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Kathmandu Monday March 26, 2001 Chaitra 13, 2057.
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Controversial move
The government’s decision to deploy army
personnel at customs points along the border is a controversial move. Finance Minister
Mahesh Acharya has defended the deployment on the ground that it is essential for checking
smuggling. That in itself is a sound enough motive. The presence of the army along the
Nepal-India border will also help to some extent in monitoring that border for other
purposes. Monitoring the border is something which Nepal has always yearned for. The army
already has a good track record in policing the national parks and wild life sanctuaries,
an area in which this country has registered commendable success. But when it comes to
deployment on customs related duty there is the suspicion that the government has acted
not out of its own wisdom but under prompting from a neighbouring country. That neighbour
has not been happy with the influx of cheaper goods from another neighbouring country,
supposedly via Nepal. Meanwhile the leader of the main opposition party, Madhav Kumar
Nepal, has also come out against the deployment, pointing out that it could turn out to be
harmful for the country. He has a point. His argument is, what are we going to do if the
army also becomes corrupted like the rest of the customs and revenue apparatus in this
country. As with the question of deploying the army against the Maoists, the army is the
instrument of last resort and if it too fails we have nothing left to turn to.
Any likelihood of the army being exposed to the
temptations of corruption and graft should be taken extremely seriously, especially at a
time when that institution has already come in for a measure of controversy in recent
months. First there was the controversy over the aircraft that the army wanted to purchase
for reasons that were never very convincing. Such a purchase would have entailed
substantial financing by the banking system of the country and also the employees
provident fund. Not many people felt comfortable about that. Hardly had the controversy
died down than the army got into another one with its notions about starting a commercial
bank of its own. Some even a saw a connection between the two. And yet another controversy
was generated when army brass said they would deploy against the Maoists only if there was
an all party consensus favouring deployment. This was compounded in the public mind by the
army’s reluctance to come to the rescue during the attack by Maoists on Dunai during
which a good many police personnel lost their lives. Contrast that reluctance on the part
of the men in olive green with the alacrity with which they have agreed to take up
patrolling the customs lines. That stark contrast may be occasioned by the fact that
taking on the Maoists is a very different ball game from taking on smugglers and that the
latter exercise would require far less commitment in number of troops. But the problem is
it may also be occasioned by the smell of money sloshing around the customs check points
at any given time. The chances of the army succumbing to bribes can be gauged accordingly.
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