Focus: Security

Editorial

Tihar speculation remains on the daily shenanigans in the ruling party and their ever-widening and transparent leadership tussle. Unwittingly or otherwise though, national attention cannot be but on two singular India missions into the country. Prime Minister K.P. Oli need no longer boast that he successfully broke the silence in relations with India. He has been visited upon last week by an Indian emissary from no less a person than Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. To add to this, he meets this week as defence minister the Indian army chief who has been invited over to be granted the honorary generalship of the Nepal army preferably described as a routine ritual by the establishment. The timing of both visits, however, by no means is cursory. Firstly, the fact that the emissary chosen to communicate Modi’s highly secret message to his Nepali counterpart is no less a person than the chief of India’s Research and Analysis Wing makes sure that the message is in the messenger himself. Secondly, the Indian Army general performing the routine ritual is none other than the one who accused Nepal of being provoked by China in claiming her own territory. Both visitors appear hand-picked security persona evidently chosen to break the Nepal-India ice which cannot but show that the concern is security in bilateral relations.

And it better be. Indian politics is in a mess what with Covid and all its fall out. So is Nepal’s. All this, hardly coincidently, is happening at a time when the pressures of international politics are mounting in the region. The West challenges a resurgent Chinese economy strategically and South Asia is no longer peripheral in the emerging scheme of things. It just so happens that external machination in which India has had a major role ensured that Nepal is the weakest chink. We have, since the inception of this Weekly, been insisting that the exercise has been to dismantle the oldest sovereign state in the region. This process was deliberately accelerated during and after the Maoist movement. The monopoly of political parties that emerged insured the monopoly of state resources internally and externally and it is here that the genesis of destabilization exists. That this was to reflect on national and regional security is self-evident. The festival season has been chosen not quite accidentally and perhaps deliberately to initiate a sober assessment. By the time the season ends, one hopes, the review will begin immediate corrections to let Nepal be Nepal. For the current system to sustain this is wishful thinking.

People’s Review Print Edition