Cartographic aggression and demographic aggression

Did Nepal raise the two most important issues in its relations with India during the visit of India's Minister for External Affairs, S Jaishankar? 

First, what are those issues? Yours truly feels that they are: Cartographic aggression and demographic aggression. 

It is hard to get the exact details of encroachment upon Nepali territories because our southern neighbour seems to be acting like an eraser erasing thin pencil lines drawn on a paper. But the Lipulek region in Nepal's Far-Western Region and the Susta region along the Narayani river basin are said to be the largest chunks of river that Nepal's southern neighbour has been occupying illegally. 

An afterthought: Shall we not call these chunks of land India-occupied territories of Nepal?   

In this context, the government-owned English daily, The Rising Nepal, has recently run an interview (http://therisingnepal.org.np/news/21217) with the celebrated border expert and the former director-general of the Department of Survey, Buddhi Narayan Shrestha, who has spent years surveying instances of encroachment upon Nepali territories and raising public awareness on the issue. Part of the interview goes: There are encroachments, disputes, conflicts, cross-holding occupations, claims and counterclaims in 71 places along the 1,880-kilometre-long border between Nepal and India. The total area of such conflicts has been computed at 66,602 hectares of land.

Thanks to this situation, Nepali nationals sleeping at their own territory at night get a rude awakening when they find the next morning that the land that used to be theirs does not belong to them anymore!

It is possible that fresh instances of encroachment may have taken place close to the open border and beyond, for the Indian side has a long history of not even caring about the sanctity of the no-man's-land, given a very thin presence of poorly-equipped Nepali security apparatuses along the border. Equipped with superior firearms, well-trained personnel and a huge population, there's no stopping India as it continues to build water regulatory structures like dams and high-elevation roads along the Nepal border inundating huge swathes of territories and displacing lakhs of peoples as the state looks on helplessly thanks to a subservient political leadership. This is not only in violation of international practices but also unbecoming of the ‘world’s largest democracy’. But who can make the largest democracy deal with its middle-sized neighbour in a democratic manner? The sole superpower? The hyperpower in our neighbourhood? The League of Nations 2.0?         

Also, demographic aggression from the dear neighbour has been a matter of serious concern for Nepal. Every day, thousands of people from across the border, a territory with a huge population (as per indiapopulation.in, the current population of India is approximately 1,350,438,098), enter Nepal through an 1,880-km border that's open on our side, by and large. These people can freely engage in commerce and trade, all because they are our neighbours! Of late, involvement of some among the entrants in grave crimes, including the recent heinous murder of a woman in Bhaktapur, is emerging as a major security challenge for both Nepal and India. The arrest of Indian shooters in pursuit of their targets in Nepal has ceased to be a major news. 

Thanks to an open border, Nepal has also been made to provide for displaced populations not only from India but from the extended neighbourhood like Bangladesh and Myanmar, countries with which it has no land border.

Apparently, when India lets its 'floodgates' along the border open or looks the other way, these people enter Nepal passing off as 'Indians', who can enter Nepal without much difficulty, given our so-called 'people-to-people' relations. 

India 'finds' Nepal links whenever terror attacks take place on its territories, should it not also be mindful that the open border is contributing to security threats not only for itself, but for Nepal too? On the other hand, India providing for and giving training to different elements inimical to certain regimes in Nepal is nothing new. Should New Delhi not stop this double standard? Should it not shut the floodgates opened for the sake of its security, at the expense of Nepal with which it has ‘exemplary and historic ties’? 

India and Pakistan have such relations and so do Mexico and the US, Germany and the United Kingdom and so do many other countries. But do they have an open border like ours?

Why are these countries not freely hosting people from the neighbourhood? Why is the superpower and the economic giant in its own right, the US, building a wall along the Mexico border? Why should our border remain unfenced? So that anyone from the extended neighbourhood enter Nepal whenever there’s political instability?   

Lastly, did the most serious issue of cartographic and demographic aggression figure prominently in the fifth Nepal-India Joint Commission meeting that Nepal's Foreign Minister Pradip Gyawali and his Indian counterpart S Jainshankar chaired? Did the two sides agree on some timetable of sorts to resolve the issue? 

If it did not, Minister Gyawali's briefing in the Parliament that "Nepal-India relation has reached a new height after the exchange of high-level visits including between the two prime ministers in the last fifteen months" does not hold much water. 

By the way, we seem to be reaching new heights after each and every engagement with India. What height will this relation reach after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Nepal visit is anyone’s guess. At this rate, yours truly wonders if we will be flying above Mt Sagarmatha pretty soon.   

Rather than climbing dizzying heights, how about taking a down-to-earth approach to our relations with the dear neighbour? Will that not serve us better?