In the United States of the early 1950s, as Mao’s Communist party regime consolidated its hold on China and marched into Tibet, exiling Washington’s favourite Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-Shek, to the island of Taiwan, the American strategic community was convulsed in a debate over “Who Lost China?” I only hope that nearly seven decades later their Indian equivalents will not be letting out the anguished cry, “Who Lost Nepal?”
There is, of course, only one place for fingers to be pointed, and that is at our own government in New Delhi. Despite its increasingly feeble denials, India’s de facto blockade of Nepal has choked the country’s economy, cut off its oil supplies, caused genuine hardship and provoked a groundswell of hostility against our country – from the one place on the planet whose relationship with us is so fraternal that we maintain open borders with it.
How did this come to pass, and why? India’s displeasure at Nepal’s new constitution and its refusal to accommodate the desires of its Madhesi and Tharu population is understandable. The people of the Terai (or the Madhes, as Indians prefer to call the region south of the hills abutting our border) are in many ways kin to – and essentially indistinguishable from – their brethren on our side of the frontier.
Here’s my take on how a centralised Modi regime succeeded in alienating Nepal: