on upstream Kali and have assigned negotiators.
• A border demarcation team was able to delineate 98% of the 1,751 km Nepal-India frontier, but not Susta along the Gandaki flats and the upper tracts of the Kali.
• In 2014, India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj agreed to the establishment of a Border Working Group, which was announced by Prime Minister Modi and Prime Minister Sushil Koirala.
• It too failed to make headway.
• In August 2019, India’s Minister for External Affairs S. Jaishanker and Nepal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Pradip Gyawali assigned the task to the two Foreign Secretaries.
• It was after India published its new political map in November following the bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh that the pressure arose for Kathmandu to put out its own map incorporating the Limpiyadhura finger.
• Prime Minister Oli’s position became untenable, and he proceeded with the constitutional amendment to certify the new map.
• Indian diplomats lobbied to keep Nepal’s Parliament from adopting the amendment, but Kathmandu needed it for the sake of cartographic parity with India in future talks.
• Truth be told — that the Limpiyadhura triangle exists now on the maps of both countries should not obstruct negotiations, when you consider that the smaller area of Kalapani, too, has remained on the maps of both countries for decades.

Dousing the volcano

• The ice was broken on August 15 when Prime Minister Oli called Prime Minister Modi on the occasion of India’s Independence Day, but that is just the beginning.
• Talks must be held, for which the video conference facility that has existed between the two Foreign Secretaries must be re-activated.
• Delay will wound the people of Nepal socially, culturally and economically.
• As the larger country, India may think it will hurt less, but only if it disregards its poorest citizens from Purvanchal to Bihar and Odisha, who rely on substantial remittance from Nepal.
• India does have experience of successfully resolving territorial disputes with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Pakistan bilaterally and through third-party adjudication.
• One difficulty is the apparent absence of backchannel diplomacy between the two capitals, which helped in ending the 2015 blockade.

Way forward

• There is an immediate need to de-escalate and compartmentalise.
• The first requires verbal restraint on the part of Prime Minister Oli and India’s willingness to talk even as the pandemic continues. India is required to maintain status quo in the disputed area. This means halting construction on the Lipu Lek track, which is the immediate cause of the present crisis.
• Not to prejudge the outcome, if Nepal were to gain full possession of Limpiyadhura, it should declare the area a ‘zone of peace and pilgrimage’.
• The larger area must be demilitarised by both neighbours to ensure security for themselves, while the Kailash-Manasarovar route is kept open for pilgrims. The idea is certainly worth a thought: a Limpiyadhura Zone of Peace and Pilgrimage.