LET THE FLIGHTS BEGIN
It has been more than three months since Indian Airlines suspended its flights to Kathmandu at the insistence of the Indian government, and the recent failure of bilateral talks regarding security arrangements at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport means that the resumption of flights is still in limbo. Meanwhile, Nepal's India-dependent summer tourism has been gravely affected, and Indian Airlines itself loses INR 25.5 lakh a day as a result of the suspensions.
The calling off of flights to Kathmandu from New Delhi, Varanasi and Calcutta, was decreed even as the hijacked Airbus 310 was circling Amritsar in the very first leg of the extended episode. It was a novel tool of regional diplomacy, this punitive banning of flights to a neighbouring country. India's response to a very real security lapse at the Tribhuvan International Airport was a singular sanction that is both unprecedented and extravagant.
Ironically, Indian Airlines has been as much a scapegoat in this matter as has the Nepali economy. It was the air carrier that introduced civil aviation to Nepal in the 1950s and helped in the country's opening-up. Not so many years ago, the Indian government had decided to stop IA from flying its brand new Airbus 320 aircraft following a crash in Bangalore—a political decision taken to blame an airplane which is today the mainstay of the airlines'
fleet. That ban on an aircraft, and this ban on flights to an entire country—even while all international carriers continue their Kathmandu services—could be considered embarrassing, if the Indian public and media were listening.
But there is also the fact that, in this time of crisis, even Nepali scholars, journalists and business elites, have proved themselves incapable of raising a voice loud enough to be heard in New Delhi. The quiet wait for bilateral talks to take place shows a fatalistic sense of incapability. However, this does not negate the fact that a sense of alienation, completely needless, has grown in Kathmandu from the feeling of having been unfairly singled out. Rightly or wrongly, Nepalis are reminded of the 15-month economic embargo instituted by Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 against landlocked Nepal for, among other things, daring to import military supplies from China.
While both sides are tight-lipped on the failure of the talks, matters seem to rest at the exact nature of upgraded security at Kathmandu airport. While the Indian side seems to have painted itself into a corner by slapping the ban, the Nepali side seems to be suffering from an exaggerated sense of 'sovereigntitis', for the main bone of contention has to do with what kind of security Indian Airlines will be allowed to introduce on its own at the airport terminal or tarmac.
What is significant for the long term, however, is not the resumption of IA flights (which will have to happen in due course) as much as an analysis of why the peremptory suspension of flights in the first place. The answer lies in the low esteem that those at the helm of affairs in India apparently hold Nepal at this time. To the extent that it could be rapped over the knuckles like an errant schoolboy, almost as if the Nepali government were a co-conspirator to the hijacking.
Kathmandu's political scientists, meanwhile, might mull over why the stock of Nepal has fallen so low in the New Delhi corridors of power that it can be subject to unreasonable penalties. In the meantime, the flights must begin, to support Nepal's tourism industry, to reinvigorate the image of India in impressionable Nepali minds, and to invigorate Indian Airlines, the most 'regional' of South Asian airlines.
(A version of this opinion appeared in the Outlook weekly of 17 April.)