IMAGE VIA SUMMITPOST
THE AIR at 5,000 metres is too thin for heavy political posturing. Yet the Lipulekh Pass has become the site of a persistent, high-altitude snub. This week India’s ministry of external affairs broke the silence of the winter snows by announcing the resumption of the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra (a sacred pilgrimage undertaken by devotees to Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar, located in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China). Two thousand pilgrims will soon trek across the roof of the world, half of them via a road that snakes through territory Nepal claims as its sovereign soil. For officials in Kathmandu, the news arrived as a reminder of their growing irrelevance in their own backyard.
The disagreement originates from a smudge of ink on a map drawn two centuries ago. In 1816 the Treaty of Sugauli established the Kali River as Nepal’s western limit. However, the British cartographers of the era failed to specify which of the river’s many tributaries counted as the main stem. Nepal identifies the source at Limpiyadhura, further west, while India points to a smaller stream near the Lipulekh Pass. This geographic ambiguity covers 370 square kilometres of rugged terrain—roughly the size of the Isle of Wight—that India has occupied since the Sino-Indian war of 1962.
For decades the arrangement persisted as a manageable friction. That changed in 2020 when India’s Border Roads Organisation completed an 80-kilometre track to the pass, meant to speed pilgrims to Tibet and soldiers to the frontier. Kathmandu reacted with fury, amending its constitution to include the disputed triangle in its official emblem. Today that map hangs in every government office in Nepal, a paper shield against the hard asphalt of Indian infrastructure.
The current crisis exposes a painful paradox for prime minister Balendra Shah and his Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP). In opposition, the RSP was a vocal critic of foreign encroachment, lambasting previous administrations for their timidity. Notably, as mayor of Kathmandu Mr Shah himself was a sharp critic of the Lipulekh dispute, urging then prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli to raise the issue with Chinese leaders during his state visit to Beijing in 2025. Today, in power, Mr Shah has fallen conspicuously silent. The 2026 Yatra is the third time in a decade that Delhi and Beijing have made bilateral arrangements for the pass while ignoring Nepal’s protest notes. Sovereignty, it seems, is a luxury that requires the consent of one’s neighbours.
China’s role in this saga is particularly galling for the Nepali elite. Kathmandu has long attempted to play its two giant neighbours against each other, a policy known as “equidistance”. Yet when it comes to Lipulekh, Beijing and Delhi have found a rare, pragmatic harmony. During an SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) summit in Tianjin last August, President Xi Jinping reportedly suggested that Nepal resolve the matter bilaterally with India, a way of saying that China prefers a stable trade route to a minor border dispute. By welcoming the Indian Yatra announcement, the Chinese embassy in Delhi has effectively endorsed the Indian administration of the pass.
This bilateralism creates a second-order effect that is difficult for Nepal to counter. Every pilgrim who uses an Indian-issued permit to cross Lipulekh, every Indian bank that processes their fees and every Chinese official who stamps their passport at the border serves to harden the status quo. These facts on the ground carry more weight than any archival map from the 1830s. Nepal finds itself trapped in a cycle of formal protests that produce plenty of domestic heat but zero diplomatic light.
The strategic logic for India is undeniable. The road to Lipulekh reduces a week-long trek to a few hours of driving, a vital advantage as tensions with China along the Line of Actual Control persist. To Delhi, the pass is a “trijunction” of existential importance; to Kathmandu, it is a symbol of dignity. These two perspectives fail to find common ground because they exist on different planes of power.
Mr Shah’s government now faces a choice between escalation and quiet acceptance. To internationalise the dispute at the International Court of Justice would require Indian consent, which will be withheld. To block the route physically is impossible. The most likely path is a continuation of the current policy: a flurry of indignant press releases followed by a return to the status quo.
As the first batch of pilgrims prepares to depart in June, the reality of Himalayan politics is as cold as the mountain wind. Smaller nations occasionally find that their borders are defined by the convenience of their larger peers rather than treaties. Nepal’s new map is a masterpiece of cartographic detail, but on the high ridges of the Lipulekh Pass, it is the traffic that defines the territory. ■
