January 18, 2007	Thursday	Zilhaj 27, 1427

NEW DELHI: India is fashioning a major shift in its relations with its smaller neighbours Bhutan and Nepal by revising bilateral treaties which embody asymmetry, inequality and imbalance.

The agreements were inherited from the British Raj and retain a deeply colonial impress.

The first restructuring of India’s relations is taking place in the case of the tiny Kingdom of Bhutan (population 700,000), India’s smallest contiguous neighbour.

India and Bhutan have “reviewed” and decided to “upgrade” the India-Bhutan Friendship Treaty signed in August 1949. The new agreement will reflect, according to Indian foreign ministry officials, “the contemporary nature of the India-Bhutan relationship” and lay the foundation for its future development.

The greatest revisions of the 1949 treaty pertain to Articles 2 and 6. Article 2 requires that Bhutan be “guided by the advice of Government of India in regard to its external relations.” “Advice” is likely to be replaced by “friendly cooperation” and less imperious language designed to indicate greater independence or autonomy for Bhutan in conducting its external affairs.

Similarly, Article 6 of the treaty will be amended. It allows Bhutan to import “arms, ammunition, machines, warlike material or stores” for its “strength” and “welfare”, but only with India’s “assistance and approval”.

This article, used in the past to demand that India must approve every military purchase proposed by Bhutan, is likely to be relaxed so that no approval will be necessary for the purchase of non-lethal military stores and equipment.

These articles were a direct reflection of Bhutan’s status as a protectorate during the Raj.

“The colonial rulers were keen to draw India’s boundaries as expansively as possible,” says Sumit Sarkar, former professor at Delhi University and one of India’s best regarded historians. “They also wanted to promote pliable and obedient behaviour on the part of India’s neighbours in the East and the North. British imperial policy involved creating buffer zones vis-à-vis the Czarist empire in the North and China in the East.”

To this end, the colonial state imposed a series of unequal agreements and treaties on neighbouring states or principalities like Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Afghanistan.

The 1949 treaty with Bhutan and the 1950 Treaty of Friendship with Nepal were signed by Independent India’s government. But they both derived from agreements signed during the late 19th century and early 20th century between India’s imperial rulers and its incomparably weaker neighbours.

In the past six decades, New Delhi, citing “security”, has often acted in threatening or imperious way towards its small neighbours and behaved as if it were South Asia’s gendarme.

Nepal is making a far bolder, assertive and radical transition to democracy than Bhutan.

“It would be odd if India revises its treaty with Nepal, but

not with Bhutan,” argues Fabian. “The sequencing is explained by the fact that Nepal is still debating the interim arrangements that will lead to the

election of a constituent assembly.”

Revising the Bhutan treaty is also New Delhi’s way of rewarding Thimpu for its loyal support to India. In international forums, Bhutan has been India’s only firm, 100 per cent reliable, all-weather ally.—Dawn/The IPS News Service