Who’s playing whom, pray?

By Maila Baje

After a series of fumbles, the government explains that Samanta Goel, chief of India’s notorious Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), met Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli late at night as a special envoy of his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. That’s probably true, but not in the way we’re being led to believe.

Clearly, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have studiously refused to take ownership of the regime change New Delhi effected here in the spring of 2006. This is not entirely so because of their lingering affinity for Nepal’s monarchy and Hindu statehood. At the core is the wider BJP fraternity’s general abhorrence of RAW, which they see as Congress-created abomination.

Now, let’s be clear here. The BJP values covert/clandestine research, analysis and – yes – operations deemed so vital to advancing India’s national interest. Still, today’s establishment in New Delhi also views RAW as an instrument of subversion against the BJP.

Modi spent his first term reining in this ‘rogue’ agency, at least the parts he deemed such. How closely the restructuring of the institutional set-up of India’s defense and security apparatus has brought India’s premier external spy agency under that umbrella remains to be seen. Nepal is the litmus test, it would be fair to say.

By mid-2006, even a cursory reading of the 12-point understanding was enough to underscore its loss of relevance. Each subsequent compromise was merely a part of RAW’s sustained effort to maintain the basic applicability of Delhi Compromise II. Things could have changed in 2014, with the sweeping change of guard in New Delhi. But RAW persuaded Modi et al. that extending the gestation period was that was needed.

After the fiasco of India’s earthquake relief in 2015, the BJP’s patience was bound to wear thin. Then Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, who wanted Nepal to delay promulgating the new Constitution to address the demands of Madhesi groups, instead got an earful from the leaders of the Nepali Congress, Unified Marxist-Leninists and Maoists.

Now, Jaishankar, as the son of K. Subrahmanyam, the doyen of Indian strategic affairs, easily detected several messages lurking behind that message. Just how many games was RAW playing in Nepal? Before Modi et al. could figure that out, the unofficial blockade became a worse mess. Even the Indian Congress party, which had mounted an official trade and transit embargo in 1989-1990, began accusing the BJP of bullying Nepal.

Ultimately, it took the militaries of the two countries to work out a compromise. It wasn’t much of a one for the Indians, who engineered Oli’s ouster. And yet the public face of Nepali resistance went on to lead communists into a landslide electoral victory. He returned to the premiership to take his crusade into new cartographic and figurative heights.

Were Nepali leaders now listening more to the Chinese, Americans and Europeans? They didn’t need to find out. What Modi et al. knew was that if the Nepali political establishment listened to any Indians, they would have to be from RAW.

So Goel arrives in Kathmandu with Modi’s ultimatum. He wasn’t too bothered about the public glare and met everyone who he thought mattered. After all, his organization was on the line, too. Modi’s henchmen leaked information so selectively that we are now wondering whether Oli has been a RAW asset all along.

Goel’s other known Nepali interlocutor, Dr Baburam Bhattarai, had no problem. In fact, he has been elevated to the role of Oli’s putative successor. Modi et al. weren’t too focused on the other Nepali leaders Goel met. They are still denying having met India spook-in-chief.

RAW may have forced the Chinese, Americans and Europeans to reassess the respective values they have assigned to individual Nepali protagonists. The Chinese and American ambassadors spent part of the Dasain interregnum singing and cooking, respectively. It’s RAW that’s facing the greatest pressure – and from India’s generals, no less.

As the bilateral territorial dispute was escalating earlier this year, Indian Army chief Gen. Manoj Mukund Naravane said Nepal might have been acting at the behest of others. Because of the India-China border tensions, everyone thought he meant China.

Gen. Naravane subsequently sought to clarify his comment, which failed to gain traction here or there. He wasn’t terribly bothered, either. Otherness in Nepal, after all, has ever-broadening connotations.

The conventional wisdom is that India is itching for a fight with China. But what if the Indian top brass are merely interested in replenishing defense coffers, and not in a full-fledged conflict? Might this help explain why Gen. Naravane is all set to fly in with a straight face to accept Nepal Army’s honorary generalship?

People’s Review Print Edition