The pro-establishment people had cried themselves hoarse about foreign intervention over the recent visit of Indian leaders headed by Sitaram Yechuri of the CPI-Marxist or of other foreign leaders. The Indian team has taken interest in solving Nepal’s worsening problem of the restoration of democracy.

In the name of nationalism and sovereignty, the supporters of the act of regression against democracy — officially begun on October 4, 2002 — are denouncing the Indian leaders and other foreign supporters of democracy for having shown their solidarity with the seven-party’s anti-regression movement.

However, the relevant question is: What and who have caused ‘foreign intervention’? The incipient event has its parallel in 1950 when Jawaharlal Nehru took initiative in the beginning of the pro-democracy movement by receiving King Tribhuvan and family for asylum in India. Had the then incumbent prime minister Mohan Shumsher conceded the popular demand for regime change, India wouldn’t have ‘interfered’ in Nepal then. Mohan Shumsher’s subsequent disappearance from the scene as the autocratic prime minister saw the rise of the Gorkha Parishad acting stridently as a ‘nationalist’ party. Again, King Mahendra’s takeover in 1961 sired another case of Indian ‘intervention’, with the upholders of the ‘home-grown’ Panchayat system protesting against such ‘interference’.

Came 1990 with the oppressed Nepalis rising against the 30-year-old Panchayat system. Visiting Indian political leaders directly supported the movement. Call it, again, ‘Indian interference’, but one should think who were responsible for ‘the Indian interference in sovereign Nepal’s internal matters?’ The same episode has been repeated now.

But are those blaming the Indian and other foreign leaders for meddling in Nepal’s affairs true patriots and nationalists by their feeling and character? Even if they were so, they had better look back at the pages of history of freedom movements in other countries, which are replete with examples of their description of ‘foreigners intervening in the internal affairs of the others.’ What have they to say about Wordsworth and Shelly singing praises of the French Revolution of 1789 waxing eloquent when the Parisians stormed the Bastille? Were all the great luminaries acting in the role of ‘interventionists’?

Meanwhile, are these ‘patriotic’ people fully familiar with the concepts of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘nationalism’? If they really are, how is it that they happen to be total ignoramuses when it comes to the issues of human rights, freedom, liberty and democracy? The struggle for freedom recognises no national frontiers, and the freedom fighters are ever prepared to fight their war in all climes, irrespective of the existence of a nation’s demarcation of its territory.

Also, how are the incumbency supporters to explain the hospitality accorded to people like Ashok Singhal and Yogi Adityanath when they visited Nepal to ‘grace’ a ceremony of near-State importance or occasion?

After all, they, too, are foreigners in the true sense of the term. Similarly, how is the establishment to justify its receiving foreign aid when the government is so vocal in denouncing the phenomenon of foreign money pouring into Kathmandu in aid of the parties for carrying their anti-regression agitation?