By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : A stormy welcome awaits Nepal Foreign Minister Sahana Pradhan when she goes to New Delhi this week to attend the two-day conference of SAARC ministers kicking off in the Indian capital Friday.
The Indian government has taken exception to Pradhan speaking to a section of Nepal’s media about a meeting she had with India’s Ambassador to Nepal Shiv Shankar Mukherjee, regarding it as a gross breach of diplomatic protocol.
The meeting last week was called by the Nepali foreign minister to ask the Indian envoy for a clarification after reports appeared in the media that India was building an 1800-km highway in the Terai plains close to Nepal’s border, that could cause Nepali frontier villages and towns to be submerged in monsoon.
Though Mukherjee assured the minister that let alone having begun construction on the highway, India did not even have such a project on its drawing board, the explanation was rejected by Nepal’s MPs, who comprise the parliamentary committee for natural resources and the minister subsequently suggested a delegation be sent to the border area to do an on-site inspection.
Soon after meeting the Indian envoy, the Nepali foreign minister spoke to a section of the media.
Besides reporting that Nepal had expressed concern about the highway, the media also said the foreign minister had raised with the envoy the issues of the death of a Nepali by Indian Border Security Forces as well as Nepal’s objection to the construction of a barrage in the border area.
India feels the minister violated diplomatic norms by speaking to the press about what transpired at the meeting even after an assurance by the envoy.
Soon after the incident, the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu issued an uncharacteristically stern statement, saying no such highway had been planned and called some of the reports motivated and inflammatory.
The displeasure is expected to be conveyed to the minister during bilateral meets in New Delhi.
Pradhan belongs to the second-largest party in Nepal’s ruling alliance, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (UML).
Though an earlier government of the then prime minister Surya Bahadur Thapa had signed an agreement with India in 2004 to start direct bus services between the main cities of Nepal and India, the agreement has still not been implemented due to CPN-UML pressure on the government on the behalf of transporters’ syndicates.
On the other hand, Nepal and China last month signed an MoU to resurrect a Lhasa-Kathmandu bus service that had been faltering from its very inception due to the Chinese stringency about issuing visa.
Nepal has also been urging Beijing to extend the Tibet railway to Kathmandu despite the geographical challenges while dragging its feet on the upgradation of its own rail service in southern Nepal and its extension to the Indian border despite repeated pleas by businessmen in the border areas.