South Asia’s fluid India-China great game will soon witness another power play.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal is scheduled to travel to China on September 22 at the invitation of Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang -- who stood in for President Xi Jinping at the recently concluded G20 summit in New Delhi. Dahal, who became premier for the third time in December 2022, will travel to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Chongqing before returning to Kathmandu by way of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
On the cards is red-carpet bilateral bonhomie and a slew of deals. These range from edu-tech and agriculture to cross-border transmission lines -- Nepal shares a nearly 1,400 km border with Tibet -- and north-to-south roads between TAR and Nepal, including a tunnel north of Kathmandu that will facilitate travel to the Resuwagadhi-Kerung border point with China, likely to be upgraded as a major trade-and-transit hub.
It will be Dahal’s second significant trip this year after a visit in June to New Delhi to meet his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi. This first port of call was widely viewed both as Dahal’s reversal of rhetoric against the giant southern neighbour. Dahal has frequently been critical of India since his arrival in post-revolutionary Nepal as a serious and disruptive political player after leadership in Nepal’s ten-year Maoist rebellion -- unarguably among modern Nepal’s most disruptive events. The rebellion contributed to the switchover from an absolute monarchy to a raucous, chaotic but -- thus far -- resolute democracy.
Saving face
Dahal saved face and brought home from that trip several gains including the boosting of several bilateral trading posts and facilities, a new transhipment treaty to permit Nepal the use of India’s waterways, and Indian participation in several hydropower projects and transmission lines. With typical bombast, Modi spoke of raising Nepal-India relations to “Himalayan heights” and in a flourish promised to increase India's current offtake of 450MW of Nepal-made power to 10,000MW within a decade. A trilateral bonus: India agreeing for its territory to be used for a robust transmission link for Nepal to export electricity to Bangladesh.
Behind this compelling South Asian sandwich lies a dirty, enduring, and open secret: The aggressive, barely hidden plays of both India and China in Nepal. Like several countries in South Asia, Nepal too has been both impelled and compelled to play in the India v China premier league. An upside is that it’s now quite adept at deriving benefits from this rivalry. Sometimes, various governments in Nepal have looked to one or the other country for continuance.
But it comes at a cost. Nepal knows it well. Foreign policy vis-à-vis Nepal has literally been as kingmaker and king-unmaker. Such history goes back to the 1950s.
In the past two decades the speed, complexity, and aggression of the play has been massively ramped up. Top Indian and Chinese diplomats have been known to criss-cross Kathmandu and, less frequently, the country -- lower-level officers do so overtly and covertly -- to stitch and un-stitch political alliances, and intervene even in the making of the constitution. And, of course, badmouth each other. Sometimes, those from Nepal’s creamy layer are effectively called to durbar with a ranking ambassador, visiting foreign secretary, even a visiting foreign minister.
Each country routinely looks for openings in the other’s Nepal playbook -- mirroring their regional playbook.
Take the developments in 2015, when India showed great interest in the exercise to promulgate Nepal’s new constitution, ostensibly to aid those of “Indian origin” in the low-lying Madhes area to the south. There were also imminent provincial elections right across the border with India.
In any event there was a resultant months-long economic blockade along the southern border from September of that year that brought Nepal, already shattered by a devastating earthquake in April 2015, to its bleeding knees. It confected an opportunity for China.
It can get intense. At one stage that India’s establishment media took to reporting on the actions of China’s envoys in Nepal as being typical of the so-called Wolf Warrior diplomats of the Xi Jinping era who play hard and don’t care about fouls. Or, as evidenced earlier this year with outrageous Ukraine-related comments by China’s envoy in France, for diplomatic niceties.
India’s Holy Cow diplomats, so to speak, refuse to hoof it or hightail it in the face of China’s aggressive moves. India’s well-marinated beef with China ensures motivation.
But beyond the 2015 debacle there are other, curious -- even confounding -- aspects which sometimes offer China an edge. This is despite the enduring visa-free travel regime between India and Nepal, freedom for Nepali citizens to live and work in India, preferential access to Nepali goods, defence ties, and the increasing acquiescence to Nepal’s requests to use Indian territory for all manner of transhipment and regional connectivity.
There’s the enduring belief that Nepal remains a waystation for, among other things, smuggling and black-market goods, and for insertion into India of both counterfeit currency and dubious folks from third countries across the porous India-Nepal border of nearly 1,850 km.
For several years, India formally banned the carriage of notes of higher denomination than 100 rupees to and from Nepal. Although Nepal now discourages higher denomination notes on account of what it sees as India’s near-whimsical and damaging re-monetization and demonetization: It happened with denominations of 500 Indian rupees and 1,000 Indian rupees in 2016. And there’s now the decision to withdraw 2,000 Indian rupee notes, inexplicably introduced with knee-jerk fanfare in 2016, by this September.
Flying wild
If Indians fly to a third country instead of returning to India, they have to produce a no-objection certificate from the Indian embassy in Kathmandu. Only Indian citizens who travel to Nepal from a third country, and return there, are exempt.
Those flying to India on Indian carriers from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu have to undergo extra frisking just before boarding the aircraft. As there are no jetways, this happens on a raised platform placed by the stairs, as if to ensure that while this demand by India was acceded to by Nepal, face was saved with this additional frisking several inches above Nepali soil.
This last modus has its roots in lax security at Kathmandu and the resultant hijacking of an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 aircraft in Kathmandu in 1999 -- the infamous episode of flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to Delhi that ultimately experienced a forced rerouting: Kathmandu-Amritsar-Lahore-Dubai-Kandahar-Delhi. An Indian passenger was killed during the hijacking, and, to free hostages that concluded in Taliban-controlled Kandahar of the time, three top-tier Islamist terrorists, including Masood Azhar, chief of Jaish-e-Mohammad, were released from Indian jails. It happened during the tenure of a previous BJP-led government. Current Indian national security advisor Ajit Doval was an integral part of hostage negotiations.
To mitigate the curse of memory is, at its best, a work-in-progress and, at its worst, occasion to create new distress, angst, and resentment. India and China would do well to remember that what benefits accrue to them is not always on account of the other’s misstep or creation of negative energy in Nepal -- or, for that matter, elsewhere in the region. Equally, although fidelity isn’t usually a hallmark of either politics or international relations, Nepal’s shape-shifting political leadership would also do well to keep in mind that looking to one or the other neighbour for personal security is a ménage à trouble, as it were, that can have implications for the entire country.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He has authored several books on history, ethnography, conflict resolution, and Eastern South Asia. His most recent book is ‘The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India’s Far East’ (Simon and Schuster).
