POLITICS: India Deports Suspected Maoists to Nepal

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 12 2002 (IPS) - India on Friday delivered on a promise it made recently to its northern neighbour Nepal to help counter a Maoist insurgency there, by deporting four nationals of the Himalayan kingdom believed to have links with it.

The four members of the rights group Indo-Nepal People’s Solidarity Forum were arrested by Indian police on Thursday as they came out of the Triveni Kala Sangam, a well-known centre for art and culture in the heart of the city.

Initially, police said the Nepali nationals — Partho Chhetri, Maheshwar Dalal, Moti Prasad and Aditi — were being taken in for questioning and would be released later. But reports said they bundled into a van and driven off to the Indo-Nepal border, where they were handed over to Nepalese authorities on Friday.

Police confirmed the deportations of the four, who apart from Moti Prasad, a student, are journalists.

“We fear for their lives given the recent disappearance in custody of Krishna Sen,” said Gautam Navlakha., who was among a group of Indian activists detained with the Nepalis. He was referring to Sen, editor of Maoist-affiliated publications and a top Maoist leader, who left-leaning publications said had died in government custody.

Nepal has been under emergency rule since November and the army has used it to round up suspected Maoists and their sympathisers, including several well-known journalists.

Navlakha and other Indian rights activists connected with the forum, including Anoop Saraya, a doctor at the prestigious All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), were let off after questioning late Thursday.

Saraya said members of the forum had just finished discussing plans for a public meeting to create support in India for a resumption of dialogue between the Nepalese government and the Maoist groups when they were picked up by a special cell within Delhi’s police force.

The deportations come in the wake of a visit to India by Nepal’s King Gyanendra in late June. That visit was aimed at seeking New Delhi’s help in stamping out the Himalayan kingdom’s battle against Maoist insurgents, who for six years have been battling to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republican state.

Gyanendra is currently on a three-day state visit to China and is expected to gain assurances of support from Nepal’s other large neighbour and source of ideological inspiration for the Maoist uprising. But this could fall short of military support as in the case of India.

A bland official statement released by Beijing as Gyanendra began his week-long tour on Tuesday said: “As friendly neighbour of Nepal, China supports the efforts of the government and king of Nepal to maintain domestic stability and we hope that Nepal, through efforts, will be able to maintain peace, development and stability.”

In contrast, India has been providing Nepal with arms, helicopter gunships, trucks and mine-proof vehicles — and Friday’s deportations show that New Delhi is prepared to crack down on Maoist sympathisers holed up in this country.

Gyanendra’s visit to New Delhi was preceded by that of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, who asked for curbs on the activities of the Nepal Ekta Samaj (Nepal Unity Society) that is believed to have a powerful following among some eight million people of Nepali origin living on the Indian side of the porous Indo-Nepal border.

India is also fighting its own battles with Maoists insurgents in several states, especially in eastern Bihar, central Jharkhand and southern Andhra Pradesh states.

“There is a growing nexus between the People’s War Group (in Andhra Pradesh) and the Maoists Coordination Committee (in Bihar and Jharkhand),” says Ashok Mehta, a former general in Indian army and commentator on Indo-Nepal affairs.

Mehta says that unless India invokes a 1950 treaty to provide Nepal direct military assistance, there is every chance of the insurgency spilling over the border and linking up with groups like the Maosists Coordination Committee and the People’s War Group.

But India is wary of interfering in a country where there has been a history of popular animosity against a sometimes overbearing neighbour, which has in the past adopted punitive measures against landlocked Nepal.

Following the hijacking years ago of an Indian Airlines plane from Kathmandu to Afghanistan by suspected agents of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), New Delhi suspended flights to Nepal and imposed travel restrictions that have seriously hurt the tourism industry of the picturesque Himalayan nation.

India has been careful with its official statements through the horrendous palace massacre of King Birendra and his immediate family, a year ago, by crown prince Dipendra, who later shot himself. Gyanendra subsequently succeeded to the throne.

Although New Delhi has been supportive of him officially, it has been emphatic that Nepal’s polity is built on the “two pillars of constitutional monarchy and multi-party democracy,” gently suggesting that the current political instability should not be an excuse to abandon the 12-year-old democracy that critics say Gyanendra has shown signs of being impatient with.