Ties between NE & Nepal

There is the possibility of Nepal and NE India becoming more aware of each other.

THE umbilical cord that ties Nepal to North-East India is the ‘People of Nepali Origin’ that inhabit the Assam Valley and beyond. Traveling westwards from their native hills of the Central Himalayas starting in the mid-19th century, the migrants responded to the ‘push’ of an exploitative state and population pressure, and the ‘pull’ of employment in forest clearance,   tea-plantations and recruitment in the armed forces.

Today, the Nepali-speakers of the North-East are scattered throughout, with little collective bargaining power and divided into different castes and ethnic grouops. While this is one   reason that their profile has remained low, it has provided them relative safety from exclusivist movements in the region.

Nevertheless, the threat of dislocation remains high, given the targeting of the Nepali-speakers of Meghalaya in 1985 and the ‘successful’ exercise of depopulation carried out by the nearby Bhutan a dozen and more years ago. In the unlikely event of   a similar depopulation drive in the form of an ‘anti-foreigner’ agitation hitting the North-East, there is the possibility of Nepal and North-   East India becoming more acutely    aware of each other than they are   at present.

For the moment, what marks the relationship between North-East India and Nepal is how it is limited to the declining linkages between the Nepali-speakers and their point of origin. Otherwise, the social and economic contact between Nepal and the region are minimal, whereas they could potentially be extensive and the areas for potential exchange of ideas are not insignificant. For example, Nepal’s experience with tourism — both high-end and budget tourism as well as adventure activities like ‘trekking’— can benefit the North-East. The tapping of the enormous Himalayan hydropower potential is another area where discussion can be held, for example with relation to the merits of dams-and reservoir schemes vs. run-of-river schemes, pricing, subsidies, and so on. Just as North-East India has been flooded with a steady stream of subsidies from the Centre that may sap the potential of the indigenous people and intelligentsia, so is overseas aid which has sapped the energies of the Nepali people and the State. The Maoist insurgency in the Nepali hills is now eight years old, and arguably different (as a supposedly class-based war) from the identity-led conflicts of the Indian North-East, yet it is surprising how little the people of Nepal and the North-East know of the conflagrations that are affecting the ‘other’.

The ethnic diversity that begins in the Hengduan Mountains of Southern China and jumps across the northern, Burmese hills and continues along the entire North-East India finds its continuum from Arunachal Pradesh to Bhutan to Sikkim and extend across  Nepal, where finally the ‘caste’ groups  take over into Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh.

The challenges of mountain communities, both to live within themselves and in relation to more mercantilist plain societies and their economic acumen, are similar in Nepal and North-East India. By virtue of having remained nominally independent throughout the last two centuries, but having relative autonomy in defining its own affairs and future in the modern era, the experience of Nepal in the present age would be of interest to North-East India in the context of how it has and has not been able to deliver social and economic benefits for the people at large during this modern era. North-East India taken as a whole will have more to learn from the Nepali experience perhaps than from others, as it seeks to define its own course in future.

(The author is a distinguished Nepali journalist. He the Editor of Himal South Asian Magazine and also the publisher of Himal Khabar Patrika}

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