Size anxiety has stirred the Nepalese people throughout their history

Prof.Anand Aditya, Kathmandu

Say small, say landlocked, say poor and it takes little else to name the country. Poverty, the central leitmotif that now propels myriad state plans and is the key inspiration behind research themes and bylines of study titles on Nepal, has become the hallmark of the average Nepali citizen today. Being a Nepalese, however, is an expensive business in other ways too. "How can a country, like Nepal-so small, so poor, so medieval-"have democracy?" Nikita Khruschev was heard asking decades ago in a prophetic vein. And another observer of the scene put it even more piquantly: "Can the Nepalese Kingdom survive without India? The Kiplingesque flavor of flowery tropes such as Shangri-La may flatter Nepali sentiments for a moment or two, but it can hardly hide the amazing ignorance that prevails about Nepal at home and abroad, be it The Hutchinson Dictionary of 20th Century World History, or Huntington’s heftier tone on the clash of civilization. Part of the problem, no doubt, is plain ignorance.

But far more conspicuous is the pretension within a certain school of thought that likes to interpret Nepal’s independence and freedom in terms other than the logic of historiography. The identity cost of such wrong images and misleading interpretations have naturally been heavy, not the least of which is the toll it has taken in the course of this country’s development and growth.

Among the figures of speech that have grown around Nepal contributing to its traditional stereotypy, the oldest, and probably the most overused, is familiar Yam and Boulder imagery, which also captures the two critical political constraints of the countries geography-its smallness and its vulnerable position.

Partly at least, the ignorance that prevails about Nepal is an offspring of the self-doubt symbolized in Nepali people’s image of the Yam. A consequence of the size anxiety that has been dogging their psyche throughout the nation’s history and holds their self-confidence a hostage, this sandwich complex and the consequent claustrophobia lie so deeply ingrained in the Nepali mind that smallness and landlocked position appear to be the predominant causes of the nation’s underdevelopment. That, at least, is how most of the Nepalese people take it.

But does size really determine the destiny of a nation? And, is landlockedness a true measure of its poverty?/ The questions may appear somewhat trite at first reading. But the kaleidoscope shift of forces in the emerging global order and the events crowding the national scene have resurrected their relevance as perhaps never before. Before the eighties ended, the symptoms of a regional metastasis had begun to set in in this nations’ policies and power structure. Along with the political upheaval that shook the ancien regime to its foundation the nation seemed to be shifting its political axis, leaving the political analysts wondering over their possible implications-implications whose complexity even after ten years is far from clear and will continue to excite speculations long into the future.

Seen thus, the problem of the small underdeveloped state is not just an issue for academic exercise . That problem is acute reflected practically in the double dilemma every such state faces: How can it safely reconcile its basic need for security with the elemental urge for sovereignty; and how can it adjust the prerequisites of security to the ever-growing demands for development which are now no less fundamental?

Size and security: One way out of this dilemma may be the alignment with the next door large neighbor. That is on road that some states have taken. And this is what Nepal did in the early fifties. Alignment, however, has failed to prove a panacea. The Nepalese discovered it in 1989. The Kuwaitis learnt the lesson two years later. Neither could be blamed for triggering the crises they faced then. These two cases render the alignment approach suspect, suggesting that the true origin of a small state may lie elsewhere. Essentially, the problem is the same: whether it be President Doud banging his fist before Brezenev in Kremelin, or General Omar Torrijos throwing Sonys to the pavement stones at US abuses in Panama canal or sobbing away the generations of frustrations of the Panamian people before President Carter, or the desperation of the king of another country bilked of the lion’s share of benefits in hydro projects. Thus, even if some of the fundamental questions about small states remain unaltered in the nature or import of their implications, the growing need to look for alternative approaches and the possible solutions in the fast changing scenario of the day can hardly be ignored.

If alignment does not make small states secure, non-alignment, too, has proved inadequate for such a purpose. Historically speaking, neither non-alignment nor alliance by itself has guaranteed against a small state’s getting involved in war. During the inter-war years, for instance, non-aligned Finland was attacked; Norway was attacked and occupied; and Lithuania disappeared from the map. Alliance with a major power, on the other hand, led to en-gulfment of Albania by Italy; abandonment of Czechoslovakia by France; and occupation of Poland, Britain’s ally, by a third power Germany. Kuwait’s case, moreover, dramatically brings home the truth that even the affluence of a small state does not make it immune to the predatorial designs of a large neighbor.

These cases could convince one that conflict inheres in smallness and that insecurity is an intrinsic element of the vulnerable nature of small states. But if so, then how is it that Nauru, the smallest state in existence today, is in some ways also the most secure? How does one explain the persistence of Castro’s Cuba, the Caribbean tail that once in a while wags the dog in Washington, long after its patron was consigned to the ash heap of history? Is it only accident of history that five small monarchies of the world, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand and Tonga remained more or less free or independent for a long time? Again, if this were really true, then was it also an accident of history that Afghanistan remained free so long as it was able to resist alignment in favor of equidistant (Be-Terafi), that is, till the early fifties when its decision to go for Special Relationship with Kremlin proved to be a disaster rather than a remedy?

A closer look at these cases suggests that real roots of small state’s vulnerability and insecurity lie in factors that may be less physical such as size and power but more psychological-rooted in the relational myths and political contrivances engineered by the larger neighbor to serve their national interests. Security then becomes the common staple of excuse for manipulation of aggressive intervention into the affairs of the small neighbor.

What Zhou En-lai told T.P.Acharya in Beijing in the mid-fifties echoes a similar message: "How big is Japan"? The Japanese captured us. Size doesn’t make any difference. It is man who counts. It is man’s mind that counts not man’s number. According to the Tofflers who declare that instead of the land, labor, raw materials and capital which were the main factors of production in the second wave economy, it is knowledge (broadly defined to include data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values), which would be the central resource of the third wave economy.

Is Nepal small? : The absence of a comprehensive survey on self-perception does not allow generalization here at the theoretical level, but a casual scan of existing literature of Nepali people’s self-image suggests that they feel small, squeezed in between the elephantine weights of two giants whose geographical mass, economic productivity, military power, and cultural presence make it pale it into insignificance. Size anxiety has stirred the Nepalese people throughout their history like nothing else. It was, indeed, the size anxiety that prompted Laxmi Prasad Devkota to pen his famous essay on the theme decades ago and continues to dog Nepali minds to this day.

A closer look at the world data, however, suggests that the situation is not really so bleak and smallness in Nepal’s case is largely a matter of its specific context. It may be deemed relatively small by its neighbors. But what is small, an epithet which has been used in as diverse a way as possible in the history? Smallness is defined in very diverse ways. Still, judged in terms of any such measure, Nepal is far from "One of the smallest countries" in the world as one Nepali author claims it is. In the ancient times, too, the Chinese traveler Hiuen Thsiang put Ni-Po-Lo’s perimeter at 4,000 Li in circuit with the capital city of "20 Li round". And, even the present level of population is equivalent to 4000 Greek poleis as per Aristotle’s criterian and 320, 457 times the Vatican, the smallest nation-state on the map. In area it compares closely to six countries-Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Malawi, Nicaragua, Surinam and Uruguay.

Headline | 5 Question  | Editorial | 2nd Impression | International | Letter | Past |