Our relations with Nepal have been on a roller-coaster especially when the Maoists had earlier assumed power under the Prime Ministership of Prachanda. The constant refrain of the Maoists has been to project China as their major benefactor and India a game spoiler.
The traditional friendship and close bonds between the two countries stand at cross-roads because of the Maoist’s nuisance value. Their demand for integrating the Maoist rebels and cadres in the regular army was totally absurd and unacceptable and rightly rejected by the previous head of the Nepal’s army Gen. Katawal.
Prime Minister Madhav Nepal visited India in August, ’09 to promote mutual relations. The Nepalese are miffed by the old treaty signed in 1950 and consider the same humiliating for Nepal. The recent tension was accentuated, when the Maoists insisted upon conducting and performing worship (Pooja) at the Pashupati Nath Temple, Kathmandu, by the local priests, and not by the south-Indian priests.
Image Source:thetechnewsnepal.com
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Indian priests were heckled, beaten up and their clothes torn. It has now been revealed that the exchange of priests between India and Nepal is an old tradition among the priests in as much as at the Kashi Vishwanath temple the priest is Nepalese.
The tradition was set by Adi Shankaracharya who had even introduced Nepalese priests in the Rameshwaram temple in Tamil Nadu; where Sri Ram (Lord Rama), the incarnation of Vishnu, worshipped Siva, one of the principal trinity, with the object of receiving Siva’s blessings upon him to defeat and kill Ravana, a Brahmin king ruling Lanka (row Sri Lanka) who received many a favour and boon from Lord Siva by making sacrifices and undergoing penance and thus could not be easily defeated Prachanda continued his anti Indian tirade in Dec. 2009, & blamed India for all Nepalese problems.
He even declared Kathmandu valley an independent area. In 1988, Rajiv Gandhi had imposed a humiliating embargo on Nepal, when he was disallowed entry into the Pashupati Nath temple because of his religion he was not considered to be a Hindu on account of his interreligious marriage with Christian Lady of Italian origin, who procured Indian citizenship through the process of naturalization.
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The Chinese are consolidating their influence in Nepal by promising more financial assistance and even a railway line from Lhasa to Kathmandu.