As most of South Asia faces a surge in COVID-19 incidence following the end of a 3-month-long
lockdown setting off a public uproar about a states’ inability to respond to the pandemic
with empathy and effective policy measures, it is timely to reflect on the changing
geopolitics of borders in the region, and its implications for the future of nationalism
and humanitarianism especially for two countries Nepal and India which are currently engaged
in an intense border conflict triggering speculations about internal power-shuffling
as well as bilateral diplomacy.
This dispute involves a 40-square kilometre stretch of land on Nepal’s far-western
border with India which is not far from China. Unwittingly, this border dispute came
immediately ahead of the violent face-off between the Indian and Chinese military
in the Galwan Valley just over 500 km from the disputed territory with Nepal, resulting
in the death of 20 Indian soldiers. It should be noted however that the Nepal-India
border dispute is not new by any means; it can be dated back to the 1816 treaty that
Nepal was forced to sign with the colonial British administration following a 2-year
violent war, a treaty which conceded about one-third of Nepal’s territory to the British
Empire.
My proposition in this commentary is that this ongoing border dispute, also known
in Nepal as the Kalapani dispute, should be read within the contexts of (i) the 1990
regime change in Nepal following the end of the Cold War, (ii) the India-Nepal standoff
amid Nepal’s promulgation of its 2016 constitution which brought a formal closure
to the People’s War waged by its Maoist rebels and (iii) the rising heavy-handedness
on part of the Nepali state especially during the country-wide lockdown involving
the COVID-19 crisis.
I also wish to remind the readers that while India continues to receive extensive
coverage in most global policy and media platforms as well as academic deliberations,
the same cannot be said about its smaller neighbours including Nepal. This commentary
presents a non-hegemonic account of Nepal’s growing border tensions with a bigger
neighbour India in the context of the India-China face-off whose roots can be traced
to the end of the Cold War and an unprecedented rise of neoliberal capitalism in South
Asia in the 1990s.
The 2020 border dispute: the tip of an iceberg
On June 13, 2 months after it imposed a strict national lockdown, the Nepalese House
of Representatives unanimously endorsed the Second Amendment to the constitution of
Nepal to update the country’s new political map in its national emblem. The bill was
endorsed unanimously by the Upper House the day after. The cabinet had issued the
concerned map on May 20 which incorporated Limpiyadhura, Lipulekh and Kalapani, a
370-square-kilometre strip on its far west frontiers disputed with India, within Nepal’s
borders (Ghimire 2020).
India reacted strongly to this. Its army chief General MM Naravane made a public statement
that Nepal “might have raised this problem at the behest of someone else” thus implying
an alleged Chinese role.1 India’s Ministry of External Affairs stated that Nepal’s
revised map included parts of Indian territory and urged Kathmandu to correct this
“unilateral act” and “to respect India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. The
right-wing media in India openly claimed that Nepal had taken the “drastic” moves
on Kalapani to “appease” China through the latter’s aggressive offensive against India.
Some far-right media journalists even raised sexist and misogynist speculations about
a possible “honey-trap” involving the role of Ms. Hou Yanqui, the Chinese ambassador
for Nepal known for her bold diplomacy.2
The mainstream media in India distanced itself from such misogynist attacks but treated
this border dispute with outrage and anticipated a strong Indian backlash. On June
12, when an Indian citizen was killed and three others injured in the Nepalese side
of the border in Sitamadhi, some 1000 km southeast of the disputed Kalapani territory,
the Indian media was quick to link this with the Kalapani dispute and anticipate a
military escalation from the Indian side. The diplomats from both countries later
clarified that the Sitamadhi incident was not a military dispute but a local law and
order matter involving the enforcement of the COVID-19 lockdown (India Today 2020).
Two days later, as a violent face-off erupted between the Chinese and Indian military
forces on the Galwan Valley in Ladakh—about 500 km northeast of the site of Nepal-India
dispute —killing 20 Indian soldiers and triggering a major backlash from the opposition
party within India, its diplomats came forth to suggest that it is within India’s
interest to reconcile the matter with Nepal than to escalate, and that disputes with
Nepal should not be entwined with the embroiling dispute with China. In an interview
with Karan Thapar, a former NSA advisor and a seasoned Nepal expert Shivshankar Menon,
responded to a question suggesting a Chinese role in Nepal’s standoff with India by
saying “Nepal is a friendly neighbour with whom we have intimate ties of various kinds
and we should deal with it accordingly rather than mixing it up into a much more complicated
and difficult and larger geopolitical problem” (Thapar 2020).
The intellectuals and the civil society activists in both countries echoed and fed
in to the mainstream media narrative: On May 8, 2020, the Indian defence minister
virtually inaugurated an 80-km-long road which had been recently built to facilitate
a Hindu pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kailash on the Chinese/Tibetan side of the
Himalayas, and by doing this, it also established a strategic land link between Delhi
and the Tibetan plateau. The Chinese side recognised the Indian sovereignty in this
stretch of land by agreeing to expand trade through the Lipulekh pass even when Nepal
had routinely registered its opposition to this road project from the point of its
construction in 2008. Basu (2020) was among the few intellectuals from India who acknowledged
a 26-year-long series of discussions between Nepal and India on this dispute. A veteran
Indian Marxist intellectual and Nepal expert Anand Swaroop Verma went a step ahead
to clarify that Kalapani and Lipulekh are Nepalese territory which India had “borrowed”
from Nepal to set up an army camp during the 1962 Sino-Indian war (Indo-Nepal News
2020).
From the Nepali side, historian Ramesh Dhungel referred to the maps issued by the
colonial Survey of India in 1850 and 1856 which had clearly stated that the source
of the border river Mahakali was Limpiyadhura—and not the Lipu Khola (a small tributary)
as is now being claimed by the current Indian establishment—thus clarifying that the
entire disputed territories did belong to Nepal (Thapa 2020). Several civil society
activists and political leaders connected this border dispute with previous political
conflicts where India had leveraged on its border control to put pressure on Nepal (Shrestha
2003; Jacob 2020).
In 2015, as Nepal promulgated its constitution which formally brought a closure to
its Maoist rebellion, an unofficial blockade was imposed by India for over 4 months
amid Indian reservation that the new constitution did not adequately address its concerns.
Popular grievance against India’s blockading move stirred a nationalistic current
in Nepal which later resulted in a massive election victory for the Nepal Communist
Party (NCP) led by the current Prime Minister KP Oli.
Earlier in 1989, when the bilateral trade and transit treaty expired, India officially
sealed its borders with Nepal for over 13 months resulting in acute shortage of fuel
and other everyday household goods throughout the country. The blockade ended only
after Nepal had a regime change that ended King Birendra’s direct rule and ushered
in multi-party democracy in Nepal. The 1992 constitution promulgated by the democratic
parliament made headways for an ambitious economic liberalisation programme in Nepal
so much so that the World Bank declared Nepal a “best practice” on its Structural
Adjustment Programme within few years of democratisation. A young generation in Nepal
grew up equating democracy with neoliberal capitalism and consumeristic freedom, thereby
triggering an unprecedented wave of the commodification of land, labour and money
(Shakya 2018).
Power crisis in the ruling communist party in Nepal
Just 2 weeks after the much-hyped new map was enshrined on the national emblem of
Nepal, Prime Minister Oli who had led through this grand nationalistic mustering seemed
certain to be unseated, not by those in the opposition party but the opposition within
his own Nepal Communist Party (NCP). It is important to remember that NCP had been
founded just 2 years ago through a merger of the two major streams of the communist
movement in the country: one which had aligned itself with the liberals to oust monarchy
and usher in multi-party democracy in Nepal (i.e. the Communist Party of Nepal-United
Marxist Leninist, or the CPN/UML) and the other which had waged an armed rebellion
against the democratic alliance (i.e. the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Centre,
or the Maoists).
NCP’s permanent committee meeting held on July 1, 2020 concluded that PM Oli must
resign obeying the party whip. The former Maoist party President Prachanda who had
chaired this meeting warned that PM Oli (earlier from CPN/UML) must resign if he wanted
to “save the unification of the two communist parties”. Oli’s supporters responded
that such a move will force the Prime Minister to dissolve the ongoing parliamentary
sessions and also register his own new party. Rumours were rife that a new CPN/UML
had indeed been registered anonymously in the Election Commission under suspicious
circumstances, and the formerly dissolved CPN/UML leaders might have had a role in
this.3
The story of anti-Oli stance within NCP is not simply a rift between the two communist
factions. Several NCP leaders from the democratic stream (or UML) openly sided with
former revolutionary Prachanda to demand PM Oli’s resignation both from national premiership
and party chairmanship. Allegations were made against Oli about corruption, crony
capitalism and unilateralism. Several protests ongoing in the Kathmandu streets overlooking
global guidelines about social distancing raised a gamut of issues ranging from serious
lapse of law and order in public COVID-19 quarantines to massive corruption in sourcing
of public medical supplies, and a spate of caste and gender violence. PM Oli, known
for his unrelenting satires against the opposition, came under pressure in both public
and social media for his denial of the severity of COVID-19 in Nepal and dismissal
of humanitarian concerns raised both by the opposition party and the civil society.
His own comrades accused PM Oli of functioning through a narrow coterie and acting
unilaterally without party consultations. The internal debate on whether or not to
sanction a massive foreign aid package under the Millennium Challenge Corporation
(MCC) was particularly acrimonious. However, the biggest objection raised by the Party
permanent committee during the July 1 meeting was that PM Oli had publicly alleged
his fellow comrades of sabotaging his cabinet at an Indian behest. Media hyped in
its reportage of the July 1 NCP meeting that Comrade Prachanda had directly confronted
PM Oli by saying, “it is not India who is asking for your resignation, it’s me demanding
it” (Dhakal 2020). Several consultations were held between Comrade Prachanda and PM
Oli following this confrontation, and the power corridors in Kathmandu were rife with
rumours that the Chinese ambassador had been very active behind the scenes mediating
between the two rivals. Within the public sphere, the country saw few mass rallies
in support of PM Oli and demanding that NCP leaders play politics based on policy
than individual showmanship (“neta haina neeti hera”).
Lockdown and the politics of border
The corona virus caught Nepal off guard. Despite having a thick aviation network with
China,4 possibilities of a COVID-19 crisis had not really been discussed in Nepal
until February. On February 15, 2020 when Nepal mustered a grand nationalistic gesture
by evacuating 175 Nepalis, mostly students, stuck in the Chinese province of Hubei,
the returnees were put in strict quarantine, and with this, the young secular republic
seemed to wash off its hands from all public duties involving the pandemic. It did
nothing for the next 5 weeks to restrict the incoming international traffic, not only
from China but also the rest of Asia and Europe. Any suggestion that flights from
China should be suspended was seen as an anti-China—and by extension anti-Communist—voice.
On February 18, as part of its regular reporting on the global scenario on COVID-19,
the leading national daily carried an opinion piece by Ivo Daalder, a former US Ambassador
to NATO, condemning that China’s secrecy had made the corona virus crisis worse for
the world. This article was previously published in the Seoul-based Korea Herald,
and with it came a stock photo showing Mao Tse Tung donning a surgical mask. This
was met with a sharp criticism from the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. Initially came
a sharp tweet from the Chinese ambassador Hou Yanqi, and later the Chinese embassy
in Kathmandu issued a formal statement on the same day which criticized that article
for “..ignorance and prejudice on China, [and that the reproduction of that image in
the TKP had] deeply hurt the feelings of the Chinese people…” A group of 17 Nepali
editors affiliated with various media houses in Kathmandu collectively denounced the
Chinese statement (Chhetria Patrakar 2020; The Wire 2020).
The situation changed dramatically within a month. As the WHO declared COVID-19 a
pandemic and India suspended all international flights, Nepal followed suit on March
19. Four days later, it temporarily sealed its borders both with India and China,
bringing to a halt all on-foot, informal border-crossings especially on its open border
with India. The country-wide lockdown declared on March 31, initially for a week but
extended till mid-June and further continued in partial forms for the next month,
dramatically altered everyday life on its border towns especially involving migrant
workers who had crossed thisopen-border to seek livelihood abroad.
India’s tragedy about migrant workers being caught off guard and having to walk several
hundred kilometres to their hometowns is well documented (Vasavi 2020). In the wake
of the country-wide lockdown, Nepal saw similar exodus on part of its own internal
migrant workers although these were not widely reported. No concerted efforts came
out of the civil society including trade unions towards helping the migrant workers
on their perilous journey. As the bourgeois middle class turned its blind eye to this,
the state easily shrugged off the woes of the migrant labour as a “necessary evil”
to save the country from Corona virus.
Instead, as the media highlighted that all of the five cases of COVID-19 reported
in Nepal in March were “imported” and that the migrant workers returning from India
may potentially be COVID-19 carriers, the border surveillance became stricter. PM
Oli made an off-the-cough remark in the Parliament that 85% of the corona virus cases
in Nepal had come from India. Few footages circulated of some Nepalis sneaking into
their villages by crossing the Indian borders through green fields and rivers without
notifying the authorities. Further, global media narratives of “super-spreaders” added
stigma and fear of the “foreign-returnees” in Nepal (Shrestha 2020). Bundled up with
class discrimination, the migrant workers became an especially suspicious demographic
category who had to be contained and kept away in order to keep the bourgeois middle
class safe. A series of draconian police crackdowns were unleashed both on the Nepal-India
border and in Kathmandu. Even then, the government hardly addressed the burning issue
that there were very few public quarantines and test centres, and that the national
stocks of PPEs and ventilators were grossly inadequate.
On April 1, Al-Jazeera produced a sensational coverage of a man who had swam across
the bordering Mahakali river risking his own life, only to surrender to police arrest
as he landed on the bank. He boldly spoke of the sufferings of hundreds stranded on
the other side of the border with inadequate food and medical facilities “sleeping
like animals on the ground”, and urged that the country needed to save them (Shrestha 2020).
This raised concerns about over two million Nepalis working in India, many working
as low-wage labourers, but the government kept the borders sealed. Only on June 3
Nepal and India opened 20 border points to allow their stranded citizens to cross
the border and come home.
Further concerns were raised as the pandemic swept through the Gulf States, and measures
were taken to expel the already-repressed migrant workers without any care for their
repatriation. In early July, Nepal facilitated nine repatriation flights to evacuate
thousand or so Nepali citizens, mostly migrant workers who had been stuck in Qatar,
UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Maldives and Malaysia. More repatriation flights are
being scheduled in the following weeks. For a country that relies on remittance to
cover 32% of its GDP and with an estimated 1.3 million Nepalis working in the Gulf
States, evacuation of a couple of thousands is clearly too little and too late. Even
so, there is very little public cry about this in Nepali media and among political
and social activists.
COVID-19 nationalism: governance and protest
Nepal had mustered a grand nationalistic gesture mid-February when it evacuated the
175 Nepalis stuck in Hubei. That nationalistic euphoria went decisively downhill as
Nepal registered several COVID-19 cases within the country and imposed a country-wide
lockdown mid-March.
The lockdown was harsh, and the public saw the police act increasingly brutally towards
those who could not afford to confine themselves within private homes. But the state
was in denial about Covid19 economics, and no measures had been taken to provide even
a bare minimum cushioning to help those who lost livelihoods because of the lockdown.
This gross oversight did not raise much criticism from the elite, and it seems that
the global grammar of lockdown had already accomplished its coercive justice on the
working poor in Nepal.
The rhetoric about COVID-19 being a “foreign” disease stirred stigma against the “foreign-returnees”
thus leading to sheer neglect of the plight of the low-wage labourers, especially
Dalits, who also bear the double brunt of class and caste discrimination. Reports
came in June that a 16-year-old Dalit worker from a Nepal-India border town had died
in the isolation ward after several weeks in a badly catered public quarantine which
denied him even a packet of oral rehydration solution as he lay in bed suffering from
diarrhoea after having undertaken a 1919-km journey from Ahmedabad on foot.5 Another
Dalit citizen had died in police custody under suspicious circumstances. The Dalit
Struggle Committees took up both these issues and staged protests.
As the Black Lives Matter protests swept through Euro-America, several public intellectuals
and social activists spoke about violence against Dalits in Nepal. Kathmandu intellectuals
openly condemned two particularly gruesome incidents that had recently occurred. During
the lockdown, six young men had died in mob attack in a remote district as Navaraj
BK (a Dalit) sought to meet his girlfriend from the higher caste who he wanted to
persuade to marry him. A 13-year-old Dalit girl Angira Pasi was found hanging from
the tree after the community leaders of her home town ordered a 25-year-old man of
a higher caste who had raped her to marry her as his “punishment”. However, this wave
of Dalit movement did not gain much momentum.
Instead, a youth-led protest to sweep through Kathmandu took the banner “enough is
enough” to raise attention on a sheer lack of government policy and programme on corona
virus. Frustrated with the forced confinement to their homes for 3 months in the name
of COVID-19 control, the urban—and arguably elite—youth staged “socially distanced”
protests to hold the government accountable for the COVID-19 mismanagement. The government
essentially dismissed these protests and continued financial opaqueness in its disbursement
of COVID-19 funds. When asked in the parliament where the government had spent the
10 billion Nepali rupees of COVID-19 funds, PM Oli shrugged off the question by saying
that the focus right now should be on fighting the corona virus and not petty financial
calculations.6
Another round of public rallies, mostly staged on the Nepal-India border towns, protested
a bill on Citizenship Act which would make it mandatory for foreign women married
to Nepali men to wait for 7 years before they can apply for Nepali citizenship and
passports. While the state argued that a 7-year waiting period would make Nepali citizenship
provision commensurable with India’s, opposition parties criticized that the bill
is targeted against the border communities who have traditionally married across the
border.
Post-pandemic border and nation
Just a few months ago, “lockdown” was a word unheard by majority of Nepalis, and “quarantine”
was something associated with pets than humans. While the elite Nepalis closely following
the global media lead on COVID-19 had enough time to digest the new global grammar
of lockdown and social distancing, the lower strata were caught off guard as a country-wide
lockdown was imposed abruptly with draconian measures restricting people’s movements.
The state did not consider the lockdown’s effects on the working poor who immediately
lost their livelihoods. No relief measures were announced for those who had nothing
to eat. The middle class being confined within their homes meant that no people-to-people
aid came forward for the poor, thus breaking the chain of cultural charity which had
historically stepped in when the government did not do enough.
The global grammar of COVID-19 seems to have unleashed a degree of totalitarian ambitions
in democratically elected governments elsewhere and in Nepal. A case in point is the
overnight shutting of the open border between Nepal and India and rapid withdrawal
of public transport in countries where less than 1% of the population own a private
car. Thousands of Nepali migrant workers were caught off guard on the Indian side
of the border after they had walked thousands of miles to return home from various
Indian cities when they had earlier migrated to work. The police on both sides treated
migrant workers brutally, forcing them to spend months in hazardously run quarantine
centres. There was very little coverage of the border miseries in the national media.
For a country so heavily invested in foreign remittance, it is ill-advised to have
turned a blind eye on the repatriation of its migrant workers. Instead of rescuing
its citizens stuck abroad in dire circumstances and rehabilitating them with dignity,
the government seems to indulge in empty rhetoric that Nepalis must now “go back to
the basics” and repopulate “beautiful mountains with fresh air”. No policies or programmes
have been announced to address the concerns of those who were forced to work in the
Gulf and Malaysian factories after finding mountain-living back home simply unsustainable.
Grave concerns should also be raised about the political lull which unleashed ultra-nationalistic
ambitions among those who are ruling. The Modi government in India deemed it timely
to inaugurate a Hindu pilgrimage route in the middle of its own lockdown despite knowing
this would trigger border disputes with its neighbours. Nepal responded with equal
grit, building on the kind of inward-looking ultra-nationalism which had brought PM
Oli to power in the first place and strengthened his position within his own party
following the Indian border blockade of 2015. It did not help that China seems set
to adopt a policy of gaining strategic advantage on its neighbours especially on sensitive
fronts such as military control of acrimonious borders.
The open border between Nepal and India built around the concept of “bride and bread
relations” is probably the biggest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic as the popular
acrimony about the new map played in the hands of brazen showmanship of PM Modi in
India and PM Oli in Nepal. As of today, India has surpassed Russia to become the third
worst-affected country by the corona virus pandemic, and Nepal is registering an explosive
rise in the number of COVID-19 cases. As worrying as it sounds, COVID-19 has not received
the kind of public concern as it should. Instead, the public discourse both in Nepal
and India is so much more about the hollow national prides than the actual measures
of public safety and humanitarian relief measures for those who lost their livelihoods.