Over the past few months, the ties between India and Nepal have been hitting several roadblocks. One irritant or the other has been cropping up, turning the relations between the two neighbours sour. Now, the birthplace of Buddha has come up as a provocation for Nepal to lock horns with India.
Nepal on Sunday tried to make a mountain out of a molehill. Reacting strongly to a statement by External Affairs Minister (EAM) S. Jaishankar, Nepal asserted that Buddha was born in Lumbini which is situated on its soil.
Nepal was feeling hurt after Jaishankar at a function said that Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi were remembered as “two greatest Indians ever”. Reference to Buddha as Indian did not, however, go down well with Kathmandu which reacted angrily.
Nepal’s foreign ministry said it is a well established and undeniable fact that the birthplace of Buddha was Lumbini. “Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha and the fountain of Buddhism is one of the UNESCO world heritage sites,” Nepal’s foreign ministry spokesperson said.
To buttress his point, the spokesperson argued that this was even acknowledged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who during his address to Nepal’s Legislature Parliament in 2014 asserted that “Nepal is the country where the apostle of peace in the world, Buddha, was born.”
In view of ties with Nepal getting strained day by day, India immediately tried to close the matter for once and all. The MEA issued a statement responding to Nepalese assertions. “EAM’s remarks yesterday at the CII event referred to our shared Buddhist heritage. There is no doubt that Gautam Buddha was born in Lumbini, which is Nepal,” MEA spokesman Anurag Srivastava said on Sunday.
According to sources, MEA officials responsible for Nepal desk through backchannel called on their counterparts in Nepalese Embassy here in the national Capital. They held informal chit-chat in a bid to ensure that the matter is laid to rest. The controversy over Buddha’s birthplace is the latest in a series of rows between both the countries over the past few months. It was only last month that India and Nepal got embroiled in a diplomatic row over Nepalese premier K.P.S. Oli’s remarks on the real Ayodhya and the birthplace of Lord Ram. The ties worsened with Nepal releasing a new political map showing the disputed regions of Kalapani, Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh as part of its own territory.
Indian diplomats were of the view that Nepal is deliberately raising the disputes at the behest of China which has been trying to increase its influence in this Himalayan nation. Nepal’s tilt towards China has been seen from time to time and the MEA has been making it a point to balance the ties with it to thwart Chinese attempts to foment trouble for New Delhi through its neighbouring country.