Madhesis reluctant to yield on demands

Sushma Swaraj with Mahant Thakur during a meeting at Hyderabad House in 
New Delhi on Sunday. (PTI) 

Charu Sudan Kasturi, TT, New Delhi, Dec. 6:Leaders from Nepal's Madhesi parties protesting against a controversial new constitution in their country today signalled unwillingness to compromise on their demands at a time India is trying to nudge them to yield just a little.

The Madhesi leaders, who met foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and a host of senior politicians from various parties here today, are expected to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow.

"The Madhesi people have no trust in the Nepal government," Upendra Yadav, former foreign minister of Nepal and chairman of the Sanyukta Madhesi Morcha, told The Telegraph .

"That's why the feeling is, if we don't get what we want at the peak of the movement, we will never get it later."

Madhesi protesters have blockaded land-locked Nepal's borders with India for the past two months, and the Himalayan nation is struggling for essential supplies: food, medicines and fuel.

Nepal has accused India, which has historic ties with the Madhesi community, of engineering the blockade. New Delhi has repeatedly denied the charge.

But India is increasingly concluding that only a compromise between the Madhesi protesters and the Kathmandu government can resolve a crisis that has dragged India's ties with Nepal to their lowest in 26 years.

The Madhesi community and its leaders are demanding the reinsertion of several clauses present in an interim constitution but altered or removed from the final constitution adopted in September.

The demands include proportional representation in jobs, population-based delimitation of electoral constituencies, full citizenship rights for children with Indo-Nepalese parentage and the redrawing of state boundaries.

Under the constitution, children born of a Nepalese mother and foreign father will gain citizenship only by naturalisation, while those sired by a Nepalese father and a foreign mother will get citizenship by birth.

Naturalised citizens are denied eligibility for top posts in the government. At least 30 per cent families in Nepal's plains, mostly Madhesis, have marital ties with India.

Also, the current provincial boundaries reduce Madhesis to minorities in most states, making it hard for them to win significant representation in Parliament.

The Nepal government has said it is willing to look at the other demands but any redrawing of state boundaries will have to wait. That's a compromise India is nudging Madhesi leaders to accept.

The leaders - including Rajendra Mahato of the Sadbhawana Party, Mahendra Yadav of the Madhesi Jan Adhikar Forum and Mahant Thakur of the Tarai-Madhes Loktantrik Party - met Janata Dal United leader Sharad Yadav in the afternoon.

In the evening, they met D.P. Tripathi of the Nationalist Congress Party and Sitaram Yechury, the CPM general secretary. Yechury had helped mediate the Nepal Maoists' transition to democracy. The Madhesi leaders are expected to meet Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday.