Our best friend has put her hand to our throat,” went the title of the pamphlet put out sometime in 1989 by the Royal Nepalese Embassy in London. Thanks to Michael Hutt of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, who had somewhat presciently preserved this document as well as the response from the counterpart Indian mission and which he kindly sent to me, we can get a sense of the approach at ‘internationalising’ the 1989-90 blockade.

The Nepali embassy minces no words while providing its version of the fracas: “As countries, India and Nepal have been friends for centuries. Which was formalised in 1950, shortly after India became independent, by the signing of a treaty between us of Peace and Friendship…We believe the reason India is acting so harshly is not because of some minor disputes on our treaties, but because India wants to teach us a lesson.”

“What then have we done wrong?” asks the embassy. “In short, we have tried to function as an independent, sovereign nation… In conformity with an economic policy of protecting our independence, we have tried to diversify our trade so we would not be economically dependent on only one country. …Worse still, in India’s eyes, we have entered into trade agreements with China, and bought from her items for our security requirements which for years we had repeatedly asked to buy from India, without receiving any response.”

The punch line in the Nepali document appears to play to the fears of the West and China, both of which still viewed the pro-Soviet India with suspicion: “It may suit India to prolong the agony our country is undergoing. But as long as she does this, then we must all (the nations and press of the world) ask questions about India’s ambitions in Asia.”

India on the offensive

The response from the Indian High Commission came on September 15, 1989. Published in the forever-bland India News that Indian missions routinely put out, it came out guns blazing from the title itself: “Facts Belie Nepal’s Propaganda.”

The first two sentences go: “The Royal Nepalese Embassy has circulated a glossy which places the blame for all of Nepal’s ills—from poverty to the chopping down of forests—on India. This handout contains many half-truths, mis-statements and unfounded accusations.”

The reference to deforestation in the Nepali embassy’s publication was the graphic (published alongside) encapsulating the now-discarded theory of Himalayan degradation. (The deforestation angle was used by King Birendra as well in an interview to a Finnish newspaper in which he asserted, rather incredulously, that Nepal was losing 240 hectares of forest every day for fuelwood required in lieu of gas and kerosene.) The sophistication of the Indian side is clear in its refutation: “Between 1950 and 1988, Nepal’s forested areas registered a dramatic decrease due to the Royal Nepal Government’s policy of settling excess population in forested lands, of encouraging timber-based exports and due to the greed of its contractors…The fact of the matter is that in Nepal (or, for that matter, in a very major portion of lndia and many other developing countries) wood is, and has always been used as cooking fuel. Oil is not used for this purpose as a rule. The Nepalese charge is only an attempt to exploit the concerns of environmentalists and ecologists in order to malign India.”

Indian concerns

The rebuttal in India News also provides an indication of the source of India’s concerns. It says, first, that contrary to the 1950 Treaty that calls for equal treatment for nationals of one country in the other, Nepal has “a) unilaterally imposed restrictions on the movement of Indians in Nepal; and b) imposed disabilities on Indian citizens in Nepal, numbering around 150,000, in the matter of owning property or seeking employment in Nepal, while six million Nepalese live and work in India along with India’s own citizens, find employment, own property, move freely, stay permanently as envisaged by the 1950 Treaty.”

Second, the Indian statement provides details of the consignments that passed through the two open border points of Jogbani and Birgunj between March and July of 1989, which included “high cost goods like refrigerators, airconditioners, cameras, photo-films, polythene granules, umbrellas, motor-car parts, tyres and tubes, liquors, raw-wool, shoes, electrical goods, cigarettes, paper, acid, construction materials, cardamom and cloves, hospital equipment etc. etc. A glance at the quantities of these items imported into Nepal would show that many items in the list would find their way into India tax-free.”

And, third, and perhaps most important, “India has never objected to Nepal’s trade with China, its other neighbour. Nepal’s arms imports from anywhere are a different matter as these bear relevance to India’s own security. Such imports are the subject matter of written covenants between the Governments of India and Nepal.”

As for the issue of petroleum products, it conveniently states: “India produces a relatively small part of its domestic requirement of petroleum products. It is a large importer of these products. Therefore, export of POL products from India is banned. Earlier, under a special and highly concessional regime certain quantities of these products were exported to Nepal. That regime has lapsed.” The said regime was the trade and transit treaty, the lapse of which on March 23, 1989 had led to the tightening of the Nepal-India border.

Colonial and punitive

As with relations between most neighbours, the truth is always somewhere in between. Thus, while Nepal rightly complained about the ‘sudden closure’ of the border (apart from the two mentioned above), India is also far from wrong when it stated: “The border remains open and millions of people move across it at will, without passport or immigration control.” A fact that was true then as it is now.

Even if the Indian establishment will never admit that what happened then and is going on now is an embargo, there is broad agreement among scholars, including Indians, that Nepal was being subjected to what is euphemistically called ‘economic statecraft’. In fact, the blockade 25 years ago features as one of seven case studies in a recent book entitled Economic Statecraft and Foreign Policy: Sanctions, Incentives, and Target State Calculations by J.F. Blanchard and N.M. Ripsman. More to the point perhaps is the late Jalal Alamgir in India’s Open-Economy Policy: Globalism, Rivalry, Continuity. He writes that while economic statecraft can be used for political reasons such as promoting democratisation or punishing human rights violations, it has an economic aspect as well. “India’s practice could be described as a soft economic statecraft, geared toward securing new markets and investment, rather than a heavy-handed type that aims at colonial or punitive purposes. (There are exceptions: In 1989-90 India put economic sanctions on Nepal...)”

In his Asian Survey summation of events from 1989, Niranjan Koirala concludes that “the problem was mostly due to the government’s own misdoings and intransigence and could have been avoided or at least minimised.” While that is again largely true in this instance, and India may be using sanctions to promote greater democratisation of Nepal’s polity, particularly in relation to Madhesis, given the proximity of the two countries it can also smack of the colonial and the punitive.