11/05/06 - 17/05/06
"Largest democracy" as greatest cheater
Sir,
The article " India and Maoists Nepal presents worrisome scenario" by Shamsuddin Ahmed published in your weekly May 4-10-2006 issue is quite interesting.
He has tried to portray some of the glimpse of the current political situation, his bias towards the Maoists very explicit.
His article has major factual errors too. Firstly, the writer has written G.P Koirala reinstated as Prime Minister. This is not so. G.P Koirala is re-elected Prime Minister by the seven agitating parties unanimously and the reinstated parliament.
His claim that New Delhi's envoy Dr. Karan Singh's efforts "has saved the Monarch" is totally baseless. In fact, this Indian envoy's so-called recipe which is believed to have been announced in the form of the Royal proclamation of April 21 that asked the SPA to submit the name of their Prime Ministerial candidate was rejected by the SPA. This was a rebuff to Delhi's design by the SPA which Manmohan's government in Delhi never expected. The Indian special envoy Dr. Karan Singh who was dispatched to Kathmandu to bridge up between the King and the Parties had completely exposed Delhi's duplicity and double game when he publicly opposed the SPA's demand for reinstating the dissolved lower house of the Parliament. But in the next proclamation the King restored the Parliament as demanded by the SPA.
So it will be sheer misreading to claim that Karan Singh suggested the solution for the deadlock. Rather it will be fair to say that Delhi was playing a dirty trick to humble the great Nepalese people and deepen the crisis.
But the Palace sensed the trouble and reached to the leaders of two major parties,
NC and CPN (UML) respectively, G.P Koirala and Madhav Kumar Nepal and clinched a deal. This is what I believe is the reality. Hence, Ahmed, if he has to write article on Nepal, he should first know the facts and reach in the depth of the subject on which he is dealing. This doesn't mean that he knows nothing about Nepal and his write up is fully incorrect.
He is seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong.
Ahmed has written that in 2001 just a week before the Palace massacre, the Chinese President Ziang Jemin visited Kathmandu and decided with King Birendra on construction of roads on border areas for direct road link between the two countries including one immediately. For the correct information, in June 1, 2001, seventeen days before the Palace massacre, the then Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji had visited Kathmandu and the agreements along with the one to link Nepal and China (Rasuaagadhi-Shyabrubesi highway) was signed by a Chinese Minister accompanying Premier Zhu Rongji and his Nepalese counterpart of Prime Minister G.P Koirala led Government of Nepal . But of course, since King Birendra and Prime Minister G P Koirala had developed a very good working relationship, Delhi had strong resentment with the King for not stopping Koirala Government of signing several comprehensive agreements with China. As most of the Nepalese believe that Delhi's sleuth organization RAW masterminded the Royal carnage. This Royal carnage of June
1 is one of the unforgettable tragedies in the history of the Royalties of all over the world. But it was not taken by the United Nations seriously as in the case of assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
I strongly believe that the United Nations should set up an inquiry commission immediately, though it is late, to conduct an investigation of the Royal carnage, in which King Birendra, his entire family including his brothers and sisters were brutally murdered. Such a heinous act of crime perpetrated has however been sidelined by the international community.
Perhaps because Delhi was opposed to such an investigation and no other country could take the initiative as the United States took in the case of Hariri.
Ahmed's claim that Delhi has long been controlling Nepal politically and economically is true to some extent. This British born fifty eight years old India has been an imperialist, an expansionist state from its very birth in 1947.
For Nepal this India turned worse than the imperial Britain which has annexed Nepal's Darjeeling, Kumaun, Garwal, Naini Tal, Deheradoon etc., (read J.L. Nehru's book "The Glimpses of World History" (94 Page 411). Nehru, who is known as cunning as Churchill, concedes in his book that Garawal,
Kumaun, Tal belongs to Nepal but after he gets a country in a golden platter by the imperialist Britain he not only annexed the Nepalese territory which the British had occupied in 1816 Nehru advanced further inside Nepalese territory and occupied many strategic positions including Kalapani. Nehru even forced upon border on Nepal in contravene to international law and Nepal's own rules and regulations. As for this so-called nation of India, it has expanded more than one-third of its size fixed by its creator imperial Britain.
From the hey day of Nehru to his daughter Indira, Delhi annexed the independent states of Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Goa, Pondichary, Andaman and Nikobar Islands and the central Asian nation Sikkim etc. Well, Nehru was British made democrat. So was his daughter Indira, who would do everything to retain power and wanted to become like British Queen Victoria and Russian Queen Catherine the Great.
Those father and daughter crushed many an independent nations and swallowed them but such an imperialist misdeeds were not opposed by the so-called international community. These two had double face, one to charm the Soviet Union and the other to the United States. As for Nepal being economically controlled by India, this is also strange. Nepalese are the buyers of their bad products but the buyer is projected in the world as if they got those Indian products in alms.
The unofficial figure tells that Nepal imports Indian products amounting over three billion dollars annually and the Indians make huge profit. Till 1995 Nepal was the third largest export market of India.
Millions of Indians got job from it and many a millions are working in Nepal. However this fact is little known to the outside world. Thanks to Delhi's Goebel's propaganda and this world where might is right has become the established norms.
The nauseating part of these so-called Nepal-India relations is that Delhi has always succeeded in taking one way benefit. India gains in every agreement and Nepal loses. In trade our so-called governments have been providing special tariff concession to the Indian products. The ignorant Nepalese consumers are even compelled to buy the Maruti cars and Tata trucks and other similar stuffs, thinking that they are cheap but they hardly know how they as well as the nation are being cheated by these products since the last two decades.
We hardly know why we cannot buy the best and modern cars from other parts of the world. The Japanese, English, French, German, American vehicles that used to run on our streets are hardly seen.
Why it is all happening? If we examine the cause of these best vehicles being replaced by the third class Indian products, we have to agree that we are the most ignorant people in this biosphere and that India the "largest democracy" is the greatest cheater. This of course is being perpetrated at the connivance of those Nepalese in our own so-called government and bureaucracy which is filled with the renegades. I will site here an example of how the Indian cheat us.
For its products the Indian government collects the exercise duty itself and handover to Nepal directly so that it can avoid paying additional tariff which is equal to the amount of the exercise duty.
This way India cheats thirty seven percent of the tariffs imposed on the exercise duty. But the products of the rest of the world have to pay both. There are so many other tricks India is applying to cheat Nepal economically.
I request the impartial journalists and columnists all over the world to make a study of how India is robbing Nepal in every field.
Suman Pudasaini
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