India set for Agnipath, worry in Nepal over Gorkha recruits

Seven years later, as the Army prepares to unroll the Agnipath recruitment scheme, there are questions about its social and economic impact on Nepal, from where India has so far recruited approximately 1,400 soldiers into the Gorkha regiment annually (pre-Covid), and how it might affect India’s relations with the government and people of Nepal, where its strategic interests are pitted against China.

The first recruitments in Nepal under Agnipath scheme are scheduled to begin late August, and some websites are already showing dates for recruitment rallies, but the Nepal government’s confirmation to hold the rallies, which is part of the recruitment procedure, is still awaited. It is also unclear whether the annual recruitment numbers will hold good under Agnipath.

In India, the Army will recruit only 25,000 Agniveers this year.

The Army’s intake of Nepal soldiers takes place under a tripartite treaty signed in 1947 between Nepal, India and Britain. Some 32,000-35,000 Nepal soldiers serve in the Indian Army at any given time. The Indian Army ex-servicemen community in Nepal is about 1.32 lakh-strong.

While the numbers to be recruited from Nepal this year are unclear, what added to the concern is that only 25 per cent will be re-employed by Indian Army; the rest will have to go home.

According to information available in public domain, annual pensions for Nepal-domiciled Gorkhas (Indian Army also hires India-domiciled Gorkhas) total about Rs 4,000 crore. Serving soldiers also send remittances home to the tune of Rs 1,000 crore every year.

“That is a huge injection of money into Nepal’s economy,” said Ranjit Rae, India’s former ambassador to Nepal, who has written extensively about India’s Gorkha connect with Nepal in his book Kathmandu Dilemma: Resetting India-Nepal Ties. “There is massive unemployment in Nepal, and most young people leave to work in other countries…. It would be very difficult to assess the impact [of the new recruitment scheme] immediately. But as we saw in India, the first reaction in Nepal, too, was dismay.”

Major-General Gopal Gurung (retd) of 5 Gorkha said that as in India, salaries, pensions and other benefits are a huge draw in Nepal for recruitment into the Indian Army. The socioeconomic impact of Agnipath may take 10 or 15 years to become apparent, he said, but what was at stake was also the historic Gorkha connection.

Gurung also flagged concerns articulated in Nepal media that Kathmandu was not consulted about the Agnipath scheme. “It is not binding on India to consult Nepal as long as it is applied uniformly and without discrimination. At the same time, considering good relations between the two countries, and to augment our ties, the Nepal government could have been consulted,” he told The Indian Express.

Nepal’s own stand on the recruitment of its citizens into the Indian Army has been a bit of a mixed bag. Over the last two decades, sections of the polity have questioned recruitment of Nepal citizens into another country’s army where they might be deployed against countries friendly to Nepal. Gorkhas in Indian Army are deployed at both the Line of Control with Pakistan and at the Line of Actual Control with China.

Nepal has friendly ties with Pakistan, and China is hugely influential in Nepal.

In 2020, then Nepal foreign minister Pradeep Gyawali shocked many by calling Gorkha recruitment into foreign armies a “legacy of the past” and the 1947 tripartite agreement as “redundant”.

Despite the rhetoric, Nepal understands that the economic aspect is too important for Kathmandu to dismiss altogether, but wants to be involved in the recruitment process. The sudden announcement of the scheme caught Nepal by surprise.

Officials in Kathmandu told The Indian Express that they had no information from Delhi about Agnipath. Even chairman of Nepal ex-servicemen’s association, Major General Keshar Bahadur Bhandari, was in the dark. He seemed to believe that the Agnipath scheme was separate from Gorkha recruitment and expressed hope that recruitment of Gorkhas would continue.