Kathmandu : Former Indian Foreign Secretary and National Security Adviser Shiva Shankar Menon has slammed India’s blockade of Nepal in 2015, calling it a “symbol of ugly neighborly diplomacy”.

Menon’s recently published book, India and Asian Geopolitics, states that India has publicly pressured and failed to change the constitution already passed by Nepal’s Constituent Assembly. “The subsequent blockade is a symbol of ugly and ineffective Indian neighborly diplomacy,” he said in the book.

After Nepal promulgated the constitution in 2015, the then Indian Foreign Secretary and current External Affairs Minister S. Jayashankar came to Nepal to put some delay in promulgating the constitution and to meet the demands of the Madhesi parties.

But Nepal’s political parties thwarted India’s pressure. After that, while the Madhes-centric parties started agitation centering on the border area, India imposed blockade. The blockade imposed by India at a time when Nepal was in crisis due to the Gorkha earthquake has become an event that Nepalis cannot forget.

In the first year of the blockade, Indian diplomats and experts claimed that India had not imposed a blockade on Nepal, but in recent years, they have not only accepted the blockade, they have started writing in the book.

In the book, Menon notes that some Indian political parties and organizations have confused India’s Nepal policy with their desire to restore the monarchy and the Hindu state in Nepal.

Menon also mentioned the blockade imposed by India on Nepal in 1989. He noted that Rajiv Gandhi had helped establish democracy in Nepal through India’s special relationship with Nepal in 1988-89 and had played a role in Nepal’s internal affairs as the Prime Minister.

At that time, Nepal had brought arms from China and revoked the work permit of the Indians, he said. At the same time, there is a movement for the restoration of democracy in Nepal and the movement was successful by putting pressure through the blockade of India, said Menon.

Menon also mentioned India’s role in forging a 12-point agreement between the then seven political parties and the Maoists in 2005.

Referring to the ongoing Maoist movement on the one hand and the parties’ agitation for the establishment of democracy on the other, he said that in 2005, Nepal’s political parties took India as an honest facilitator. He acknowledged that India had played a role in reaching a consensus between the seven parties and the Maoists.

Menon’s book also describes India’s role in Nepal in the 1950s. At this time, India has actively supported the democratic forces led by King Tribhuvan and the Nepali Congress. However, after the beginning of the autocratic monarchy in the 1960s, Menon’s book states that India has adopted a policy similar to his.

Apart from this, the growing Chinese influence in Nepal, the role played by China in uniting the UML and the Maoists are mentioned in the book. The book also mentions the issues that Mao addressed to a Nepali delegation after the Sino-Indian war of 1962. The book states, “Mao told a Nepali delegation that the problem between India and China was not the McMahon Line but the question of Tibet.”

A former National Security Adviser and top diplomat traces the changes in India’s foreign policy, maps its present-day challenges, and suggests prescriptions for the future.

Independent India’s foreign policy, according to Shivshankar Menon, has gone through three geopolitical phases and their transitions. From 1947 to the 1960s, a bipolar Cold War world; from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, rapid changes in its neighbourhood such as China falling out with the Soviets and moving to the U.S. side; and the post-Cold War world when the U.S. emerged as the sole superpower in a unipolar world order. Menon, who was the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser and Foreign Secretary, is exploring these phases in their historical context to tell the story of how India weathered the many geopolitical storms of the past in his latest book, India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present. Stanlt Johny mention in The Hindu daily.