Refugee issue and EPs fresh conclusion

Better late than never, the Strasbourg based European Parliament has come out with a powerful resolution only last week that calls for India’s genuine and meaningful ‘mediation’ in sorting out the overly stretched Bhutanese refugee imbroglio that have bedeviled the Nepal-Bhutan mutual ties since a decade or so. It is perhaps for the first time that the developed West belonging to the European Union through their Parliament have concluded that it is India and only India that could amicably settle the Nepal’s refugee issue once and for all and that without her mediation the issue in question will continue to linger intact for decades and decades. The fact is that India understands this fact clearly but then her continued unwillingness in jumping forward to help her immediate small neighbors is simply intriguing. India’s standard hypothesis that she would not wish to meddle in the bilateral affairs of Nepal and Bhutan is untenable for obvious reasons. It is so because her announcement made in this regard is hundred percent biased. It is biased in the sense that it is this India which facilitates the grand entry of the Bhutanese through her soil to Nepal and it is the same nation which summarily prohibits the Bhutanese refugees of Nepalese origin from entering into their ‘motherland’ Bhutan under one pretext or the other. In essence, India, by allowing the forcedly evicted Bhutanese of Nepalese origin-unhindered passage to Nepal, has already become a party to this decade long Nepal-Bhutan conflict. It can not escape from this allegation. Perhaps it is this factor that has prompted the European Parliament to rush to this conclusion though a belated one.

More so India should take due cognition of the fact that if the Bhutanese refugees languishing in the Nepali camps since long were lured by some fanatic and criminal sort of elements at any point of time from now then its grave impact would be definitely on both the sides of the borders that is Nepal and India. Later the disturbing impacts of such situation might reach up to the country that forced them to flee their own motherland. Media reports that some of the unemployed and hooligan sort of the Bhutanese youths have already been found with pistols and gelatins. Fortunately this impending menace has not yet taken a disturbing shape. A disturbed and lured mind will not then care as to where he or she has to use the gelatins and create terror with the pistol in his or her hand. A security conscious India perhaps forgets the fact that the adjoining areas where the already frustrated refugees currently reside and dwell bordered India’s "restricted area" Bagdogra which perhaps houses secret military establishment. Add to this the BODO and the ULFA insurgency that is very much creating troubles inside Assam, West Bengal and the adjoining areas. Thanks that the Nepalese Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala too talked on the same line this time when he reportedly met his Indian and the Bhutanese counterparts inside the ramparts of the UN building in New York.

In essence, the eagerness to arrive at an early solution to this refugee imbroglio should have come from India at the first place considering all these possible threats in store to her security by the factors just mentioned above.

Any delay made in this regard by India or even Bhutan will time permitting hit both the nations very hard. Any help that comes forth from India in this regard will perhaps benefit the mediating country more vis-à-vis her own security than the country housing the refugees since ten years or so. For Nepal, since the limit of the damages have already touched the highest point and hence to talk of further damages to its socio and environmental degradation is simply meaningless.

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