NEPAL: A Nepali passage to India

FROM MYREPUBLICA.COM

BY BISHNU SAPKOTA

English novelist EM Forster suggests in his celebrated novel A Passage to India that the Englishmen and the Indians can never be friends in the true sense. That was during the first decades of the twentieth century when the British still ruled India. It is now irrelevant whether or not the Britishers and Indians can be friends on a personal level. What is now relevant for us Nepalis is to reflect on whether or not Nepalis can be friends with Indians. Not that India has colonized Nepal like the British had colonized India. However, if colonialism is also a culturally-acquired attitude and not just a political method, drawing some parallel from Forster’s novel to talk about friendship between the citizens of the two nations may not look overstretched.

Despite what some people choose to believe on both the sides of the border, there have been problems between the two countries for long which date back to the days before India’s Independence in 1947. And the real nuances of the problems lie not on a political level as popularly analyzed but on a deep cultural level. I have my full pity and sympathy with the Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal who had to accept New Delhi as the real political master for Nepal one day and elaborate the same least satirical statement as a satire the very next day. This is fully understandable.

The analyses and study about Nepal-Indo relations have had only two (superficial) perspectives so far. The first perspective is: The two countries share unique historical and cultural (religious) ties and they have great relations. The second is political: India has always been an influential and dominating factor in Nepali politics. Maybe both these perspectives are valid in their own right but because they both miss the deep cultural perspective, they are not complete.

This cultural perspective involves a close look at how an ordinary Indian relates himself or herself to an ordinary Nepali. Such a look would examine the deep culturally-rooted codes in intimate inter-personal relationship between two individuals of the respective nations. Individual Nepalis who think their best friends of life are Indians would be better positioned to examine this provided they have the required cultural and intellectual framework of mind to do so.

An Indian from New Delhi with a humble economic and academic background meets a Nepali in London who has a relatively better social status in Kathmandu compared to his counterpart’s in New Delhi. But the respective nationalities of the two individuals clash in such a way that their comparatively different social statuses in their native places just vanish and a new hierarchy is created in the personal relations based on nationalities. Of course, such clash and vanishing statuses would happen at such a subtle level that it may often go unnoticed. The concerned individuals may not be aware of the cultural barrier created by their respective belongingness to nations big and small, and powerful and weak.

But, much like a white man has the inborn burden to civilize the rest of the world, the Indian would have the historical Indian burden to help the Nepali. Some people say nationalism is imaginary and abstract and maybe they are right. However, this abstract, imaginary nationalism interferes with the personal elements of relations and this is what I mean by deep cultural perspective to analyze the relations between the two nations.

Coming back to the political level of relations, I often pity the Nepali political leaders who have suffered so long for their cause, have been imprisoned for long in the prime of their youths and compromised on their family. Pity because, despite their sacrifice and contribution for politics in the country, if they are not favored by their “friends” in New Delhi, they do not have a stable political career in Nepal. What is the point of all the sacrifice and competence then? The irony is that every single leader in Nepal knows that if there is a strong national unity within the country and our own democracy is stable, Delhi would have much less influence in our internal matters than it has had so far. However, the fact is also that our leaders will not have this unity but rather will look for Delhi for personal political favors.

It is always hard to gauge how much of Delhi’s influence is real and how much perceived. And it is also hard to assess how Delhi works within each of the party and its leaders for its influence. But the perceived influence of Delhi is always giving India a much greater space to influence than it could actually have. The announcement of Dahal to hold direct talks with Delhi for power negotiations in Kathmandu is definitely going to increase the perceived influence of India. Due to the combined influence of the actual and the perceived, the relation between the individuals of the two nations will continue for long to be inferior for one side and superior for the other. This unequal relationship has a bearing on personal relations between the citizens of the two countries.

The subtle nuances that make up the huge cultural tensions in the relations between the citizens of the two nations are deeper and higher than the political tensions in diplomatic relations. It may therefore help a little bit to understand the complexity of relations if we had a reading of the personal relations at the citizens’ level between the two countries through a cultural perspective. Maybe, we would need a novelist for this, not a mere political analyst or a historian.


COURTESY: BARUN ROY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------