Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  This was a new development. Before World War II all attempts to climb Everest had been launched from Tibet, with the sometimes reluctant blessing of Lhasa’s Dalai Lama. Meanwhile the kingdom of Nepal had remained firmly closed to climbers, as it had to most other visitors for over a century. It was Indian independence, followed two years later by the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, that isolated Tibet from its southern neighbours, opened up Nepal, and so ushered in a new era in sub-Himalayan relationships. Additionally it would be as a spin-off of these events that the Nepal–Tibet border was settled and the ownership of Mount Everest finally clarified.

  In November 1950, a month after Maoist China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moved in to reclaim (or ‘liberate’) Tibet, King Tribhuvan of Nepal had deserted his capital of Katmandu and fled to India. The King was little more than a figurehead; power in Nepal had long rested with the Rana family of hereditary prime ministers. But the Ranas now faced serious opposition. In imitation of Congress in India, popular movements were challenging Rana rule and demanding a more representative form of government. Parties like the Nepali Congress (founded in India in 1947) derived their ideas and much support from Indian sympathisers, while Nepalis whose political horizons had been broadened by service in the India-based Gurkha regiments of the British Indian army gave to the struggle something of a diasporic dimension.

  Indeed the Gurkhas might be claimed as the first of South Asia’s transnational communities. Defeated in the Anglo–Nepal war of 1814–16, the Gurkha kingdom had been effectively partitioned by British retention of its western districts (Garhwal, Kumaon, Dehra Dun, etc.). At the same time the Gurkhas’ aptitude for warfare, their limited domestic prospects and their flexibility in respect of caste (though Hindus, they were agreeable to service overseas) had recommended their recruitment into British India’s forces. In the first half of the twentieth century around 200,000 had served with distinction in various theatres of World War I, and over quarter of a million in World War II. But as in the Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, demobilisation saw many returning to their hills with poor prospects of employment allied to a sense of entitlement and notions of popular sovereignty. At the time of India’s independence, many Gurkhas transferred to the British army, and some would eventually secure residence rights in the UK. But more than half of the Gurkha regiments that remained under arms opted to join India. In Kashmir and elsewhere along India’s mountain frontier their altitude abilities proved invaluable, and their loyalty to India went unquestioned. Not surprisingly, many Gurkhas reasoned that if a Congress government could unite the Indian nation, then so it could the Nepali nation.

  When in 1950 the popular unrest within Nepal turned to revolt, the King had seen his chance. Instead of opposing demands for representative government like the Nizam of Hyderabad, he aligned himself with them, hoping thereby to discredit the Ranas and regain some vestige of his dynasty’s lost authority. King Tribhuvan’s exile, a ploy therefore to distance himself from the Ranas, was short; he stayed in India for only three months. But it was long enough for the insurgents in Nepal, aided by some volunteers from India and Burma, to force the Ranas to compromise. Under a power-sharing agreement between them and the Nepali Congress, the King returned.

  Nine months later the Ranas were elbowed aside, so ushering in a decade of parliamentary-style government under a constitutional monarchy. New Delhi applauded, most Nepalis celebrated, and so did the mountaineering fraternity. Nepal’s relations with India had just been regularised under a 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. This confirmed landlocked Nepal’s border with India as open to both trade and unregulated migration; in an arrangement fraught with difficulties for the future, Indians might settle in Nepal and Nepalis in India without let or hindrance. Under the new dispensation foreigners might also seek entry, and their diplomatic representatives might apply for climbing permits. The race for Everest, stalled by World War II, resumed.

  Possibly influenced by the King of Nepal’s flight, just a month later, in December 1950, the fifteen-year-old Dalai Lama also fled his capital, in this case before the advancing troops of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. From Lhasa he too headed south for the Indian border. But he was there persuaded to turn back. India, in the person of Nehru, though sympathetic to the democratic forces in Nepal, was not prepared to uphold an obscurantist theocracy in Tibet. Moreover, any condemnation of Chinese aggression in Tibet would prejudice India’s fraternal relations with the new Communist regime in Beijing. Commitments to Tibetan autonomy inherited from the British were accordingly downplayed, and India declined to support a Tibetan appeal to the UN. Under the circumstances His Holiness had little choice but to turn around and make the best terms he could with Beijing. These meant abandoning any notion of Tibetan sovereignty, ‘returning to the big family of the Motherland – the People’s Republic of China’, and cooperating to ‘drive out imperialist aggressive forces’.1 The chances of imperialist mountaineers being admitted to Tibet were now zero. In effect, Tibet’s Himalayan portal had slammed shut just as Nepal’s swung ajar.

  An approach route to Mount Everest from the Nepal side had been reconnoitred in 1951. Then in 1952 two Swiss expeditions nearly made it. Tenzing Norgay accompanied both of them as sirdar in charge of the other Sherpas and as a full member of the assault team. In the same dual role he was recruited by the British-led expedition of 1953. He was emphatically not a mere support member. His experience by then was second to none and it was wholly appropriate that he shared the ultimate prize.

  Everest put Nepal on the international map. Expeditions to the mountain itself and to other peaks in the Nepal Himalaya became an annual event. By 1960 four Swiss climbers had also attained Everest’s summit and three Chinese climbers had made the ascent from Tibet. Tourists and trekkers followed in ever greater numbers, providing a much-needed boost to the Nepali economy and taking a heavy toll of the mountain environment. By the end of the century an average year saw several hundred thousand backpackers streaming through Katmandu, several thousand attempts on Everest itself, and several hundred breathless pioneers actually jostling for position on the icy hump where Tenzing and Hillary had first stood.

  But down in Katmandu, Nepal’s new age of international engagement was doing nothing for the political process. As in Pakistan, the politicians struggled to meet the expectations of a widely dispersed and extremely diverse population, and were sorely challenged by autocratic tendencies, here represented principally by the monarchy. King Tribhuvan’s death in 1955 brought his son, King Mahendra, to the throne. An interim Constitution, the second of many, had already been fatally diluted by amendments, and the promised elections had failed to materialise. In 1959 Mahendra promulgated a new Constitution, albeit one that reserved considerable powers to the monarchy. He then called the first national elections. These were conducted successfully and were handsomely won by the Nepali Congress under B.P. Koirala.

  Educated in India during his family’s long exile there, indeed a one-time member of the Indian Congress, B.P. Koirala was the second of several brothers, three of whom would occupy the Prime Minister’s office. But BP’s tenure lasted less than a year. Like Sheikh Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir, he introduced radical land reforms that excited popular expectations but encountered strong opposition from vested interests. In 1960 King Mahendra broke the resultant stalemate by staging what was becoming a Nepali speciality – a royal coup. He repealed his own Constitution, arrested B.P. Koirala, banned all political parties and declared directly elected parliaments unsuited to Nepal’s barely literate peoples. A new Constitution better suited to such conditions was proclaimed in 1962.

  This introduced a party-less system based on elected village councils (or panchayats). The panchayats in turn elected district councils, which in turn chose representatives for the National Panchayat or Parliament. Panchayati raj, with its ‘bottom-up’ structure and its supposedly ancient credentials, carried the imprimatur of India’s revered Mahatma; bu
t it also bore a close resemblance to the system then being pioneered in Pakistan under the banner of ‘Basic Democracy’. And like ‘Basic Democracy’ it left ample scope at every level of the electoral hierarchy for the exercise of the prerogative and influence reserved to the sovereign/President. With amendments, the system would nevertheless survive the release of B. P. Koirala in 1968, the death of King Mahendra in 1972, the succession of King Birendra, and a somewhat dubious referendum on its retention in 1980.

  Only in the course of the 1980s would it come under heavy fire, as Koirala’s successors in the Nepali Congress Party secured positions in the National Panchayat. King Birendra offered a concession in the form of direct elections to the national body. Yet the protests continued. Finally Birendra relented. The Panchayat Constitution of 1962 was abrogated; and after countless false starts, in 1990 Nepal got yet another Constitution. This restored parliamentary democracy, but again it would not last. In remote parts of the country Naxalite Maoists were already offering a radical alternative.

  More even than Pakistan, Nepal was handicapped by an identity defined by its relationship with India. Pinioned against the Great Himalaya, with Indian territory on its other three sides, it had little choice. The country was one of the least developed in the world. Overland transport between its extremities involved loops into India. Though imports came mostly from India, and exports went mostly to India, all other trade must also pass through Indian territory. And the Gross National Product relied heavily on remittances from Nepalis employed in India (including Gurkha servicemen). An outreach of the Indian economy, then, Nepal’s political options were few.

  It nevertheless did its utmost to assert its individuality. Proclaimed as the world’s only Hindu kingdom, it adopted the world’s only five-sided flag (an elision of two triangular pennons) and set its clocks for the world’s only quarter-hour time-zone (fifteen minutes behind Indian Standard Time). Heedless of visitor convenience, the value of its rupee also lagged behind that of India. UN membership and obligations to international donors and aid agencies afforded some leverage in relationships with Delhi; so did Nepal’s command of the hydro-electric and irrigational potential of several major tributaries of the Ganges. But it was China-in-Tibet, its only other neighbour, that was of most concern to India.

  Historically, Nepal and Tibet had enjoyed a chequered relationship marked by incursions and counter-incursions interspersed with tributary exchanges. That a now Communist China might renew its interest in Nepal seemed unlikely so long as New Delhi and Beijing were on the best of terms. But as of the late 1950s this changed. In 1960 Katmandu, having previously had diplomatic relations only with Delhi, exchanged representatives with Beijing. Tension between its two colossal neighbours was introducing Nepal to the gentle art of playing one off against the other. It made good sense, but only so long as the possibility of India and China actually coming to blows over their Himalayan hinterland could be discounted.

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  India’s supposedly ‘wasted years’ under Nehru are usually taken to refer to the patchy performance of the economy rather than the conduct of external affairs. Between 1950 and 1965 the country’s GNP grew by a respectable, if not sensational, 4 per cent a year, thanks largely to the Planning Commission’s prioritisation of heavy industries and power generation. But even these favoured sectors seldom realised their forecast potential: siltation choked the turbines and the big new steel plants proved woefully inefficient. Elsewhere the main blockage was bureaucratic. A labyrinth of licences and quotas (‘the permit raj’), which was designed to protect indigenous production, so hobbled the private sector that basic industries like textiles, consumer goods and agriculture languished. In a nation proudly committed to self-sufficiency through ‘import substitution’, the ability to feed itself was an obvious priority. Yet, though agricultural yields did increase, they failed to keep pace with the growth in population. Despite more irrigation, ambitious agrarian development schemes and some land redistribution, by 1965 cereal imports from the USA under a Public Loan programme would top forty million tonnes a year. Begging bowls, even when cast in an Indian blast furnace, were still begging bowls.

  External affairs, on the other hand, looked to be a much less controversial field. Handled with intellectual panache by Nehru himself, by the late 1950s India’s standing with the rest of the world could hardly have been higher. Having dedicated his country to the ‘still larger cause of humanity’ in his Independence oration, Nehru had wasted no time in championing the freedom struggles of other peoples suffering under colonial rule. Already, in early 1947, an Asian Relations Conference had brought to Delhi representatives from all over South and South-East Asia including Nepal, Tibet, Ceylon and Afghanistan. The Asian continent was awakening, Nehru declared; India stood ready to listen and help.

  By 1954 it was prepared to lead. In talks with China designed to normalise relations following the Chinese retrieval of Tibet, Nehru and Zhou Enlai jointly invoked the hallowed ‘Five Principles [or panchsila] of Peaceful Co-existence’ – namely equality, non-aggression, non-interference in one another’s internal affairs, and mutual respect for one another’s borders and one another’s sovereignty. Soon after, at a meeting of Asian heads of government in Colombo, Nehru boldly insisted that universal acceptance of these principles would ensure that ‘there would hardly be any conflict and certainly not war’.

  The ‘hardly any conflict’ might have been a reference to Pondicherry. In this still French enclave south of Madras, demonstrators backed by most of India’s political parties were demanding an end to French rule and integration with India. Non-interference notwithstanding, Nehru too pressed their cause throughout 1954. His timing was impeccable. With France reeling from defeat at Dien Bien Phu, then smarting over the Geneva partition of Vietnam and facing another colonial revolt in Algeria, capitulation over Pondicherry was a near certainty. Better, reasoned Paris, to sell Mirage fighter-jets to India than to deploy them in defence of a worthless outpost. Without as much as a show of force by either side, the seafront colony and its satellite enclaves were duly handed over in November 1954. From the colonial past, that left just Goa and its Portuguese satellites. Abetted by New Delhi, Goans too were agitating for an end to colonial rule. But Lisbon under the dictatorial rule of President Antonio Salazar stood firm.

  The Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence resurfaced at the epochal Asia–Africa Conference convened in Bandung by President Sukarno of Indonesia in the following year. Here Nehru, long a champion of Indonesian independence, positioned himself at the helm of what was becoming the Non-Aligned Movement. Heads of state and senior representatives from twenty-nine anti-imperialist and recently independent nations attended the conference, including Egypt’s Colonel Nasser, Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, Zhou Enlai from China, Pham Van Dong from North Vietnam, U Nu from Burma and Prince Sihanouk from Cambodia. South Asia was well represented, with deputations from Pakistan, Nepal and Ceylon. But in this galaxy of mid-century luminaries, it was Pandit Nehru, accompanied by his daughter Indira, who made the running. The Five Principles, fleshed out into twelve, were duly adopted in the final communiqué and incorporated into the charter of the budding Non-Aligned Movement.

  Non-alignment as between the superpowers – the capitalist West and the Communist Soviet bloc – meant being open to both, yet dependent on neither. The Movement was presented as a haven of consensus in an otherwise bipolar world of nuclear-armed and ideologically confrontational power blocs. That was the theory – a peace-loving third bloc dedicated to challenging all forms of imperialism and defusing Cold War tensions. No doubt it appealed to Nehru’s superior intellect in the same way as did neutrality in the choice of a national language, a mixed economy with both public and private ownership, and a lofty secularism as between competing belief systems.

  But if non-alignment meant anything, it ought also to have meant that the subscribers were themselves unaligned. This was not the case. At the time China, for instance, a key member of
the Movement, was still bound to the Soviet bloc in ideological comradeship, and to the USSR by a 1949 treaty of ‘Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance’. Others, like Pakistan, were already incorporated into the Anglo-American framework of Communist ‘containment’ as members of the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and/or its Middle Eastern counterpart, the Baghdad Pact (later the Central Treaty Organisation or CENTO). As critics gleefully noted, the Movement’s neutrality was compromised from birth.

  Nehru preferred to overlook such inconsistency, and to talk up the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence. They too, though, were not without flaws. Pledging non-interference and respect for one another’s sovereignty presumed that the signatories’ sovereignty enjoyed popular legitimacy, as evidenced by respect for human rights, the rule of law and accountable government; yet all too often these safeguards were being flouted, while the parliamentary democracy so dear to Nehru and so central to India’s self-image was notably absent. Similarly, respect for one another’s borders rested on the assumption that they were not in dispute. Yet as creations of the discredited colonial powers, many international borders were little better than the optimistic projections of imperial strategists. They might ignore social factors, historical precedents and natural features, and they seldom conformed to the highest standards of international jurisprudence. As India was about to discover, endorsing such frontiers could prove just as contentious as contesting them.