Gorkha Recruitment Unlikely to Stop: Nepal Officials
KATHMANDU: The government of Nepal is unlikely to take any formal decision to stop recruitment of Gorkhas in the Indian or the British armies in the foreseeable future, according to highly placed official. Despite a parliamentary committee having made such recommendations, the current arrangement can’t just be terminated at will, the officials said requesting anonymity. They added that the committee report, forwarded by the prime minister’s office to the foreign and defence ministries recently, contained no specific instructions about how to move ahead with terminating the recruitment arrangement. A concept paper on “Nepal’s Foreign relations in the changed context” submitted to the prime minister by the Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Relations and Human Rights in December had said that permiting recruitment of Gorkhas in the British as well as Indian armies, was against national honour. It also said Nepal’s foreign policy of “equal distance” with two neighbours, India and China, demanded that arrangement with one neighbour for recruiting Nepalese in their army must be done away with.
The prime minister’s office, however, forwarded the report to the defence and foreign ministries only two weeks ago. Nepal can not simply act on recommendation of a parliamentary committee, and specific instructions are required from the government for the matter to proceed, the officials said. The East India Company and Nepal signed a treaty in 1816 forming 10 regiments of Gorkhas. India continued with that arrangement giving choice to the Gorkhas to remain either with the British or Indian armies when it became independent in 1947.
Currently, there are over 30,000 Gorkhas in the Indian Army, while Britain, which decided to cut down the number, has only around one tenth of that figure. Britain still operates two recruitment centres — one in eastern Nepal’s Dharan and another in central Nepal’s Pokhara. The committee report said that “no sovereign country drafts its youths for recruitment in other countries’ armies” and recommended winding up the two recruitment centres.
The Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists (UCPN-M) that heads the current government, used to be a vocal advocate of stopping Gorkha recruitment during the years of insurgency, but has been maintaining its silence after it joined the political mainstream and emerged as the largest party in parliament in the 2008 April election.
( Source - Indian Express)
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