IMAGE: RSP
THE STANDARD way of describing Nepal’s geopolitical position is to say it sits between India and China and therefore matters to both. This has been true since at least 1950. What has changed, in the past few months, is the intensity with which both powers have started acting on it.
India is worried in ways it was not five years ago. Its relationship with Bangladesh collapsed in 2024 when a popular uprising removed Sheikh Hasina and brought to power a government that is considerably cooler towards New Delhi. The Maldives elected a president in 2023 who made asking India to remove its military personnel one of his first acts. Sri Lanka has been managing its relationships with characteristic pragmatism, leaning wherever the money and the relief is. India’s “neighbourhood first” policy has produced a run of reversals across the subcontinent, and Nepal—the one country in the region with the deepest religious and familial ties to India—has become more important to Delhi because the ring around it has slimmed. A stable, non-hostile Nepal is the closest thing India has to a guaranteed friendly relationship in its immediate neighbourhood right now.
China is worried for different reasons. Nepal shares its entire northern border with Tibet, and Beijing has always treated a stable and discreet Nepal as essential to managing the Tibetan plateau. The September 2025 protests, which killed 77 people and briefly paralysed a country on China’s doorstep, alarmed Beijing in the same way that any sudden popular upheaval near Tibet alarms Beijing.
More specifically, the protests swept away the communist formations that had been China’s most reliable interlocutors in Kathmandu for two decades or so. When the RSP won 182 seats in March and the CPN-UML was reduced to 25, China lost the parties it had been cultivating since at least 2008. It is now trying to build a relationship with a government that has no ideological alignment with Beijing and a founder who spent his career as a television journalist rather than a Maoist guerrilla.
Those two anxieties—India’s fear of further neighbourhood losses, China’s discomfort with an unfamiliar government in Kathmandu—are what has produced the sudden surge of diplomatic attention Nepal has received since March. Twenty-three European ambassadors. The US special envoy. Lamichhane meeting Modi. Khanal in Delhi, then, as reports suggest, immediately off to Beijing. A senior Nepali official confiding to a journalist that the India trip was added only after the China trip was confirmed. None of this activity is primarily about Nepal’s economy or Nepal’s infrastructure. It is about the fact that a country that was ungovernable for a generation has suddenly produced its first stable single-party government since 1999, and every interested party in the region wants to establish itself with that government before someone else does.
Retired Nepali army general Binoj Basnyat made the reality plain in the Kathmandu Post in March: “Maintaining equidistant diplomacy without getting drawn into the strategic competition between India and China is very important. Nepal must avoid the perception that it aligns too closely with one side, which could threaten its sovereignty or invite political pressure.” The advice is sound.
The difficulty is that equidistance, in practice, is not a stable equilibrium. Nepal’s geography, its open border with India, its dependence on Indian fuel and Indian transit routes and the 3.5m Nepalis who cross that border for work all pull the relationship with India towards something much closer than any diplomatic formula can express. China offers infrastructure and alternatives. It has been offering them for nine years under the BRI and has not yet built very much. The asymmetry is fundamental and no amount of careful scheduling of foreign minister visits will alter it.
What is new is not Nepal’s strategic position (it has always mattered) but the attentiveness with which its neighbours are acknowledging that it does. India has had a decade of taking Nepal for granted and has recently learned, via Bangladesh and the Maldives, the cost of that habit. China is navigating a relationship with a government it did not expect and does not fully understand. For Nepal, the combination of a stable government and two anxious neighbours is the most favourable external environment it has had in years. The question the next few years will answer is what a country in that position decides to do with the attention it has finally earned. ■
