IMAGE: KHABARHUB
NEPAL’S FOREIGN policy has long followed a rhythm. The foreign minister goes to Delhi. Three days later he flies to Beijing. The prime minister despatches his party chairman to meet Narendra Modi while remaining in Kathmandu; a month later the foreign minister pledges “closer ties” in the Chinese capital. Each journey to one neighbour is shadowed by a journey to the other, as if the two trips cancel each other out. The ritual preserves the appearance of balance. The substance is difficult to sustain.
The cancellation of this month’s 17th International Association for Tibetan Studies seminar was one example. Nepal had been due to host 720 scholars from 39 countries, including nearly 100 from Chinese academic institutions. The event had been assessed as manageable. Then the Chinese ambassador, Zhang Maoming, urged the foreign secretary to be “vigilant”. A CPPCC member arrived from China on a pastoral visit that covered the subject extensively. Nepal cancelled the seminar. The same week, its officials were telling every visiting diplomat that the country pursued a policy of “equidistance”. That is, rather than balance, compliance.
The asymmetry at the heart of Nepal’s predicament is material. India controls the main arteries of trade. Seventy-one per cent of Nepal’s imports come from India. Every goods truck heading beyond the subcontinent passes through an Indian port. The blockade of 2015, when Indian truck operators stopped moving, demonstrated what happens when those arteries close. Prices in Kathmandu’s kitchens rose within weeks. The costs of annoying India are painful and immediate. The costs of annoying China are slower and mediated through diplomatic channels that take months to produce practical consequences. Nepal absorbs Chinese pressure on Tibet quietly while taking care not to endorse anything that crosses India’s core red lines. This is asymmetric risk management.
That management is becoming tougher. Ten years ago India and China competed in Nepal’s political economy in a fairly contained way. Each cultivated political parties. Both built some roads. The competition was manageable. Now it has moved into some institutional choices: which university receives Chinese equipment, which data centre gets Chinese investment, which hydropower project secures Indian financing, which political party receives which kind of foreign engagement. The United States is also present, funding transmission infrastructure through the Millennium Challenge Corporation while having withdrawn USAID development funding. Its role is real but hazy to read.
The Balendra Shah government has responded with energy and incoherence. In June Rabi Lamichhane, the chairman of the RSP party, visited Delhi and met Modi, Jaishankar, Shah and Doval. Indian officials described the visit as a productive reset after years of friction under the previous Oli administration. Three days later the foreign minister, Khanal, was in Beijing vowing closer ties. Kumar Ben, a chief advisor, travelled to India and reportedly met India’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval. The foreign ministry confirmed the visit after Ben had privately denied it. These are separate people pursuing separate objectives under what is nominally a single foreign policy.
Nepal has been advised to avoid playing the “China card” or the “India card” for short-term political gain and instead pursue a pragmatic, issue-based foreign policy rooted in national interest. The advice is sound. It assumes a foreign-policy apparatus capable of executing it. Nepal currently has 24 ambassadorial posts vacant or run by acting heads, including its missions in India, China, America, Britain, Japan, Russia and Australia.
The balancing act has always depended on a particular condition: that both India and China found it more useful to have Nepal neutral than to force a choice. That condition is eroding as the rivalry between them intensifies across the Indo-Pacific. For India, Nepal matters for northern security, water resources and historical ties. For China, it matters for Tibet’s security, for influence in South Asia and for the Belt and Road Initiative. When the stakes are high for both, the space for a small country to be genuinely neutral shrinks. Nepal is losing its balance because the tectonic plates it sits between are moving faster than they used to. ■
