Occasional TV snippets of rioting in picturesque Katmandu are all too familiar: demonstrators with English signboards [for the international cameras], riot police cracking skulls, and occasional gunfire. It’s not that different from scenes almost simultaneously seen around the world – unfortunately in developed Western Europe as well as in countries like Nepal where more primitive political forces have collided.
But events in the Himalayan capital could be much more critical than would first appear. Not only is the fate of 30 million Nepalese at risk — minuscule in an Indian subcontinent where a quarter of the world’s humanity lives. But outcome of the muddled power struggle could be decisive for India, its giant Siamese twin on the south, so often proclaimed the world’s largest democracy.
Nepal’s relationship to India is another historic anachronisms. The country’s very diverse population came together, as did other former “princely states” in British India, almost by accident. But its fate was different from other one-time allies of London incorporated into independent India. For Nepal’s warrior-led agglomeration was given an official imprimatur by London in 1923 as a separate country, a reward for services of 35,000 Nepalese soldiers — mostly recruited from the tribes of Mongoloid appearance near Gorkha. a feudal hill village in what is now western Nepal — who served the Empire in World War I.. Just as generations before them — dating back to three indecisive wars the Honorable East India Company and its successor Imperial Indian governments fought against them — and down to the present, the Gurkhas had served as quintessential mercenaries, renowned as among the best warriors throughout the British Empire.
When after 1947 an independent India needed Gurkhas as much as the British [who continued to use them for another three decades], the long reigning Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru continued to respect Nepal’s independence. It’s said he even reminded a former king — when he flirted with the Chinese who had arrived on his northern border after overthrowing the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan government in 1951 — he was, after all, the only Hindu king in the world.
For all its pristine Himalayan beauty — Everest’s peak separates it from Tibet — Nepal is one of the poorest countries. Modernization has not gone well. Power of a dictatorial clan of hereditary “prime ministers” ended only in 1951. Parliamentary government came in 1990 when the King was forced to legalize political parties, largely because of pressure from “sister” organizations in India. In 2001 King Birendra and the rest of his immediate family were assassinated by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra, in an argument over the prince’s determination to marry into the family of the former prime ministers.
Communists had made a substantial showing in the first elections in 1991. And a breakaway Maoist terrorist movement, seeking to overthrow the monarchy, began guerrilla operations in the countryside in 1996. The Nepalese Maoists are classic Marxist guerrillas. [Their leaders charge the Chinese Communists have abandoned the true Marxist faith.] peasantry.
With more than 30,000 victims, their announced aim is to end the monarchy. They have butchered administrators, teachers, and police. But often through a combination of intimidation and local reform, and victories over the ill-armed and poorly-trained royal army, they now control much of the hinterland with a parallel movement among students and an above-the-ground presence in the capital.
In 2002, the King suspended parliamentary rule arguing acknowledged corrupt and incompetent, feuding party officials had failed to subdue the Maoists. But the King’s direct rule has not achieved that goal either. Meanwhile, the Indians — reinforced by Washington — have called for a return to popular rule. Beijing, in its half century role of infiltration by aid, commerce and guile, has supported the King with some weaponry after a cut off by an Indian-U.S. embargo. The old politicians and the Maoists, for the moment, have formed a common front backed up by the diplomats against the King who has stubbornly been holding out.
Maoist ascendancy would be disastrous for India. The Terrai, the lowlands strip of the country, has no natural border with northern India. The Maoists have close connections — and support — from the so-called Naxallites, armed insurrectionists with the same modus operandi in more than a dozen Indian states. And they, in turn, are an offshoot of the Communist Party ruling in India’s second city, Calcutta. Although the Communists have courted foreign investment for West Bengal they have governed for 30 years, their party originates in their siding with China after the Moscow-Beijing break, a split in the Indian Communists, and they have strong ties to Beijing
To compound the difficulties, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition government in New Delhi maintains its majority with the parliamentary support of the Bengali Communists at the federal level. But they have, in fact, braked his whole program for continued economic liberalization.
If Nepalese Maoism comes to power — or present Nepalese anarchy continues indefinitely — no one has more to lose than India.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.
