The politics of border and nation in Nepal in the time of pandemic
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The politics of border and nation in Nepal in the time of pandemic Mallika Shakya 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
As most of South Asia faces a surge in COVID-19 incidence following the end of a 3-monthlong lockdown setting off a public uproar about a states’ inability to respond to the pandemic with empathy and effective policy measures, it is timely to reflect on the changing geopolitics of borders in the region, and its implications for the future of nationalism and humanitarianism especially for two countries Nepal and India which are currently engaged in an intense border conflict triggering speculations about internal power-shuffling as well as bilateral diplomacy. This dispute involves a 40-square kilometre stretch of land on Nepal’s far-western border with India which is not far from China. Unwittingly, this border dispute came immediately ahead of the violent face-off between the Indian and Chinese military in the Galwan Valley just over 500 km from the disputed territory with Nepal, resulting in the death of 20 Indian soldiers. It should be noted however that the Nepal-India border dispute is not new by any means; it can be dated back to the 1816 treaty that Nepal was forced to sign with the colonial British administration following a 2-year violent war, a treaty which conceded about one-third of Nepal’s territory to the British Empire. My proposition in this commentary is that this ongoing border dispute, also known in Nepal as the Kalapani dispute, should be read within the contexts of (i) the 1990 regime change in Nepal following the end of the Cold War, (ii) the India-Nepal standoff amid Nepal’s promulgation of its 2016 constitution which brought a formal closure to the People’s War waged by its Maoist rebels and (iii) the rising heavy-handedness on part of the Nepali state especially during the country-wide lockdown involving the COVID-19 crisis. I also wish to remind the readers that while India continues to receive extensive coverage in most global policy and media platforms as well as academic deliberations, the same cannot be said about its smaller neighbours including Nepal. This commentary presents a nonhegemonic account of Nepal’s growing border tensions with a bigger neighbour India in the context of the India-China face-off whose roots can be traced to the end of the Cold War and an unprecedented rise of neoliberal capitalism in South Asia in the 1990s.
* Mallika Shakya [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology, South Asian University, Akbar Bhawan, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021, India
M. Shakya
The 2020 border dispute: the tip of an iceberg On June 13, 2 months after it imposed a strict national lockdown, the Nepalese House of Representatives unanimously endorsed the Second Amendment to the constitution of Nepal to update the country’s new political map in its national emblem. The bill was endorsed unanimously by the Upper House the day after. The cabinet had issued the concerned map on May 20 which incorporated Limpiyadhura, Lipulekh and Kalapani, a 370-square-kilometre strip on it
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