POLITICS-SOUTH-ASIA: Questions Surround Nepal King’s India Visit

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Surendra Phuyal

NEW DELHI, Dec 21 2004 (IPS) - Nepal’s King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev begins a 11-day visit to India on Thursday despite mounting criticism back home, with detractors accusing the monarch of trying to legitimise his role by seeking military assistance from New Delhi to crush an on-going Maoist insurgency in the Himalayan kingdom.

King Gyanendra’s trip comes three months after Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba visited the southern neighbour. And many are irked at its odd timing.

Nepali Congress leader Girija Prasad Koirala said the monarch’s India visit would not be fruitful as it was taking place at a time when political parties are agitating and violence is on the rise in the country.

”No matter how much the king speaks of peoples’ benefit, the crisis faced by the country, including the Maoist insurgency, cannot be resolved with the initiative of the palace,” Koirala told reporters in Kathmandu.

”Had the king made the visit after reviving the House of Representatives backed by peoples’ support, it would have been more result-oriented,” added the former prime minister.

Even ministers in the multi-party Deuba government are suspicious over the visit.

”In countries where the king is a constitutional head, his foreign trips are organised by the government,” Jhalanath Khanal, head of the foreign affairs department of CPN-UML (Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist Leninist), a key coalition partner in the government told reporters.

”But here, nobody knows that the agenda of the royal visit is. Even the ministers in our party are not aware of it. Under such circumstances the visit seems downright mysterious,” he added.

Democracy took several steps backward in Nepal in October 2002 when King Gyanendra, a constitutional monarch, dismissed the elected government and sacked Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his council of ministers and assumed executive power himself..

However, Deuba, himself, has to take a lot of the blame for the country’s predicament. He dissolved Parliament in May 2002 promising to call elections by November.

In October, there were still no preparations for the elections in sight. That was when King Gyanendra decided to step in. The monarch sacked Deuba and his government on the grounds of being incompetent to lead the country.

But things took a complete turnaround in early June this year. Bowing to intense pressure from civil society groups and agitating political parties, the monarch reinstalled Deuba as prime minister.

Nonetheless, the political landscape in Nepal remains deeply divided coupled with the havoc caused by the on-going bloody Maoist insurgency that has killed more than 10,000 people since 1996.

While a multiparty government led by Deuba of the Nepali Congress (Democratic), with leftist Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) and centrists, Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) and Nepal Sadbhawana Party (NSP), rules the country, another group of four parties are continually agitating against the king’s October 2002 move.

The agitating parties – like the Nepali Congress led by Koirala, People’s Front Nepal and splinter factions of RPP and NSP – are hell bent on their demand seeking reinstatement of Parliament dissolved by Deuba in May 2002.

Indian officials in New Delhi describe King Gyanendra’s trip as a working visit. The Hindu monarch is meeting with President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, leader of the ruling United People’s Alliance (UPA) Sonia Gandhi, opposition leader L.K. Advani of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and senior ministers and officials.

Thereupon, the monarch is due to visit the capitals of Nepal’s neighboring states: Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal before returning to Kathmandu on Jan 2.

But New Delhi, which has provided substantial moral and logistical support to Kathmandu to fight the Maoist insurgency, has its message ready for the king: ”consolidate multi-party democracy and constitutional monarchy, and better prepare the Royal Nepal Army to fight Maoist insurgents.”

”The Maoists want to abolish monarchy, they want to abolish multi-party democracy,” Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, also the former ambassador to Nepal, told a New Delhi conference that was convened on Dec.. 6 to explore ways to end the current Nepali crisis.

”So you (in Nepal) have to make sure that this system (the multi-party democracy with a constitutional monarchy) survives. If it does not survive, the parties won’t survive. So come together to defend democracy,” he said.

There are indications, however, that King Gyanendra will press for more support from India in the form of weapons to fight the Maoist rebels when he is in the Indian capital.

The poorly equipped Royal Nepal Army needs helicopters and mine-proof vehicles to fight the guerrillas who have stepped up attacks on army patrols in the rugged countryside and bombings in the nation’s capital.

”We are committed to helping the security forces. Whatever assistance is needed, it will be made available,” Indian Ambassador to Nepal Shiv Shankar Mukherjee told reporters in Kaathmandu.

But the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission rights said New Delhi’s support for King Gyanendra would only increase rights violations in Nepal, and was a blot on India’s democratic credentials.

”The AHRC now calls upon the current government of India not to repeat its predecessor’s mistake of supporting a monarch responsible for the perpetuation of state- sponsored crimes against humanity,” it said in a statement.

On Dec. 10, the U.S. – which is a major weapons provider to Nepal – imposed new conditions on military assistance to the Himalayan kingdom. Washington, now, requires fundamental changes in the way the Nepali security forces deal with human rights.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch and others have documented systematic abuses by Nepal’s government forces, including extrajudicial executions, large numbers of ”disappearances”, torture, and arbitrary arrests of suspected Maoist sympathisers.

But India has interests in Nepal’s security situation as the Maoists’ ideological brothers, now the Communist Party of India (Maoist), are expanding their operations in Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – all along the Nepal-India border.

And the Indian Maoists have already issued a warning to New Delhi.

”If the Indian government dares to send its army for suppressing the revolution in Nepal, it will have to incur the same shameful defeat as it had received in Sri Lanka in the 1980s,” said the party’s general secretary Ganapathi in a statement issued on Tuesday.

In 1989, India had to pull back its peacekeeping forces from Sri Lanka’s Jaffna peninsula after violent clashes with the Tamil Tiger rebels. About 1,200 Indian soldiers were killed during this phase of the conflict.