Tag: Nilambar Acharya

With Envoy Still to Obtain Appointment With MEA, Nepal Awaits Indian Signal

Nepal’s ambassador to India had submitted a request to the MEA for an urgent meeting early last month. This request was again followed up on May 21 – but no dates have been given yet to the envoy.

New Delhi: The Nepal ambassador to India, Nilambar Acharya, is awaiting a suitable date for a meeting with the ministry of external affairs after Kathmandu released a new political map which shows Kalapani and Lipulekh in Nepalese territory.

Relations between the two South Asian neighbours have hit a rocky patch this month over a long-pending boundary dispute. The latest friction is over the link road inaugurated by India to Lipulekh on the India-China border, which Nepal claims is part of its territory as per a 19th century treaty signed with the British.

On April 21, Nepal government formally unveiled the map, approved by its cabinet, that showed areas of Kalapani, Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh within its borders.

On the same day, India had responded that this “artificial enlargement of territorial claims” was unacceptable. “We hope that the Nepalese leadership will create a positive atmosphere for diplomatic dialogue to resolve the outstanding boundary issues,” it added.

After the May 8 road opening, Nepal foreign minister had summoned the Indian ambassador and handed over a protest note.

Also read: India Reacts to New Nepal Map, Says Kathmandu’s ‘Cartographic Assertion’ is Unacceptable

Nepal’s leading English newspaper Kathmandu Post reported on Monday that eyebrows had been raised in Nepal that their envoy had been unable to get access to senior officials in the Indian foreign ministry.

Sources confirmed to The Wire that the Nepal’s ambassador to India, Acharya, had submitted a request to the ministry of external affairs for an urgent meeting early last month. This request was again followed up by the embassy on May 21 – a day after the new map was released by Nepal.

The objective of the meeting, as per sources, was not to conduct a ‘negotiation’ over the boundary issue, but to convey the wishes of the Nepalese government for an early high-level meeting to discuss the matter.

While no dates have been conveyed by the Indian side, diplomatic sources noted that the time taken to respond to the request is not surprising as MEA has a lot on its plate. The ministry is currently coordinating operation of flights from over 30 countries to bring back Indians stranded in foreign lands due to snapping of air transport links in March to slow down the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

In an interview to Nepal’s Republica newspaper, Nepalese foreign minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali indicated that Kathmandu had activated informal networks. “We have been trying to do that. However, formal talks and conversations have not taken place yet. But different channels are actively working,” Gyawali replied in answer to a question whether there had been any high level contacts with India.

Nepal and India share a 1,690-kilometre long border, which is open and porous. Both countries had settled and finalised strip maps for 98% of the boundary in 2007. However, there are two areas – Kalapani in Uttarakhand and Narsahi-susta in Bihar – where both sides still have difference of perception on alignment of boundary.

The Kalapani dispute got revived last November, when India issued a political map to show the newly-created union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. It led to Nepal issuing a strong protest and proposing a meeting of the two foreign secretaries.

Also read: India Should Realise China Has Nothing to Do With Nepal’s Stand on Lipulekh

But India had been unable to give a date for the meeting, especially since there was a transition in leadership at the Indian foreign ministry.

The resurgence of the dispute after the opening of the Lipulekh road was met with a chorus of demands from Nepali politicians for a strong response from Kathmandu. Having been elected on a nationalist campaign platform, Nepal Prime Minister K P Oli, whose popularity had reached its peak during the so-called Indian blockade of 2015, also predictably raised the pitch.

Indian army chief M.M. Navrane’s statement on May 15 that Nepal had objected to the road at the behest of “someone else” – China – also raised hackles in the Nepali establishment.

While there had been no official response from Kathmandu, Nepali deputy prime minister rand defence minister Ishwor Pokhrel pulled no punches in an interview to state-run newspaper, Rising Nepal, on May 22.

Describing the statement as a “political stunt”, Pokhrel asked, “How professional is it for the head of the Army to make a political statement? We don’t have anything like that here. The Nepali Army does not go vocal on such matter.”

The Nepalese minister also said that the army chief’s words had “hurt the sentiments of the Nepali Gurkha army personnel who lay down their lives to protect India”. “It must now become difficult for them to stand tall in front of the Gurkha forces,” he added.

Nepal Proposes Talks on Kalapani, Awaits India’s Response

It has been more than a month since the dispute erupted and it continues to remain on Nepal’s domestic political agenda.

Kathmandu: Nepal has proposed holding a foreign secretary-level meeting to resolve the Kalapani dispute that resurfaced after India placed the disputed territory within its borders in a new political map released during the first week of November.

In a diplomatic note dispatched last week to India, Nepal requested that India fix a date for the proposed meeting to which India has yet to respond. Nepal has also stated that India stationed its border security troops in Nepali territory after India-China war in 1962.

The Nepal government has prepared some historical documents to prove that it has held an election there in 1959 and that it also collected revenue in 1961. It has also said that it has land certificates. Nepal has been making an effort to collect all historical documents available after Sugauli Treaty of 1861.

On the basis of these documents, Nepal is keen to hold a meeting with the Indian side. The third joint commission meeting held in Kathmandu in 2014 had directed “the foreign secretaries to work on outstanding boundary issues, including Kalapani and Susta, receiving required technical inputs from Boundary Working Group (BWG) as necessary”. 

Though BWG is working to settle technical issues in several places, there has not been even a single meeting on Kalapani and Susta after 2014.

With India now pushing Nepal to sign on the agreed and initialed strip maps of about 98% of the boundary, Nepal is of the view that it would sign the strip map only after the settlement of the two disputes. Also read: Nepal Fumes Over Kalapani in New Indian Road Map; ‘Accurate,’ Says MEA

In Nepal, there is an all-party consensus that India occupied Nepali land and should remove its troops. A few weeks ago, in a strongly-worded public statement, Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli requested India to call back its troops from Kalapani. Similarly, main opposition leader Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba has criticised the government for not taking initiatives to talk to India about the dispute. Deuba went as far as to say that India is treating Nepal as though it is Pakistan with regards to the border issue.

Other fringe parties and concerned citizens lives have also been putting pressure on the government to talk to India and resolve the issue. Some civil society organisations have also prepared a map that they have handed over the map to government.

One of the visuals doing the rounds on Twitter, showing purported ‘misrepresentations’ of the Indian border in the map. Photo: Twitter

India, however, appears to be playing down the issue. MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar on November 7 said that the map is accurate in its depiction of the sovereign territory of India. India has also said that “it is committed to find a solution through dialogue in the spirit of our close and friendly bilateral relations”.

But over the past few weeks, India has simply been repeating the same statements. In fact, in the second week of November, Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat claimed that Kalapani is a part of India.

It has been more than a month since the dispute erupted and it continues to remain on Nepal’s domestic political agenda. Opposition parties and civil society members have been asking PM Oli to directly talk to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There have also been discussions about the possibility of sending a senior leader of the ruling party, former prime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, as a special emissary to India to hold discussions, but nothing has not been finalised yet.

On Thursday, co-chairman of Nepal Communist Party Pushpa Kamal Dahal publicly said that consultations are underway to send leader Nepal as a special enjoy but there has not been concrete decisions.

Over the past few weeks, there have been continuous street protest by students and the youth wings of ruling and opposition parties, but the scale of the protests has been steadily on the decline. The issue of Kalapani and Susta, however, are not the new issues – both have remained on the agenda when it comes to bilateral visits and negotiations ever since 1990.

The issue has been mentioned in almost all the joint press statements issued after the visit of prime ministers. The issue was removed from the joint statement after the Nepal-India Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) was formed in 2016. But there have been no serious talks between two sides about settling Kalapani and Susta issue.

Also read: Bilateral Experts Report on New India-Nepal Treaty Likely to Face Roadblocks

Former Indian foreign secretary Shyam Sharan, who also served as an Indian envoy in Nepal, wrote an article on November 27 in the Indian Express claiming that India had “conveyed its readiness to have a substantive discussion on the treaty revision, the agenda item was dropped by the Nepali side in 2003”. Sharan’s statement drew criticism in Kathmandu with several former senior Nepali diplomats saying that that was not the truth of the matter.

Responding to Sharan’s article, former Nepali foreign secretary Madhu Ram Acharya said on Twitter:

Despite the issue being brought up repeatedly, an end to the matter will not happen without serious dialogue between the two countries with a focus on Kalapani and Susta – of which there has been none since the dispute made a resurgence barring the one meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhle and Nepal’s Ambassador to India Nilambar Acharya in the first week of November.

Kamal Dev Bhattarai is a Kathmandu-based writer and journalist.