June 20, 2024
KATHMANDU – The Poet Laureate of the 1950s, Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959), penned a lyrical essay, “Ke Nepal Sano Chha?” (Is Nepal small?), and claimed that Bharatmatako Mutu (The heart of mother Bharat) was “pretty, quiet and great”. The essayist takes cringeworthy poetic licences to glorify his homeland where “Wagner is using a spade, Shakespeare could be ploughing, Titian and Turner may be tending the sheep, Socrates contemplating in a cave …”!
Every country, irrespective of its size, has the right to adore itself if it doesn’t degenerate into collective narcissism. But it’s dangerous to fantasise that someone else will help end its misery or to hallucinate that all others are conspiring to harm its interests.
The anxiety that Narendra Modi’s electoral enthronement as a third-term prime minister of the most populous country in the world has caused everywhere is real. A beacon of hope for the freshly freed countries since the 1950s, India was often cited as an exemplar of slow but steady path from exploitative governance to social justice through democratic processes.
By re-electing “one of the worst autocratisers” for the third time, albeit with a lower margin, a significant section of Indian voters has shown that it values religious gratification of Hindutva chauvinism much more than its democratic credentials. Nepal was once “the only Hindu Kingdom” of the world, and it’s perhaps understandable that remnants of the ancien régime of the Shah and Rana clan look towards the entrenched Hindutva establishment in New Delhi with a poignant sense of longing and hope.
The sadness comes from the realisation that the Hindutva lobby in India doesn’t care much about what happens to the conservative elements in Kathmandu. Hope rekindles whenever a minor functionary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) makes a promissory statement to support the restoration of “Hindu Rashtra” in Nepal. However, the wishful expectations of Hindutva factions in the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party and the Nepali Congress stand on shaky grounds: Indian foreign policy is dictated by its geostrategic compulsions, geoeconomic considerations and geopolitical options. Cultural diplomacy is merely a tool at the hands of its adroit practitioners.
Fears of former Naxals, such as the de facto supremo of the ruling alliance Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli or the degenerate Maoists of Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s ilk, appear to be equally unfounded. National interests invariably triumph over ideological considerations in the implementation of foreign policy. The priorities of Modi 3.0 towards Nepal are unlikely to be much different from what they have been since 2015—quiet behind-the-scenes manoeuvres combined with studied indifference in public.
Strategic irrelevance
The Gandhian dreams of self-rule, self-sufficiency, social justice, non-domination and ethical rightness fired the Indian Independence Movement. The Nehruvian pursuit of modernity in political economy laid the foundations of a country emerging from some of the worst excesses of British colonialism. The Ambedkarite idea of India as “a social democracy firmly established on the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, and humanity” remained an aspiration till the aughties. Meanwhile, revivalists of “Hindu glory” had a completely different idea of India since the early 1920s.
The leadership of the Sangh Parivar wanted to replace all secular ambitions with the Savarkarite concept of Hindutva hegemony in a civilisational state of, for, and by the people who had their homeland, motherland, fatherland, and holy land within the Akhand Bharat.
When Premier Modi assumed office in 2014, he took care to cloak the Hindutva agenda with economic rhetoric. He managed to dupe some people for almost a decade with an enticing slogan of inclusive development. Back in the saddle with the cobbled majority of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and forced to rely on temperamental partners in the coalition, he has once again begun to repeat his beguiling bombasts of the past.
On the domestic front, Premier Modi may be forced to dilute his hardline Hindutva to maintain the cohesion within the NDA. However, the continuation of his team for external affairs shows that Indian foreign policy will stay its course. S. Jaishankar’s suave toughness has been retained by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Speaking at the First Gateway of India Dialogue in 2016 as the top bureaucrat of MEA, Jaishankar closed his speech with a statement of purpose: “A new normal is in the making, one where the business of Indian diplomacy is increasingly business.”
Jaishankar will continue to be tasked with procuring petroleum products from Russia, industrial goods from China, advancing military hardware from countries of the West, and managing the contradictions of being simultaneously in the Chinese-dominated BRICS and the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The sophisticated but blunt former bureaucrat shall be the face of Modi 3.0 in the international arena.
A scholar, Jaishankar, can elucidate about India being “non-Western” and “not anti-Western”, ignoring the distinction without an inherent difference in the proposition. Multipolarity is an oxymoron, and multi-alignment is just a jargon in the bipolar world of the Cold War II. Despite its geoeconomic handshake with the Russians, the geostrategic foot of Indian diplomacy finds Western grounds firmer and friendlier than its Chinese challengers.
Perhaps the former spymaster Ajit Doval will have a more prominent role in geostrategic affairs as the third-time National Security Advisor. He has been elevated to the rank of a Cabinet Minister and put on par with the former secretary of the MEA. When National Security Advisor of the United States Jake Sullivan came to New Delhi on June 17, 2024, he did meet Jaishankar. Still, he held “comprehensive discussion on a broad range of issues” with his counterpart. If Nepal figured at all in their conversations, it probably was connected with countering the Chinese influence in South Asia.
Tactical impassivity
From the legions of the imperial epoch through the armada of the colonial era to the cyber security challenges of the AI age, economic considerations have always remained the main concern of all competing powers. Tall talks of tourism and hydropower notwithstanding, Nepal is essentially a resource-poor country with the export of unskilled and semi-skilled youths to the labour markets of the world as its primary source of income. There is a reason the four pillars of Premier Modi’s economic team—Ambani, Adani, Tata and Jindal—aren’t too keen on investing in the land of Pashupatinath.
Competency in science and technology is important in determining the strategic significance of relatively smaller countries. Nepal’s last indigenous innovation was the watermill. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are unlikely to prefer Banepa over Bengaluru in setting up their data management facilities.
Nepal can no longer count upon the remaining Bharatmatako Mutu with Premier Modi’s Agnipath scheme on stream, and recruitment of Nepali Gurkhas in suspension. The four-time prime minister of Britain, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), described the first principle of his foreign policy: Good government at home. Nepal must discard its obsession with the paranoid “yam between boulders” formulation and aim to be a confident pipal tree growing out of the crevices of the mighty rocks.