Nepal is not a failed state, but it is a fragile one

Frustrated with revolving door politics with the same tired, tested and failed leaders, Nepal’s cybersphere is harking back to the good old days when we had strongmen rulers like Jang Bahadur Rana or King Mahendra.

The century-long Rana oligarchy ended 74 years ago this week, and the Shah kings airbrushed Nepal’s history to downplay their achievements and glorify their own dynasty. After the monarchy was abolished in 2008, the Shah kings were similarly vilified.

But Nepali society is mature enough to realise that the truth is not all black and white. Jang Bahadur may have usurped power in a ruthless coup, but he was a geopolitical strategist way ahead of his time. Whatever you may say about King Mahendra’s efforts in quashing democracy and pushing a unitary state, he defended Nepal’s sovereignty and projected its international image right through the sensitive Cold War period.

Jang Bahadur in England is a new Nepali language book by journalist Gajendra Budhathoki about the visit in 1850 by Nepal’s prime minister to England and France, the first by a South Asian potentate.

He met Queen Victoria and by all accounts was able to establish Nepal’s presence on the world stage. Historians have long mulled why a devout Hindu like Jang Bahadur would want to break the taboo and cross the Black Waters.

Budhathoki recounts the incident upon his arrival at Southampton on 2 May 1850, when British customs officials tried to check the belongings of the Nepali entourage. Furious, Jang Bahadur threatened to sail right back to France if they opened any of the bags.

Jang had three main reasons for his trip. Essentially he was on a spy mission to assess British military might to decide if it was worthwhile for Nepal to try to militarily take back territory ceded to British India in the Sugauli Treaty of 1816. So, Jang asked his perplexed hosts to show him cannon factories, artillery and naval yards. He even visited Woolwich Arsenal (now the Royal Arsenal) not once, but three times. 

Read also: Looking back at the 1923 Nepal-Britain Treaty, Santa Gaha Magar

Suitably impressed, Jang decided to be Britain’s BFF, and even rode down to Lucknow with 3,200 Nepali troops to rescue the British from the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. As a reward, the British gave back the Tarai districts of Banke, Bardia, Kailali, and Kanchanpur (Naya Muluk). This close relationship continued with Jang’s descendants right till the time the British left India in 1947.

Jang Bahadur was also fed up with the Governor General Lord Dalhousie in Calcutta who tended to bully Nepal, and wanted to build direct contacts with his bosses in London. The British told him Dalhousie was their man in India, and Jang should deal with him.

Jang’s visit to France does not get as much attention in the book, but he was also trying to gauge France’s strength and to see if its military was more powerful than Britain’s. At that time, France was Britain’s main rival and was trying to make inroads in India.

At the Louvre, Jang Bahadur was drawn to exhibits reflecting French military prowess. Later, when he met Louis Napoleon III, he asked if he could see a parade of 900,000 troops to assess France’s military might. 

Read also: Nepal-France ties in photos, Reeti KC

Freshly returned from Europe, an emboldened Jang Bahadur Rana led Nepal in a war against Tibet in 1855 which ended with the Treaty of Thapathali a year later. This was the third time Nepal and Tibet had fought, the first time being soon after Prithvi Narayan Shah in 1788. 

The Qing Dynasty came to the rescue of Tibet, and while both sides claimed victory, the Sino-Nepalese War ended essentially as a stalemate with the Treaty of Betrawati. 

All of this is detailed in Axel Michaels’ book, Nepal: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present which is a recent English translation of his German Kultur und Geschichte Nepals published in 2018. 

Michaels is a Professor of Classical Indology and Religious Studies at Heidelberg University, and writes that Nepal mattered little to China. Proof of this is that while both Nepal and Tibet agreed to accept the suzerainty of the Qing emperor following the war, Nepal managed to retain its autonomy but Beijing asserted its control over Lhasa.

And despite a clause in the treaty which stated, ‘if a foreign power attacks Nepal, China shall support Nepal’, China never did so during the1814–16 war with the East India Company. 

This practice has continued to this day. Aside from token petroleum shipments, Beijing did not help out Nepal during the Indian Blockade of 2015. Even though Nepali leaders have tried to play India off against China, the two do not find Nepal important enough to fight over and prefer to leave it as a buffer state between them. 

In that sense, Britain also did not press home its victory after 1816 and left Nepal alone. The malarial Jangles to the south, rugged Himalayan terrain and the lack of marketable products (except soldiers) may have persuaded the traders at the East Indian Company that it was not worth the effort.

There is a lesson from history here for Nepal: the country must look out for itself, and this requires deft diplomacy to understand what our giant neighbours really want and leverage it for our gain. This may require strategies like the ones made by Jang Bahadur and King Mahendra after all.

Michaels is not a fan of either the Rana or the Shah dynasties. He says that although the Rana era is characterised as ‘a century of tyranny’, the description holds true for the Shah period as well. 

Michaels does not mince his words about Gurkha recruitment into the British and Indian Armies (another legacy of the Sugauli Treaty). He calls the mercenaries ‘cheap labour’ and Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘represents a continuation of the King-Brahmin alliance’. In fact, he goes at length to discuss how the Khas-Arya used ‘Hindu state’ to homogenise a country that couldn’t have been more diverse.

But democracy has not served Nepal well either. Corruption, impunity and lack of transparency are rife. And so, Michaels asks if Nepal is a failed state. No it is not, but it is a fragile state.

He leaves us with these parting words: ‘If Nepal succeeds in continuing down this road, preserving its ethnic and cultural diversity, leaving the ethnic populations with a certain degree of autonomy, while at the same time integrating them into political decision-making processes, and if it manages the reforms needed for land-ownership, labour, education, infrastructure, then the country can become a model for unity in diversity, even in the age of leveling globalisation.’