IMAGE VIA WIRED
IN THE autumn of 2015, a humanitarian crisis gripped Nepal. The flow of fuel, medicine and food from India slowed to a trickle for months. It was an unofficial blockade, imposed by New Delhi in an effort to force amendments to Nepal’s new constitution. The goal was to secure greater rights for marginalised communities in Nepal’s southern plains, with whom India shares cultural ties. The result was different.
Shelves emptied and hospitals rationed supplies. The Nepali public saw a brutal assertion of power by an overbearing giant. The blockade lasted only a few months. Its political aftershocks are still being felt a decade later, redefining the rivalry for influence in the Himalayas and testing India’s ability to control its backyard.
India’s relationship with Nepal is uniquely intimate and chronically fraught. A 1950 treaty allows for an open border and reciprocal rights for citizens. It also, in secret letters, gave India a say in Nepal’s defence purchases and foreign policy. For much of Nepal’s modern history, New Delhi played the role of kingmaker, using economic and political levers to keep its neighbour aligned. The 2015 blockade was the apogee of that strategy. It was also its ruin. The perceived cruelty of the act catalysed a surge of Nepali nationalism. It pushed Kathmandu firmly towards China as a strategic counterweight. And it forced a thorough rethink in Delhi about how to manage a relationship it can never take for granted.
India’s new approach is less about overt political micromanagement and more about building irreversible geoeconomic links. The primary tool is energy. Nepal has the potential to generate over 40,000 megawatts of hydropower, a transformative asset for a nation whose trade deficit with India runs to billions of dollars. In 2024 India agreed to buy 10,000 MW from Nepal over ten years. Last year it allowed Nepal to transmit power to Bangladesh through Indian grids, a small but emblematic step towards making India the hub of a regional energy market. The state-owned Power Grid Corporation of India is building cross-border transmission lines. “The vision is to bind Nepal into a single power grid where India is the natural buyer and distributor,” says a consultant who advises on Himalayan infrastructure. “It creates a mutual dependency that is harder to politicise.”
That pragmatic pivot is a straight lesson from the blockade. New Delhi’s heavy-handedness provided an opening for China, which rushed in with diplomatic support and promises of investment under its Belt and Road Initiative. China has since signed up Nepal for a list of prestige projects including a cross-border railway. Progress has been glacial, hamstrung by financing disputes and the brutal geography of the Himalayas. Yet the psychological shift is permanent. Nepal now actively courts China to balance Indian influence. It has joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation—a China- and Russia-led Eurasian alliance for security and regional cooperation—as a dialogue partner and signed a controversial American aid grant, the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact, much to Beijing’s irritation. Kathmandu’s foreign policy is a classic act of hedging.
For India, the urgent task is to ensure the hedge does not tip into outright alignment with China. The security stakes could hardly be higher. Nepal shares a long, porous border with India’s sensitive heartland. The narrow Siliguri Corridor, commonly called India’s “Chicken’s Neck”, which connects its north-eastern states to the mainland, lies just south of Nepal. Chinese activity in Nepal is watched with intense suspicion in Delhi. India has used regulatory power to checkmate Chinese inroads, notably in hydropower. Its guidelines for cross-border electricity trade practically barred the purchase of power from projects with Chinese investment. That forced Kathmandu to choose between Chinese capital and Indian market access. It usually chooses the market.
Yet India’s greatest challenge may now come not from Beijing, but from within Nepal itself. A generational quake is upending Nepali politics. Last year a youth-led uprising, sparked by a clumsy government attempt to ban social media, exploded onto the streets. Protesters decried the corruption and incompetence of the ageing leaders who have dominated politics since the monarchy fell in 2008. The movement toppled the government of K.P. Sharma Oli and has fuelled the rise of new parties like the Rastriya Swatantra Party, led by Rabi Lamichhane. It has also split the venerable Nepali Congress, with the reformist Gagan Thapa, 49, wresting control from the octogenarian Sher Bahadur Deuba.
This new political class is less invested in the old ideological battles between pro-India and pro-China factions. Its focus is jobs, governance and national pride. It views India with a cooler, more transactional eye. “The emotional card of ‘Roti-Beti’ does not work with this generation,” notes a Kathmandu-based analyst. “They see India as a necessary economic partner, but also as a sometimes-bullying neighbour. They want a relationship of respect, not dependency.” That sentiment complicates India’s geoeconomic courtship. Infrastructure ties and power purchases build leverage but they do not build affection.
Elections scheduled for March 5th will be a litmus test. A strong showing by the new, issue-based parties could produce a government less amenable to the traditional backroom influence that characterised Indian diplomacy for decades. It might also renew calls to revise or scrap the anachronistic 1950 treaty, a long-standing nationalist demand. India’s response so far has been cautious engagement. It has publicly welcomed the rise of Thapa, for example, while maintaining lines to other factions. The tone from Delhi is softer, stressing partnership and connectivity.
The paradox of India’s position is that its greatest sources of influence are also its greatest vulnerabilities. The open border allows unchecked movement but also fuels anxieties about undocumented migration in India’s northern states. Hydropower integration creates binding interdependence, but a future Nepali government could still invite Chinese firms to build dams, forcing another difficult Indian choice. The cultural and familial ties run deep yet they can be swept aside by a wave of popular resentment, as happened in 2015.
India is thus learning to wield power by seeming to relinquish it. It is replacing the blunt instrument of the blockade with the subtler bind of the grid. The goal is no longer to dictate political outcomes in Kathmandu but to make the economic cost of drifting into China’s orbit prohibitively high. Whether this works depends on an unknowable variable: the will of Nepal’s next generation. They are the heirs to the bitterness of the blockade, and the judges of whether India’s new embrace feels any less constricting than the old one. The Himalayas have always been a strategic buffer. Now they are a mirror, reflecting the limits of power and the price of its abuse. ■
