When you pass through the security checks and head over to the apron of Kathmandu's international airport to board an Indian airline, you are asked to enter a strange contraption. It is a covered platform on wheels, and about three feet above the ground. Here, your bags are checked and you are frisked once more before you are allowed to ascend the stairs.
If you are an inquisitive type, you may have wondered how high the sovereignties of Southasia's countries extend into the stratosphere. If you take the example of this apparatus at Kathmandu's airport, the answer seems to be that national jurisdiction extends only up to about three feet. If you are standing, then you are in Nepali territory only till about your mid-thighs – depending on how tall you are, of course. An infant or a child may easily remain wholly within Nepali sovereign space, but an adult wishing to do so will have to lie down. Obviously the average, curious reader will demand an explanation about all this ridiculousness. The story begins with the 1999 hijacking of the Indian Airlines IC 814 Kathmandu-Delhi flight by militants who used Indian passports and managed to get past airport security, it is said, with some arms. The plane hopped from Amritsar to Lahore to Dubai until it finally reached Kandahar airport, where it sat on the tarmac for days while India's BJP government tried to tackle the ultra-nationalist fallout back home. A passenger was killed by the hijackers and dumped overboard. In the end, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, worked out a deal, flew to Kandahar with 3 jailed militants whose release had been demanded, and returned to Delhi with the freed Airbus 300 and its passengers.
As the episode unfolded, the Indian media began screaming with 'anti-Nepal' propaganda, which fed pre-existing notions of how the country, which shared an open border with India, was a hotbed for 'ISI infiltration'. This period proved costly for Nepal, with India slapping an unprecedented condition for air travel between the two countries: the need for passports or other specified identification, where none had been previously required. Tourism from India plummeted by 60 percent.
Indian airlines flying to Nepal – at that time only Indian Airlines – were banned until the Kathmandu government was able to assure security at the airport. New Delhi officials insisted that the Nepal Police security was not good enough, and Indian security would have to be employed. That would not do for Nepal's sense of self and sovereignty, so carefully nurtured over the centuries vis-a-vis the empire to the south, variously Mughlan, the Company Bahadur, the British Crown and now the Republic.