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GEOPOLITICS IN THE Himalayas can feel like a high-altitude chess match played by giants who occasionally forget there are smaller pieces on the board. Nepal, wedged between India and China, has always responded with a strategy of restraint, guided by the belief that small states survive by keeping their heads down. Caution became a habit, and neutrality slid into quietness. At least inside the Nepali Congress, someone suggests that silence has outlived its usefulness. Udaya Shumsher Rana, newly elected joint general secretary of the country’s oldest political party, argues that Nepal has confused non-alignment with a lack of ambition. Neutrality, in his telling, should not mean invisibility.
Mr Rana does not look like a natural agitator. His background is polished rather than populist, shaped by St Stephen’s College in Delhi and Cornell University in New York, and by a family name that still carries weight in Nepali politics. At Cornell he wrote his master’s thesis on Nepal’s foreign policy towards its two immense neighbours, dissecting the permanent squeeze faced by a country that can neither move nor ignore the powers on either side. Those ideas now travel with him into party leadership, where theory meets the messier realities of South Asian power. His rise suggests a change in how Kathmandu sees the world, and how willing it is to speak back to it.
For much of the Cold War, non-alignment functioned as a protective shell. It was not glamorous, though it was effective enough to keep Nepal intact while larger powers jostled around it. Over the past quarter-century, Mr Rana argues, the doctrine has hollowed out. Fear of being labelled pro-India, pro-China or pro-America has produced a diplomacy that prefers absence to engagement. Nepal has learnt to avoid rooms where decisions are made rather than negotiate its place within them. Over time that caution has carried a price, because countries that stop talking eventually discover that no one is listening.
The loss shows up clearly when past crises are placed side by side. In 1989, after India imposed a harsh blockade, Nepal’s plight drew a sharp international response. Western and European capitals criticised New Delhi openly, and Kathmandu benefited from years spent cultivating those ties. In 2015, during another blockade amid constitutional turmoil, the global reaction was close to silence. No major power stepped forward. Indian influence had not changed so dramatically. Nepal’s diplomatic stock had. Goodwill, neglected, had drained away.
Support of that kind is never spontaneous. It is accumulated through steady engagement and relationships built long before trouble arrives. Mr Rana’s prescription is for Nepal to deal with all major powers at once, treating diplomacy as a wide table rather than a narrow corridor. One can talk seriously with Beijing without offending New Delhi, and court American investment without sending Moscow into a sulk. That style of diplomacy demands sophistication and discipline, and a move away from ideological theatrics towards a more transactional, quietly practical approach.
Bangladesh provides a useful illustration. In developing Chittagong Port, Dhaka stitched together Chinese, Indian, Russian and European interests, allocating different pieces of the same project to different partners. The result was not a geopolitical incident, only a working port. That is the craft Mr Rana admires, the ability to invite everyone to the table so that no single guest controls the meal. For Nepal, perched between vast markets, precarious geography can become leverage if handled with enough confidence.
Geography, at least, is not negotiable. India and China are global economic engines and military heavyweights, and this will stay a permanent feature of Nepali life. Mr Rana’s point is that even small spillovers from such enormous economies could remake Nepal’s fortunes. The obstacle is not interest from the giants. It is the Nepali state’s poor negotiating capacity. To benefit, Nepal first needs to understand what unsettles its neighbours.
India’s sensitivity over internal security is well known, and the open border is a constant source of anxiety in New Delhi. Mr Rana argues that these concerns should be addressed directly rather than sidestepped. Kathmandu, he says, ought to offer formal and consistent assurances that Nepali territory will not be used for activities hostile to India. This is less about deference than about realism, because ignoring such fears has repeatedly undermined Nepal’s own development plans.
The Gautam Buddha International Airport in Bhairahawa makes the point neatly. Conceived as a regional hub, it was built without sufficient consultation over the nearby Indian Air Force base in Gorakhpur. Security concerns were left unresolved, airspace restrictions followed and the airport now handles a trickle of traffic. In a poor country, this idle infrastructure stands as an expensive lesson in the costs of failing to coordinate. Neighbours who are not consulted early rarely become cooperative later.
China needs similar clarity. Beijing is acutely sensitive about Tibet and its northern border, and Nepal’s commitment to the One-China policy needs to be demonstrated through credible security cooperation. By offering predictability on issues China treats as core, Nepal strengthens its hand in asking for trade, investment and infrastructure. Foreign policy, in this view, is an exchange. You provide reassurance. You gain access.
At the centre of Mr Rana’s thinking lies a demand for coherence. Nepali diplomacy has tended to swing with domestic politics, tilting towards India under one government and China under the next. Such inconsistency corrodes trust. Investors and partners want to know that agreements signed today will survive tomorrow’s election. Mr Rana presses for a cross-party understanding on major foreign-policy goals, something stable enough to outlast coalition cycles.
The purpose of that diplomacy, he insists, should be plainly economic. Trade missions, embassies and bilateral visits ought to be judged by hard questions: do they bring tourists, improve terms for hydropower exports or help transfer technology? Relationships that fail those tests are indulgences Nepal cannot afford. Symbolism is a luxury item. For a developing country, foreign policy needs to pay its way.
That shift means you need new habits. Countries cannot be treated as taboo. Engagement cannot be painted as ideological betrayal. Grand projects should not be announced with fanfare only to be dropped when politics turns. Above all, Nepal must rediscover its voice in international forums. Silence does not signal neutrality. In fact it signals irrelevance. A country that says nothing about the world should not expect the world to say much about it.
Mr Rana’s idea of neutrality is active, confident and transactional, rooted in the belief that small states do not survive by disappearing. By engaging widely and aligning narrowly, Nepal can shape a foreign policy defined by its own interests rather than by the anxieties of its neighbours. The journey from Cornell classrooms to the upper tiers of the Nepali Congress has been a long one. He must now persuade his party, and the country, to exchange timidity for engagement. The alternative, however, is a slow slide into irrelevance. ■
