Lessons in diplomacy

DESPITE events in Nepal and Sri Lanka moving in two very different directions, the situations in India’s two neighbours may serve to reinforce a common lesson for New Delhi. Nepal is finally showing signs of getting out of the morass it had slipped into. The decision of the Maoists to play an active role in the creation and functioning of a constituent assembly is undoubtedly a major step forward. It throws up the very distinct possibility of democracy in Nepal finally representing all sections of the population. And if the influence of the Nepalese Maoists on the Naxalites in India is as significant as it is sometimes made out to be, it could even help bring this group closer to the mainstream of Indian democracy. In sharp contrast, the signs from our southern neighbour are far more disheartening. The massive scale of individual incidents of armed conflict between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers raises the prospects of the island nation slipping back into a fullblown civil war. And India can hardly afford to ignore the consequences of such conflict. Even if the political support for the Tigers in Tamil Nadu is now less vocal than it has been in the past, there remains the very real challenge of coping with the refugees who are pushed into the southern state with every increase in the intensity of the conflict in Sri Lanka.
The differences between the two situations do, of course, go beyond their current fortunes to their very nature. The crisis in Sri Lanka has a bitter ethnic dimension, which, fortunately, is not an issue in Nepal. And yet what the two countries do share is wariness about their big neighbour. It is not entirely accidental that the events in Nepal took a turn for the better only after the proposed solution the Indian representative brokered with the King was allowed to fall by the wayside. The costs of direct intervention in Sri Lanka, too, are still fresh in Indian memory. The recent developments are then yet another reminder that India’s interests are served not so much by direct intervention in the neighbourhood as by using New Delhi’s diplomatic and other skills to help events move in a direction that do not hurt this country.


-- The Economic Times Editorial