It has been more than three months since Indian Airlines suspended its flights to Kathmandu at the insistence of the Indian government, and the recent failure of bilateral talks regarding security arrangements at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport means that the resumption of flights is still in limbo. Meanwhile, Nepal's India-dependent summer tourism has been gravely affected, and Indian Airlines itself loses INR 25.5 lakh a day as a result of the suspensions.
The calling off of flights to Kathmandu from New Delhi, Varanasi and Calcutta, was decreed even as the hijacked Airbus 310 was circling Amritsar in the very first leg of the extended episode. It was a novel tool of regional diplomacy, this punitive banning of flights to a neighbouring country. India's response to a very real security lapse at the Tribhuvan International Airport was a singular sanction that is both unprecedented and extravagant.
Ironically, Indian Airlines has been as much a scapegoat in this matter as has the Nepali economy. It was the air carrier that introduced civil aviation to Nepal in the 1950s and helped in the country's opening-up. Not so many years ago, the Indian government had decided to stop IA from flying its brand new Airbus 320 aircraft following a crash in Bangalore—a political decision taken to blame an airplane which is today the mainstay of the airlines'
fleet. That ban on an aircraft, and this ban on flights to an entire country—even while all international carriers continue their Kathmandu services—could be considered embarrassing, if the Indian public and media were listening.
But there is also the fact that, in this time of crisis, even Nepali scholars, journalists and business elites, have proved themselves incapable of raising a voice loud enough to be heard in New Delhi. The quiet wait for bilateral talks to take place shows a fatalistic sense of incapability. However, this does not negate the fact that a sense of alienation, completely needless, has grown in Kathmandu from the feeling of having been unfairly singled out. Rightly or wrongly, Nepalis are reminded of the 15-month economic embargo instituted by Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 against landlocked Nepal for, among other things, daring to import military supplies from China.