Should Nepal and India talk now?
There is hardly a foreign policy wonk in either Nepal or India who is not publicly in favor of dialogue to resolve the outstanding border dispute. Yet it is also hard to see what the two sides will discuss—much less resolve—if they talk now. The mutual distrust is far too great. The risk is that they will talk more as their country’s aggrieved representatives than as cool-headed negotiators, further complicating matters.
As Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali has said, Nepal’s bottom-line is the pullout of Indian troops from Kalapani. But at a time of escalating border tensions with China, the Indians will not be ready to withdraw from Kalapani, the strategic outpost that helps them keep a close eye on the PLA garrison in Taklakot. In that case, what other alternative will Nepal offer to India?
The last thing PM KP Oli—widely criticized for his bungling of the Covid-19 response, and cornered in his own party—wants, is to be seen as compromising on national sovereignty with India. The Nepali blood still aboil, anything short of getting India to fully agree to the new map will be viewed as treason back home. On the other hand, if he can hold his ground against the big brother, Oli will place himself well going into the ruling party’s impending general convention and, after that, the next round of national elections.
Oli, who returned to power on the back of his resolute stand against the Indian blockade, has no other political card up his sleeve. Even if his government badly botches the Covid-19 response, even if it appears to be profiting from people’s misery, even if it has dashed most public expectations, Oli reckons people will still forgive him if he refuses to blink against India. Traditionally, a strong anti-India posturing has been a foolproof path to power, more so in times of Nepal-India hostilities.
The more uncompromising the Nepali negotiating team appears on Kalapani, the greater will be the belief among its Indian counterpart that Oli really has sold his soul to China. The Nepali prime minister has not helped his cause with the Indians by belittling India’s national emblem and blaming it for Nepal’s corona crisis. Nepal’s unconditional support for recent China’s actions in Hong Kong will also have been noted.
If the two sides get talking, the Indians could propose a complete rewriting of bilateral ties—this time with the sole intent of securing India’s security interests. With an end of the ‘special relations’, India won’t be obliged to make any concessions to Nepal. But if they really propose to, say, regulate the open border or cancel visa-free access to Nepali citizens, will the Nepali side be able to accept the proposals? I am unaware of any kind of homework in Nepal on how the country will deal with this kind of monumental change in its foreign policy.
Nepal-India relations are on the verge of derailment, and it won’t be easy to bring them back on track. One hope could be that, special relations or not, the ever-present threat of China usurping India’s strategic space in the region will make India amenable to compromise, if only partially, in Nepal’s favor.
But that is a risky bet. China has repeatedly compromised Nepali interests at the altar of its business ties with India. It could do so again. What if India, while it engages Nepal, is simultaneously negotiating with China on Kalapani? PM Oli may think Nepal has China’s back on the region. Verbal assurances aside, where is hard proof?
Suffering is good
After enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautam met his five former ascetic companions to share his experience. He said, “Monks, let me tell you about the truth of suffering.”
It may sound strange for an enlightened person to talk of such a seemingly trivial thing. Who wouldn’t know about suffering? And he was talking to the ascetics who were walking examples of suffering! They ate a few grains of food in many days, just enough not to die. They slept on cold, hard floors of cremation grounds. They denied themselves even the tiniest and pettiest things of comfort. Being their former colleague, Siddhartha knew suffering wasn’t new to them. But he still had to talk about it. Why? To liberate them from suffering—the real one which had nothing to do with their bodies, but with their minds.
The five ascetics thought the body was a prison for their soul—the pure substance that they needed to free. The idea of liberating the soul from suffering became their fixation. When something becomes a fixation, one can go to any length. But the enlightened Siddhartha knew the poor guys would get nowhere by torturing their bodies. They needed to fix their minds.
From what the Buddha taught, we know he was helping people live a life of peace and contentment. It would be a life free of dissatisfaction, of course. To find freedom from something, first we need to realize it exists. A physician has to tell the patient that they have certain disease so that they can take the medicine. Likewise, the Buddha tells us to wake up to suffering, or the pains and dissatisfactions, of life.
There are obvious pains that we all face and see: birth, disease, old-age, death. There are natural disasters and pandemics. But there are less severe and less visible everyday pains as well. We have to live with people we don’t like. Our boss refuses us to grant leave from work and our long-planned trek to the mountains is canceled. When we desperately want to have a fresh lime soda, the waiter says they have run out of lemons. After finding a perfect ‘soulmate’, we cling to the ‘bliss’ of their company and fear losing it. The list is endless.
While the grosser ones like disease and old-age are physical, the subtler ones happen in the mind. Death or separation may only happen once, but the fear of it haunts us all the time. We are all trying to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic right now. The virus may or may not affect us at the physical level, but at the mental level it has already deeply affected us. We create most of our sufferings in the mind.
So what does it mean? Often, we are born and we die without actually knowing what’s happening. Most of us fail to see these things as suffering—they form part of ordinary routine life. Ignorance may be bliss, and if you are happy with it, that’s okay. But that’s not a wise choice. Knowing is more interesting than not knowing. Recognizing our subtle sufferings and knowing how our minds create them may open us to a higher possibility, just like the Buddha and other enlightened masters.
In support of Nepal’s EV tax
The government decision to increase the excise and customs duty on electric vehicles (EV) was widely criticized as a reversal of the policy to promote electric transport. As a symbol of that protest, 17 eminent civil society leaders submitted a memorandum calling on the Prime Minister to reconsider.
Those protesting the EV tax have erred in their judgement. The new EV tax still retains the policy of promoting EV but ends an unreasonable subsidy to car buyers. Protestors have confused two objectives. First, the objective of promoting purchase of EV over conventional fuel vehicles. Second, the objective of making private vehicle affordable.
Promoting EV
Even with the new tax, EV remains comparatively cheaper than the equivalent conventional fuel vehicles.
The effective tax on EV has increased from approximately 30 percent to 140 percent. In contrast, the equivalent taxes for conventional fuel vehicle are 260 percent. Taxes on conventional vehicles are still 85 percent higher than for EVs.
Consider this example. Suppose the base price of a petrol car is Rs 100: it will incur Rs 260 in taxes and cost the consumer Rs 360. The base price of an EV is approximately 30 percent higher than the equivalent petrol car. Starting at Rs 130, the EV will then pay Rs 182 in taxes and cost the consumer Rs 312.
Even with the new tax, EV still remains comparatively cheaper. And this is without accounting for the fact that EVs are cheaper to operate and run than conventional fuel vehicles. The new EV tax hasn’t changed the policy promoting EV.
Making private vehicles affordable
The new taxes will increase the price of an EV.
An EV with a base pre-tax price of say Rs 15 lakhs will now cost the consumer approximately Rs 21 lakhs more in taxes. Previously, the taxes would have been Rs 1.5 lakhs. The consumer must now pay Rs 19.5 lakhs more.
It is this price increase that protestors are really arguing about. The new EV tax has made private vehicles unaffordable for many.
No government in Nepal has ever had a policy of encouraging private vehicle ownership. Only a small fraction of Nepalis can afford a private vehicle. With limited government revenue, reducing import taxes for private vehicle ownership can undermine spending on other development needs.
Put this into perspective. Last year, approximately 590 EV passenger cars were sold in Nepal. With the new EV tax, the government would have raised approximately Rs 115 Crores. Based on this year’s budget, that would have enabled it to educate 43,928 school and college students, or helped 605,526 women access institutional health care for safer motherhood, or provided 143,813 babies access to medical care, or distributed financial support to 191,863 farmers.
Making EVs, or for that matter private vehicle ownership in general, affordable for all Nepalis is a great goal. But it cannot come at the expense of depriving the basic needs and livelihoods of millions of poor Nepalis. The poor have as much a right to a future as protestors have to affordable cars.
Civil society activism
The EV tax debate is a stark reminder of our harsh realities. Even a well-intentioned government with efficient honest systems (impossible to begin with!) will struggle to balance our multiple urgent needs and fiscal constraints.
Opposition to the EV tax must empathize with these broader challenges. It cannot merely be a revolt of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
As civil society, we must mobilize to pressure government to perform. But we must also supplement what the government cannot or will not achieve. Where government cannot, we must lead ourselves into the future we desire by collectively mobilizing voluntary individual action.
There are cheaper and better ways of reducing urban air pollution. EVs help—don’t get me wrong—but in Nepal, the bigger impact will come from reducing vehicles on the road.
We can do more to improve public transport (incidentally, tax on EV public transport has been left unchanged). Rich people can ride buses too! Create voluntary car-free days. Cycle or walk short distances. Popularize the pedal (or electric) rickshaw. Close urban centres to vehicular traffic.
We can put pressure on the government to reduce fuel imports by doubling taxes on conventional fuel vehicles, and impose a pollution tax on fuel oil.
We can demand greater accountability on the taxes we pay. If we will shell out 140 percent tax on EV, perhaps we should focus our protest to know precisely where it goes.
Rethinking Nepal-India ‘special relations’
One of the best articulations thus far of the need to reset Nepal-India ties comes from C. Raja Mohan, among India’s most trusted foreign policy hands. At the risk of over-simplification, his nuanced column for The Indian Express makes two basic points: one, he urges New Delhi to come to terms with Nepal’s “natural politics of balance”; and two, for it to recognize that the “much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ is part of the problem.”
His first argument is that starting with Prithvi Narayan Shah, Nepal has always looked to balance India and China. KP Oli is doing no more than continuing the age-old trend. “Delhi, which puffs up with the mere mention of ‘strategic autonomy’, should not find it difficult to recognize where Kathmandu is coming from,” he writes perspicuously.
Second, Raja Mohan asks Delhi to no more hanker after “a ‘special relationship’ that a large section of Kathmandu does not want”. No bilateral relationship between nations can be built on sentiment, he continues, “whether it is based on faith, ideology or inheritance. Only those rooted in shared interests will endure.”
The strategic thinkers in Nepal have long been making this twin argument, and yet no one in Delhi seemed willing to listen. Many Nepalis are ‘anti-Indian’ precisely because they see Delhi as wanting to foist ‘special relationship’ on them: Given the power and demographic asymmetry between the two countries, the relations were ‘special’ only for the bigger partner. If India saw Nepal as its sovereign equal, it would ditch the ‘big brother mentality’ it inherited from the British and stop seeing Nepal as no more than a supplicant for its favors.
Every country’s foreign policy is rooted in its self-defined national interests. New Delhi’s emphasis on special relationship was also based on the belief that it served India’s interests—whether or not it served Nepal’s. The feeling in Kathmandu is that Delhi has over the years used the special relations to justify its interference in Nepal.
Again, nothing wrong in Delhi pursuing its interests the way it sees fit. It’s only if the Indians realize that the current modus operandi is not working do they need to change track. In this light, Raja Mohan’s recent article comes as a breath of fresh air. Not only does it hint of a realization in Delhi that its foreign policy conduct is breeding resentment in Nepal. I believe it is also a voice of a more confident India that can deal with its small neighbors based on mutual interests rather than outdated and artificial labels.
Paradoxically, therein also lies a need for caution for Nepal. If India revisits its ‘special relationship’, are we prepared to live with the consequences, like the renegotiation of “national treatment to Nepali citizens in India, trade and transit arrangements, the open border and visa-free travel,” as Raja Mohan suggests? Can we pick and choose what we want to retain from the old model? If the goal is to engage more with the rest of the world to reduce the country’s dependence on India, how can Nepal overcome its geographical constraints? Will Nepal then also un-peg its currency with the Indian currency? Forget the concerns of the south for a moment. The more important question is: Have we done any homework on how Nepal, minus the special relationship, will deal with the changed reality of ‘equality’ with India?
