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| Kathmandu Wednesday March 20, 2002 Chaitra 07, 2058. |
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Another state visit
Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba is on a
five-day state visit to India starting today. The ritual visit comes eight months after
Deuba took the office of Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has also got the state of
emergency extended, especially to quell the Maoist insurgency. However, the Mangalsen and
Sanfebagar carnages, which claimed more than 143 lives of police and army personnel, have
taken a new direction in the fight against the Maoists. It is true that a decision to
visit India has come at the time of a serious Maoist problem facing this country. The
itinerary of the state visit outlines that the Prime Minister will address a Confederation
of Indian Industries (CII) organised gathering, besides meeting India’s prime
minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, opposition leader Sonya Gandhi and West Bengal’s chief
minister Buddha Dev Bhattacharya. But the question which is yet to be made public is how
the Prime Minister is going to resolve the Maoist problem by merely paying a state visit
to India.
The Prime Minister, before he holds talks
with his Indian counterpart Vajpayee, must keep a long list of outstanding bilateral
problems which remain unresolved at the official levels of the two countries. The Indian
extremists —the People’s War group and the Naxalites — have been supporting
the Maoists of Nepal is now a known fact. Maoist ideologue Babu Ram Bhattarai and leader
Prachanda are taking shelter in India. The open border system has allowed the free
movement of illegal arms. Had this open border between the two countries been regulated,
the supply of illegal arms to the Maoists would have been less possible. Besides, India
has failed to cooperate with Nepal to nab the top Maoist "terrorists" living in
that country. In fact, India should have extradited these Maoist terrorists to Nepal if it
had shown its cooperation in quelling the six-year long insurgency. India has also refused
to dismantle the Laxmanpur and Rassiyal-Khurda-Lautan barrages built without the consent
of Nepal across Rapti and Danav rivers. The recent renewal of trade treaty between Nepal
and India has again affected the Nepali export to India, especially by the provision of
value addition.
It has become a ritual for every prime
minister to pay a state visit to India within a year after assuming the office. Not that
each visit has resolved the long-standing bilateral problems of the two countries. But
that every prime minister whoever visited India in the past returned to this country with
poor diplomatic outcome. Another aspect of bilateral relation between Nepal and India that
needs immediate attention is the security pact of 1965 which prohibits Nepal from
purchasing arms from a country other than India. Prime Minister Deuba must acknowledge the
fact that such a security pact has served India’s security interests rather than
helped this country in quelling the armed Maoist rebellion. If the Prime Minister fails to
raise such pertinent bilateral issues with India, his visit will mean nothing but a mere
ritual state visit. The recent religious riots in Gujrat have also weakened prime minister
Vajpayee’s hold over the ruling national democratic alliance. Given such a fluid
political situation both in Nepal and India, let us hope that the outcome of Prime
Minister Deuba’s visit to India would make a difference between Koirala’s
Sadbhawana visit and the visit that begins today. |
