Modi 3.0: All eyes on India’s Nepal, peripheral policies

 

India: The caretaker Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is all set to take the oath of office for the third constitutive term on Sunday evening, with the invited South Asian leaders to witness the ceremony. Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal will fly to New Delhi to attend the swearing-in, and the two prime ministers will hold a meeting after the ceremony, according to government officials.

 

photo: reuters

A Cabinet meeting on Thursday approved the prime minister’s visit to India. It will be a two-day trip, says Rekha Sharma, Minister for Communication and Information Technology.

 

On Wednesday, Modi phoned Prime Minister Dahal and they briefly discussed the upcoming meeting, according to government officials.

 

Modi is set to become the second Indian prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to serve three constitutive terms. The third term will be different from his first two as he was the prime minister backed by an absolute majority for his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in the last two terms. This time, Modi has to rely on coalition partners under the banner of the National Democratic Alliance.

 

With Modi entering his third term, will Nepal-India ties change, or will they remain the same? Modi has championed the “Neighborhood First” policy in his dealings with South Asian nations.

 

Modi is the only Indian prime minister who has visited Nepal more than once—in 2014 and 2018, and again in 2022. Thus, he knows all top leaders of Nepal and is fully aware of bilateral issues, having served in the office for a decade.

 

“India’s policy towards Nepal will not change. There is very much consistency in their policy towards Nepal,” said former foreign minister Ramesh Nath Pandey. “Modi will have control over Nepal policy.

 

In the past decade, several Nepali prime ministers have visited India and interacted with Modi. The Indian prime minister is thus fully aware of Nepal’s concerns and interests, as well as India's expectations of Nepal. However, according to Pandey, Nepal has squandered a decade trying to shed the historical baggage and resolve bilateral differences.

 

This time, the BJP’s coalition partner, the Janata Dal (United), hails from the bordering state of Bihar. The JDU has called for a review of India’s controversial Agnipath scheme, under which hundreds of Nepali youths used to be recruited into the Indian Army’s Gorkha regiments. The Nepal government has refused to allow India to recruit its youth under this short-term scheme, arguing that the 1947 agreement between Nepal, India and Britain stipulated full-term service in both the Indian and British Armies, not short-term enlistment.

 

“Prime Minister Modi had a telephone conversation with the Prime Minister of Nepal,” said an Indian government statement on Thursday. During the talks, Prime Minister Dahal congratulated Prime Minister Modi on his historic victory in the recently concluded Indian general elections, according to the statement.

 

The statement said, “Dahal was convinced that, under Prime Minister Modi's leadership, India-Nepal relations would continue to strengthen.”

 

Nepal shares deep-rooted cultural and civilizational links with India and remains a special partner in India’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy, added the statement.

 

Nepal and India have many commonalities and differences that surface from time to time. Issues like boundary disputes, Nepal’s call for scrapping the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1950 and drafting a new one, and the submission of the report of the Eminent Persons Group on Nepal-India relations, among others, remain key bottlenecks in the bilateral ties. Once again, Modi has an opportunity to resolve them.

 

Some Indian experts also claimed that although Modi’s new government will include several coalition partners, the policy towards Nepal will fundamentally remain unchanged. But Modi’s new term is full of challenges as he will have to rely on and persuade his alliance partners and this could lead to instability in governance.

 

Ranjit Rae, former Indian ambassador to Nepal, said that India’s foreign policy will remain unchanged in Modi’s third term as there is broad consensus among the parties on key foreign policy issues.

 

“As Nitish Kumar is in the government and Bihar shares a long border with Nepal, Nepal will remain important in the foreign policy architecture,” Rae said. “Primarily, India’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy will continue.”

 

 

According to the Indian media, there are hard bargains among coalition partners in New Delhi on power-sharing and it remains to be decided which party gets what portfolio.

 

The two key alliance partners, N Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party and Nitish Kumar, both have secular credentials, so a party-centric foreign policy is unlikely to dominate during Modi’s third term, said Nihar Nayak, Research Fellow at the New Delhi-based Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA).

 

According to Nayak, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) could see a revival, and as per the strong demands of Nitish Kumar’s JDU, the Agnipath scheme will also be scrapped.

 

“If the Agnipath scheme is scrapped or reviewed, relations with Nepal will improve. The second thing is that there will be no BJP foreign policy. India’s insecurity in the region will diminish. The call for the restoration of the Hindu state in Nepal is unlikely to crop up as prominently. There will be changes in some aspects of foreign policy as Modi will be compelled to heed his coalition partners,” said Nayak.