BOOK REVIEW: Kathmandu Dilemma - Ranjit Rae

VINTAGE edition - Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd

Copyright Ranjit Rae 2021

Genre: Political and "Historical" Non-Fiction

Background: India's perspective on Nepal through the opinions and interests of Ranjit Rae, former Indian ambassador to Nepal. He also was the head of the Northern Division in the Ministry of External Affairs from 2002-2006. This book mentions Nepal during the time of its Kings, through the Maoist insurgency, and Nepal's climb to modern politics as it established a secular federal democratic republic. Taken straight from the book: Partly a memoir, this book examines India's perspective on these developments, in the context of the civilizational and economic underpinnings of the India-Nepal relationship...

My personal opinion/review: I did not appreciate this book. It was very hard for me to read this book with a neutral perspective because the author left no room for me to be able to do that. This is by far the worst piece of non-fiction writing I have read, and this is mostly because of how unfairly biased it is.

Bias is necessary because it adds a personal perspective to the work and helps the reader understand how the reader should comprehend the writing and the story. But this novel was unfairly biased, with condescending tones and negative approaches to a country's history that the reader has only read about in books or heard from other people, not lived through it himself. This is a political book, written by someone who only ever saw Nepal through a political perspective, so the fact that he tries to understand the Nepali people socially and culturally, is not appropriate. He maintains a condescending tone throughout the book, using history to justify the words he writes. There are several parts of this book where Rae states facts and then gives grounds to the idea that "India has done so much for Nepal, but these people are just not grateful" or the idea that "Nepal and its people might say they are separate, but they are just as a part of India as they fight to disagree with". These are what I thought of as the central themes in the book, as every argument or factual statement came back to these two themes.

Here are some examples:

1. Chapter 1 is titled Why Don't They Like Us? and Rae starts off by using the 2015 earthquake as a preface to state that India provided the most aid to Nepal during that time: The people of India opened their hearts and their wallets... the largest provided by any country. And then goes on to state that despite all the money India spent on Nepal at that time, the Nepalese remained suspicious of India's intentions (page 1). Rae, bro, it's not that Nepal isn't grateful for India's aid, but it is the fact that India uses it against Nepal in every argument that pisses people off. There is always this chokehold that India has against Nepal, politically (although it has also spread culturally and socially), in which Nepal will always be suspicious of India's intentions. India performed a blockade against Nepal after Nepal passed its new constitution (which focused on individual growth as a country and less on dependency on its neighbors). It is because of these actions by India that Nepal will always be politically cautious of India's actions and intentions.

2. There was this constant notion of Rae talking about how much Nepali people will always repeat the fact that "Buddha was born in Nepal", which he questions as to why it is such a sensitive topic. He further goes on to sort of attack Nepal on its attempts to vigorously oppose what it sees as attempts by India to expropriate this heritage...Nepal's desire to assert its own cultural identity as distinct from India (page 4). He uses a mocking tone to infer the fact that Nepal has to try so hard to make its cultural and societal aspects distinct because India will always be more prominent and it's always easy for Nepal's culture to be mistaken as Indian. He also goes on to mock the fact that since Nepal is landlocked (3 sides from India, 1 side from China), no matter how hard it tries to it will never be able to claim something for itself entirely. He gives the example of Mt. Everest: Unfortunately for Nepal, both these markers are shared (referring to Buddha and Sagarmatha), the former in terms of the common Buddhist heritage with India, and the latter with China (Page 6).

3. There was a part where Rae referred to the "treatment of the Hindi language" in Nepal, and how even though Indian soap operas and Bollywood has such a massive influence on Nepali modern culture and society, the Hindi language itself has no official status in Nepal. He implies that because Nepal and India are so culturally similar, Hindi should be treated as an official language in Nepal. He then goes on to state that Prithvi Narayan Shah and the dynasties that followed after, all stemmed from Indian roots, which justifies the idea that Nepal and India share a history, and Hindi therefore should be considered an official language in Nepal. Okay, but why not also make Nepali an official language in India then, if he claims that both countries share such a history? Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is also listed as one of the official languages of India, yet Indian people get heated when they are compared to Pakistan and its history. Maybe Nepal-India is not as sensitive of a topic as India-Pakistan, but that doesn't it isn't important. If Pakistan, which has much more of a historical, political, social, and cultural similarity to India than Nepal does, is not considered similar to India, then why should Nepal (a country that is completely different in many ways from Pakistan-India will ever be) be pulled into this argument? Nepal, India, and Pakistan are all culturally and socially similar, so does that mean we should make one big country by combining the three? No. While there are similarities, there are also massive differences. Which is why these are three separate countries in the first place.

4. Even with the title of this book, the author attempts to "reset" Nepal with his biased opinions and condescending tone. "Resetting India-Nepal ties"?? C'mon, man, be for real.

There were so many other examples of biased and condescending language in this book, we would be here all day if I start listing them in detail. Overall, this book was atrocious and it just straight-up ruined any hopes I had before starting it. I had thought this was going to be a neutral perspective of a book where the former ambassador to Nepal was going to share his experience in a way that uplifts the Nepali people while giving tribute to India's aid and welfare towards its neighbor. Clearly, this was not the case. It is probably because I am Nepali that I am able to pick a side of the arguments raised in this book, which is also why I think the writing is heavily biased. The author himself is biasedly Indian and he makes his arguments accordingly.

I am giving this book a rating of 1/5. That 1 is for my respect as a reader towards the author for having spent so much of his time writing a book as bad as this one. Bravo. Ranjit Rae, Nepal thanks you for your attempts of service within its political sphere, but it is with a sad heart I must say that even in all your years of service, you failed to truly understand Nepal and its people.

This is also merely a review of the book I have read and does not reflect my feelings towards the people of India as a whole. Politics should never be used as motivation to form an opinion about a whole country of people (which is literally what this author did lmao).

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If you've read this book, please do share your thoughts. If you are thinking about reading it, then please let me know what you think of it. Your comments are always endearing to read/reply to.

The italicized portions are direct quotes I have taken from the book and are followed by their appropriate page numbers for this particular edition.