Asia Times: Closing the friendship gap


	July 29, 2000	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Closing the friendship gap

KATHMANDU - An airline hijack and charges of hosting anti-India subversives have soured ties between this small Himalayan nation and its giant southern neighour for the past year. However, when Nepal's Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala visits New Delhi this week, the two sides will put aside the rancor of the past months and try hard to be friends. Not that this will be easy.

Although political observers on both sides of the border are counting on Koirala's good personal rapport with the Indian leadership, there is much mistrust. It was only in early June that India resumed flights of government carrier Indian Airlines (IA) to Nepal, cancelled since a December 1999 hijack of an IA Airbus soon after take off from Kathmandu airport.

The hijack ended on New Year's eve in the Afghan city of Kandahar after India released jailed Kashmiri militants as demanded by the hijackers. The incident was seen to have bolstered Indian perceptions of Nepal being a soft base for anti-India subversives. A new chill crept into bilateral ties when a leading Indian newsmagazine published a report in June based on information provided by Indian official intelligence agencies that Nepal was a safe haven for pro-Kashmiri separatists and their backers.

New Delhi for its part has tried to reassure Kathmandu by sending a series of high level official teams to Nepal in the past two months to take up issues of mutual concern. This included a visit to Kathmandu by Brajesh Mishra, the National Security Advisor to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and said to be the second most influential man in Indian foreign policy making.

Koirala's visit to India will be the first by a Nepali prime minister in the last four years. While trying to allay Indian concerns about Nepal becoming a centre for anti-India subversives, he would have to be mindful of critics back home who see Nepal emerging the loser in such meets.

India still has to shed the big brother image it has in Nepal due to the former's relatively huge geographical, political and economic size. Landlocked Nepal is sandwiched between China and India. While the Himalayan mountains separate Nepal from China in the north, there is a 900km open border with India. Nepal's opposition politicians traditionally run down their rivals in office by accusing them of being arm-twisted by New Delhi.

The biggest controversies until the hijack, centered on a series of India-Nepal treaties initialled in the past half century. Nepali politicians have long criticized a 1950 political treaty that is seen to not have treated Kathmandu as a diplomatic equal. ''Certain provisions of the 1950 treaty have become obsolete. We would like it to be revised, updated and made relevant to existing needs,'' says former deputy prime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal.

One of the clauses in the treaty that Nepal wants changed requires both sides to inform and consult each other in the event of ''a threat to the security of the other by a foreign aggressor". Nepal is also required to buy defense equipment with the ''assistance and agreement'' of India. In 1989, India closed all border points with Nepal for a long period when the Nepali army tried to buy light arms from China. This cut off Nepal's foreign trade that has to pass through India and strengthened India's big brother image in Nepal.

Another issue that fires political passions in Nepal is the sharing of the Himalayan rivers with India. A series of cooperation agreements on this have been criticized by politicians for denying Nepal its due share of benefits. One of the most controversial was the 1991 New Delhi-Kathmandu accord that gave India 2.9 hectares of Nepali territory to build a hydroelectricity generation plant on a shared river. In return, Nepal was promised two megawatts of power from the plant and some farm irrigation water. The agreement caused such an uproar in Kathmandu that it led to the fall of the government that had initialled it with India.

To allay apprehensions, Koirala has already held talks with different political parties ahead of his India visit. He has declared that he would raise several issues with New Delhi, ranging from water resource development to border regulations.

However, according to the former deputy prime minister whose United Marxist-Leninist party is the main opposition group in parliament, there is a big gap in the perceptions in Kathmandu and New Delhi. While Nepal sees India as ''big brother'', India is under the ''impression that Nepal can never be satisfied.'' Madhav thinks that such misunderstandings are being encouraged by people in both countries who do not want India and Nepal to be good friends.

(Inter Press Service)

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