IMAGE VIA SUMMITPOST
SOMEWHERE IN the far western Himalayas, at the point where India, Nepal and China all share a border, there is a mountain pass called Lipulekh. It sits at about 5,000 metres above sea level. Almost nobody lives there. The nearest town of any size is days away. And yet this cold, windswept gap in the mountains has just caused, according to reports, India to cancel a high-level diplomatic visit to Nepal and prompted Nepal to send angry letters to two of the world’s most powerful governments. It has also reignited a territorial argument that has been running, without resolution, for more than sixty years.
To understand what is happening, you need to know one thing about Nepal: it is a small country squeezed between two enormous ones. To its south is India. To its north is China. Nepal has a population of some 30m people and an economy the size of a mid-sized American city. Its neighbours between them account for nearly 3bn people and two of the world’s largest militaries. This geography shapes everything about how Nepal conducts itself in the world: including why it keeps raising a dispute it has never won and shows little prospect of winning.
The latest flare-up began in April, when India announced that it would resume an annual Hindu pilgrimage to a sacred lake in Tibet called Kailash Mansarovar. One of the two official routes it planned to use runs through the Lipulekh Pass. India made the announcement in coordination with China, which controls the Tibetan side of the mountains. Nepal was not consulted. Early this month its foreign ministry sent formal protest letters to both governments, saying Lipulekh sits on Nepali territory and that neither country has the right to use it without Nepal’s agreement.
India replied without concession. Its foreign ministry pointed out that Indian pilgrims have been travelling through Lipulekh to Kailash Mansarovar since 1954, that nothing had changed, and that Nepal’s claim over the territory was not supported by historical facts. China said nothing at all. A few days later, the Indian foreign secretary who had been planning to visit Kathmandu—a trip intended to build goodwill with Nepal’s new government—postponed the visit. Nepali press reports said the postponement came partly because prime minister Balendra Shah, Nepal’s new leader, had declined to meet the foreign secretary, saying he would only sit down with someone of equivalent seniority. India officially cited prior commitments.
The underlying dispute goes back to 1962, when India and China fought a brief war in the Himalayas. As fighting broke out, India moved troops into the Kalapani area—a stretch of about 35 square kilometres at Nepal’s far western corner that controls access to the Lipulekh Pass. Nepal’s king at the time chose not to object, calculating that it was unwise to antagonise India while its larger neighbour was at war. India’s troops never left. For decades Nepal raised the issue periodically, India listened politely and nothing changed. The area is now administered by India’s border police.
The legal argument at the heart of the dispute comes down to a river. The treaty that ended a war between Nepal and British India in 1816 drew Nepal’s western border along a river called the Kali. Nepal says the river originates high in the mountains at a point called Limpiyadhura, which would place Lipulekh on Nepal’s side of the border. India says the river begins further east, from a smaller stream closer to Lipulekh itself, which puts the pass firmly on Indian territory. Two countries, one river, two different answers to the question of where it starts—and two centuries without agreement.
What has made the current dispute louder is the arrival of Balendra Shah as Nepal’s prime minister. Shah is a former rapper who became Kathmandu’s mayor before leading his party to a landslide in the March elections. He has shown little appetite for the careful diplomatic hedging that older Nepali governments used to manage relations with India. His party had already objected in the strongest terms when India and China agreed last August to reopen Lipulekh for cross-border trade. The decision to send protest notes to both countries, and the reported refusal to receive a senior Indian diplomat, fits the same pattern: assertive, nationalist and popular at home.
The problem, which any Nepali government eventually confronts, is that assertiveness has limits when you are landlocked. Nepal has no coastline. Every litre of fuel, every shipment of goods, every piece of machinery the country needs from the outside world arrives either through India or through China. India is Nepal’s biggest trading partner by a wide margin. The open border between the two countries—1,800 kilometres long, with no visas required—means that hundreds of thousands of Nepalis live and work in India, sending money home to families who depend on it. When relations with India went badly wrong in 2015, India restricted goods crossing the border—and Nepal, already reeling from a catastrophic earthquake, ran short of fuel, medicine and cooking gas.
China offers Nepal an alternative, at least in theory. There are roads through the Himalayas to the north, and plans for a railway connecting Kathmandu to the Chinese border town of Kerung. But the mountain passes to China close in winter. The railway remains a plan rather than a reality. And the costs of moving goods through the Himalayas are far higher than moving them across the flat plains to India. Nepal cannot afford to treat India and China as equals in practice, even if its official policy is to do so.
None of this makes Nepal’s claim over Lipulekh wrong. The legal argument, rooted in that 1816 treaty and the question of where the Kali River starts, is taken seriously by international legal scholars. What it does mean is that Nepal has very few ways to force the issue. It can write protest letters, as it has done again this month. It can refuse to meet visiting diplomats. It can update its maps to include the disputed territory, as it did in 2020. What it cannot do is make India leave, or persuade China to take its side against a neighbour with whom Beijing has its own reasons to stay friendly.
The committee that India and Nepal set up in 1981 to resolve their border disputes has been meeting, on and off, for 45 years. It has not resolved them. The likeliest outcome of the current row is the same as every previous one: a period of tension, some diplomatic communication, an eventual resumption of normal relations and no change on the ground. Lipulekh will remain where it is. So will the disagreement about who owns it.
That Nepal keeps raising the issue anyway is not irrational. Countries that go quiet about territorial disputes tend to lose them over time, as silence gets read as acceptance. By protesting loudly and often, Nepal keeps its legal claim alive in the international record and makes clear that whatever India and China do in that pass, they do over Nepal’s explicit objection. It is a small form of power. For a country sandwiched between two nuclear-armed giants, it may be the only form available. ■
