Challenges of being on the Indian periphery

June 20, 2024

KATHMANDU – The Poet Laureate of the 1950s, Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959), penned a lyrical essay, “Ke Nepal Sano Chha?” (Is Nepal small?), and claimed that Bharatmatako Mutu (The heart of mother Bharat) was “pretty, quiet and great”. The essayist takes cringeworthy poetic licences to glorify his homeland where “Wagner is using a spade, Shakespeare could be ploughing, Titian and Turner may be tending the sheep, Socrates contemplating in a cave …”!

Every country, irrespective of its size, has the right to adore itself if it doesn’t degenerate into collective narcissism. But it’s dangerous to fantasise that someone else will help end its misery or to hallucinate that all others are conspiring to harm its interests.

The anxiety that Narendra Modi’s electoral enthronement as a third-term prime minister of the most populous country in the world has caused everywhere is real. A beacon of hope for the freshly freed countries since the 1950s, India was often cited as an exemplar of slow but steady path from exploitative governance to social justice through democratic processes.

By re-electing “one of the worst autocratisers” for the third time, albeit with a lower margin, a significant section of Indian voters has shown that it values religious gratification of Hindutva chauvinism much more than its democratic credentials. Nepal was once “the only Hindu Kingdom” of the world, and it’s perhaps understandable that remnants of the ancien régime of the Shah and Rana clan look towards the entrenched Hindutva establishment in New Delhi with a poignant sense of longing and hope.

The sadness comes from the realisation that the Hindutva lobby in India doesn’t care much about what happens to the conservative elements in