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Amid the standoff on Line of Actual Control (LAC), China has responded to India’s charges of what is euphemistically called ‘changing the facts on the ground’ with denials and counter-accusations. But satellite images taken on June 22, a week after the June 15 brutal clash in the Galwan Valley that aggravated weeks-old tension between the two, clearly demonstrates naked Chinese aggression. 

Chinese military structures have sprung up in the middle of nowhere in the territory claimed by India. Bunkers, tents and storage units for military hardware are visible in an area overlooking the Galwan River where last month there were none. The Chinese now claim that Galwan Valley was on the their side of the Line of Actual Control.

The satellite imagery provided by American space technology firm Maxar were released on the day Indian and Chinese military commanders agreed to de-escalate the surging tension at several locations along the LAC following the June 15 clash. This is how China changes facts on the ground, as India has alleged. The world has been witnessing such deception after the Xi Jinping era began in 2012, as China set about pressing territorial claims using a mix of skewed logic of sovereignty, bullying and intimidation. 

India realized the magnitude of danger an assertive China posed during the 2017 Doklam standoff and began executing military infrastructure upgrades along the border to counter China’s own buildup and aggression. The deadly June 15 clash occurred as China repeated its ignoble pattern of the past two years of pushing territorial claims and refusing to vacate the occupied land. 

By cementing its occupation in the Galwan Valley as it has done, China is signaling India to refrain from buttressing its military capabilities along the LAC while also indicating that its incursions will continue. It is a signal meant to warn that China will assert its claims by intimidating India as it does other neighbors, even as it attempts to build a network of client states in South Asia selling its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that will pass through areas claimed by India is a key project.

The Wuhan and Chennai summitry between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi appears to have done little to moderate China’s belligerent behavior. The Modi government is shaken by the June 15 clash and its aftermath because it did not expect personal diplomacy with great powers, in which it has invested heavily, to fail spectacularly in case of China. The government knows that military confrontation with China is unlike one with Pakistan, where cross-border terrorism makes a retaliation enjoying greater international legitimacy. The poorly demarcated and often-undefined nature of the LAC might bring India to pull punches or risk an undesirable escalation.

Standing up to Chinese threat calls for deft diplomacy and recalibration of ties with Beijing on India’s part while remaining on its guard. However, if China is intent on annexing more territory in the Galwan Valley style in future, it could spark more clashes, risking a limited or even full-blown war. 

If that comes to pass, India might have to reckon a grim reality where it has been thrust into fighting a two-front war. It is foolish to expect the impetuous army generals who indirectly control the country sit idle when the country that they consider arch-enemy is in peril. China may even instigate Pakistan, already a puppet. Therefore, it is quite possible that Pakistan will waste no opportunity to turn its covert war of thousand cuts into an overt one, or at least a Kargil-style one, to humiliate India and to obtain maximum territorial advantage in Kashmir. 

After the Doklam affair, Indian Army has acknowledged that two-front war is a real and present danger India confronts. In 2018, the then Army chief, now the Chief of Defense Staff, has declared that a two-front war is a real scenario and India’s military is very much prepared for such an eventuality. However, in spite of such poise, it is likely India would find odds stacked heavily against it, more so as both adversaries are nuclear-armed. We have to bear in mind that a war with each country—with China in 1962 and with Pakistan in Kargil war in 1999—had shattered many comforting myths our military top brass believed in as viable strategy until then. 

In a hard-hitting interview with PTI on 26^th June 2020, Indian Ambassador to China Vikram Misri warned China that trying to alter the status quo by resorting to force will not just damage the peace that existed on the border areas but can also have ‘ripples and repercussions’ in the broader bilateral relationship. He demanded Beijing to stop its activities in eastern Ladakh, saying that the only way to resolve the current military standoff was for Beijing to not alter the status quo by resorting to force or coercion. 

“The resolution of this issue is quite straightforward from our perspective. The Chinese side needs to stop creating obstruction and hindrances in the normal patrolling patterns of the Indian troops,” Ambassador Misri said. He also rubbished China’s claim of sovereignty over Galwan Valley in Ladakh as “completely untenable”, and asserted that these kinds of exaggerated claims are not going to help the situation. “Whatever activities we may be carrying on have always been on our side of the Line of Actual Control LAC, so the Chinese need to stop activities to alter the status quo. It is very surprising that they should attempt to do so in a sector which has never before been a sector of concern,” he added.

On the Chinese Ambassador Sun Weidong’s assertion during an interview with PTI that the onus is on India to deescalate tensions, Ambassador Misri said, “I think we have been very clear, and very consistent in pointing out that it has been Chinese actions over an extended period of time, that are responsible for the current situation.”

In fact, with its policy of territorial aggrandizement, China has set its relations with India back. The worsening of ties with China came as Nepal stirred a row with India, many believe at Beijing’s behest, over a map of its border regions with India. Fraying of our ties with Nepal is another symptom of India’s diplomatic failure to counter China in South Asia.

For its part, Nepal has not read China’s intentions in the South Asian region and it will seriously suffer if it falls prey to Chinese advances to turn it into a third front in a Sino-Indian war. When it comes to Lipulekh or the matter of sovereignty at large, Nepal has every right to act. However, those acts are supposed to strengthen Nepal’s position rather sensitizing the main plank and letting go the options in engagements and dialogues for normalizing its ties with India. Nepal’s Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli should come to terms with the sensitivities and positively reciprocate on India’s concern for China’s move to open the third front through Nepal for countering India’s geo-political and economic interests.

Given the authoritarian and militaristic impulses of China, the vision for ‘Asian Century’ is being hollowed out. India should reassess its priorities in international relations and realign them with an outcome-driven approach. China has reasons to be upbeat about its plans but India has no option left but to answer China through different means. Just selectively banning the apps is not suffice, India’s response has to rise above petty considerations that otherwise shape the priorities of Narendra Modi government.

Though the de-escalation has started at borders near Galwan but both India and China have to think deep about the strategic failure that led to terrible moments. China must think for ‘Asian Century’, it should not keep a flawed notion for attaining a ‘Chinese Century’. A normal India-China relation would do well for entire continent and humanity.

Written by: Atul K Thakur and Rajiv Jayaram

Thakur is a Public Policy Professional and Columnist;  Jayaram is a Journalist and Political Commentator. They can be reached @ [email protected]

I was recently talking to someone who has worked closely with Prime Minister KP Oli for a long time. In the course of our conversation, I asked him if he had any idea why the prime minister had randomly brought up Lord Ram’s nationality. My contact laughed out loud. “Oli is not someone who listens to anyone, you see, not even his advisors,” he began. “He is also a bit of a gambler and has this tendency to throw out certain ideas in public to gauge their impact.”

So Oli knew what he was talking about? “Certainly,” he replied. Immediately after he had claimed Lord Ram for Nepal, Oli had asked his advisors, with a smiley face, if he had gone overboard. So, basically, Oli wanted to throw out the idea of Ram’s Nepali birth and see how New Delhi would react. 

But the prime minister couldn’t have cooked up something like that out of the blue, could he? “He reads a lot,” my contact replied, suspecting Oli had read about the possibility of Ram being born in Nepal. “Not just in this case. Whenever he pitches an interesting but unsubstantiated idea, nine times out of 10, he would have read about it somewhere.” And that was all the anti-India ammunition he needed at the moment. 

PM Oli publicly aired the ‘Ram is Nepali’ idea because he was getting increasingly irritated with the Indian establishment and its media outlets. The latest Indian media reports suggesting he was amorously involved with the Chinese envoy was the tippling point. If the Indians could make such baseless, humiliating claims about him, why couldn’t he pull one over on them? 

Yet Oli is far too astute a politician not to recognize the implication of such brazen remarks. Perhaps no other senior Nepali politician understands New Delhi and its bureaucracy better than him. He knew the BJP-wallas, for whom Lord Ram might well be their ‘official god’, would not take his claim lightly. 

His increasingly bolder anti-India remarks suggest Oli is not looking for reconciliation. If he still believed he had a realistic chance of prolonging his political career beyond the term of the current government, he would not have broken all channels with India. Oli’s health is failing. The political equations in the NCP are not in his favor. Near the end of his political career, he wants to buttress his image of a true nationalist leader who was not afraid to see eye to eye with the Indians. 

Oli could also have calculated that precisely because there is no historical basis to establish Lord Ram’s birthplace, he might just claim him for Nepal. Historical artifacts could later be ‘unearthed’ from the ground. If nothing else, people of Thori will remember Oli for placing a tiny village near Birgunj on the Hindu pilgrimage map. On the other hand, if an ancient bit of sculpture, stone, house, horseshoe—anything at all—is later excavated and if that bit could be even remotely linked to Ram, why, KP Oli’s exalted place in Nepali nationalist narrative that starts with King Prithvi Narayan Shah is guaranteed.

A band has to only start its set in a random bar or pub in Thamel and within minutes into their performance, someone from the audience has had requested a song already. And as the night continues with a bit of drunkenness in the air, the ‘requests’ start getting harassingly loud and the poor band on stage is clearly confused and embarrassed; it is impossible for a group of musicians to cover almost everything under the sun.

And the problem is not limited to Thamel or Kathmandu. Musicians playing live at venues all over the country complain about the same thing: a nightmare when a group of drunkards disrupt their performance, dismiss their music, and disrespect their job. All because they think they own the artists and their art when they’re paying for the cover charge at the venue or their restaurant bill.

For a musician, or any other artist who’s up on stage, it is most disrespectful to be interrupted by the audience for no apparent reason. For Nepali musicians playing live in all kinds of venues, interruption has been so normalized that sometimes it’s a surprise when they get to complete a set without hassles. But most of them are not so fortunate most of the times.

Ask any musician for a story on a bar fight that disrupted the show; a police raid which ended in calling the night too early; a group of drunks who harassed the musicians with requests to the level they couldn’t play on stage—you’ll hear many different versions of their experiences and the details could be both shocking and surprising.

As the audience is paying at the bar, one may argue, they have the right to order performing artists to play music of their choice, but is that how it really works for all professions? No matter how much you pay, you won’t ask a urologist to check your eyes, would you? And ask a pilot on a Kathmandu-Pokhara flight to take a detour to Chitwan in between because your friends want to see elephants?

So, similarly, you’re agreeing to pay for a service when you enter a bar and seat yourselves down. Now it’d be really considerate of you to let the professionals do their work without interfering with them time and again. Instead of showboating money and clout at the venues, you could showboat chivalry, empathy, and good taste. 

Having said that, some bands and venues do accept requests, but there are limits to what a band can perform. If you see a jazz band performing at a bar, you DON’T pester them to play Narayan Gopal just because ‘the band members are Nepalis, and every Nepali musician should know how to play Narayan Gopal.’ When you see a rock band on stage, you DON’T shout to them to play Nepali film songs, because that’s most probably not in their repertoire. To make things clearer, if you have no idea of the genre that a band is performing, you either listen to them if you enjoy their music or go to a different venue. Plenty of options out there.

The biggest NO for requests though is when artists with original music are performing on stage. Requesting a musician playing their own music at their concert to cover another musician’s songs is the biggest disrespect there is, not only of the artists, but of music as an art too.

There have been plenty of incidents when a bunch of unthinking audiences have spoilt the mood of a performer by requesting them to play someone else’s song. It’s like going to a Metallica show and asking them to perform Eminem, just because you’re paying for the tickets. See the problem here? If you wouldn’t do that to international artists, why would you even think of doing that to the Nepali artists?

Don’t ask Albatross to play Bipul Chhetri or vice versa. But no, seems like our audience will never learn. Because on a recent Facebook live by Albatross singer Sirish Dali, there were requests for him to perform covers of other Nepali artists. The audience here had the option to shut down the page and move to other things on the internet if they didn’t like his music. But they chose to be arrogant, or ignorant maybe.

This write-up might sound a bit harsh, but this comes out of genuine frustration of being undervalued by our own audience—many of whose members do not know the basic etiquettes of attending a concert. So when the Covid-19 pandemic is over and live music starts making it back to our favorite venues, we request you audience, be more thoughtful and let the artists—who have worked hard on creating a playlist for you—perform in peace.

The author is one of the suffering musicians

If you are an outsider in Nepal, the handout your outpost provides you must have elaborately covered the seismic dangers. But it probably needs a complimentary explainer about this equally volatile realpolitik zone. This is my attempt.

For the sake of clarity, let’s cover it in three bullet points: do not trust the elites; forget everything that you know about political and ideological categorization; and, federalism as a political experiment, so far, has misfired.

Let’s tackle them one by one.

As all forces, internal or external, needed the elites of Kathmandu to manage the country, these forces danced to the tunes of the powerful. But the vice versa was also true, up to an extent. These forces helped King Mahendra overthrow an elected government and have consistently been partners in crime in every plunder that has taken place in this country. As a result, one can observe with some discretion that Nepal has become a country run by selfish elites without devotion or dignity.

Writers experienced in statecraft, like Rishikesh Shah and Lokraj Baral, have hinted about the parasitic and disgraceful nature of the elites of Kathmandu and how this has proliferated all the state machineries. (‘Essays on the practice of governance in Nepal’ by Shah; ‘Nation state in Wilderness’ by Baral).

By showing neither the gumption nor the determination to be the pathfinders, the elites have betrayed the nation. They have been the silent observers in every political change but have jumped in the fray to benefit the most after every transition.

Strangely, this nature of the Kathmandu elites hasn’t changed even after the democratic movements and the mainstreaming of the Maoists. The revolutionaries took the place of the elites, but borrowed their character too and got sucked into the bandwagon of shameless skullduggery. 

The servitude to influential powers has increased and the attitude to always look for the low-hanging fruits is more evident than ever. For example, the finance minister of the Nepal Communist Party recently said that the government would encourage the youths to go abroad.

Connected to this is our second point: forget everything you learnt about political ideological categorization. It’s confusing in Nepal.

The Maoists, who launched a decade-long armed struggle, came to mainstream politics aligned with the other democratic forces to overthrow the king. In the past seven decades, Nepal hasn’t really seen a revolution. It has always creeped from one change to another, without truly delinking itself from the past, and yet pretending to have adopted some newness.

The three milestones in the journey towards progress in the past 70 years—1950, 1990 and 2006—are significant as a whole but not revolutionary on their own. The 1950 overthrowing of the Rana regime came as a compromise that left room for the coup. The 1990 people’s movement came merely as a score settling of the 1959-60 coup, and the feudal and Kathmandu centric equilibrium made the Maoist war possible.

The overthrowing of monarchy came out of the blue, but the elites failed in institutionalizing the change. The constitution was a result of a compromise between descendants of different ideological interest groups and the lines were blurred beyond distinction over the long years of transition politics. The state hasn’t yet come out clean on war crimes and justice, nor has the issues of institutional discriminations been fully addressed. In fact, the polity has been on a downward spiral since being hit by a worldwide wave of populism.

So, this lack of an ideological commitment lies at the center of the political decay in Nepal today. Nepal has become a nation ruined by crony capitalism with words like ‘socialism’ used for cosmetic purposes in the constitution.

As Nepal lacks an elite class that can stand for its dignity, and political forces deeply committed to their ideologies, all the political experiments here have backfired. Our latest attempt at finding the ‘One Cure’ for all the ailments led us to federalism. But the indicators suggest it is turning out to be a disaster.

Local governments are not running any better than in the earlier set up. The constitution has put the governments of the three levels on an equal footing with coexistence and collaboration as the binding principle, but in practice the center controls the resources.

This paradox has turned federalism into a costly misadventure. State governments everywhere are jobless and purposeless, adding to the financial burden without making an iota of difference in people’s lives or nation building. This federal government, with a huge mandate, had the historic responsibility to institutionalize the change and stabilize politics. Sadly, it has failed its people, many times over.

When we connect the dots, we see a grim picture. Nepal seems to be in an endless downward spiral of political decay that is accentuated by a head of government who seems to have no control over his faculties.

If you are an outsider in Nepal, this for you is grim but probably not heart-wrenching. But for those in this country, it’s a different story.

We need to find the dignity and the devotion to tackle it.