Prachanda

New Delhi, April 25: A new Indian envoy has taken over in Kathmandu with diplomatic course-correction post the Maoist victory on top of his agenda.

Rakesh Sud assumed charge from ambassador Shiv Shankar Mukherjee — he’ll now head India House in London — yesterday at a mission struggling to come to terms with the implications of an electoral result that it failed to foresee.

Embarrassed over their gross miscalculation — Indian embassy officials in Kathmandu had assuredly predicted that Prachanda’s party will come a poor third — Indian diplomats in Kathmandu are scrambling to build bridges with the Maoists who are set to dominate the newly elected Constituent Assembly.

Although they did not manage a majority — 218 seats in a House of 601 — the Maoists lead the runners up, the Nepali Congress, by more than double their number.

“We did not anticipate this at all and the Maoists have a sense we were not backing them to win. Now that they are the dominant Nepali party, we will have to work overtime to remove misgivings they may have,” an embassy source said.

New Delhi has been a key de facto player in Nepali politics and would not want any dilution of its decisive centrality in Kathmandu. There are sections in the foreign office, though, that fear India might be sidelined if it is not able to rally close to the Maoists.

“Although he has made polite noises about having constructive relations with India, Prachanda has also made unilateral statements about scrapping the Indo-Nepal treaty,” a source said. “This is a departure from the past when Nepali leaders always took New Delhi into confidence on major bilateral issues. We are unsure how the Maoists will conduct this relationship.”

A foreign office-sponsored seminar beginning in Patna tomorrow may provide some clarity on how relations between New Delhi and Nepal’s Maoists will evolve. Although scheduled ahead of the Nepal elections, the conference, titled Emerging Trends in Indo-Nepal Relations, has assumed fresh worth in the light of the Maoist victory.

A senior Indian diplomat said: “This will be our first real interaction with the newly empowered Maoists, the Patna conference will have to be keenly watched.”

The two-day conference will be opened by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar; the keynote address will be made by Shyam Saran, the Prime Minister’s special envoy and former foreign secretary. Saran was also ambassador to Nepal in the critical years of Maoist insurgency.

Nepal has sent a strong 40-member contingent led by Hisila Yami, newly elected Maoist politburo member and wife of top party ideologue Baburam Bhattarai. Other senior members of the delegation are Durgesh Man Singh, the Nepali envoy to India, C.P. Gajurel, chief of the Maoists’ foreign policy cell, veteran Nepali Congress leader Pradeep Giri, general secretary of the Madhes-based Sadbhavana Party Anil Jha, and respected Nepali commentators Kunda Dikshit and C.K. Lal.

Sources said the Maoist representation on the conference was beefed up following their stunning performance in the recent polls. It may well be a signal of sorts that Yami has been picked to lead the Nepali contingent; she wasn’t even on the panel when the first invitations went out.

Among prominent participants from India will be minister of state for commerce Jairam Ramesh, Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh and former ambassador to Nepal Deb Mukharji.