Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s government has found eager assistants in a section of the Indian media. These outlets, mostly close to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, want Nepalis to get all riled up over China’s purported land grab in Humla.
Both the pro-Indian and pro-American wings of the Nepali Congress continue to rake up the issue. Still, protests outside the Chinese Embassy haven’t gained much traction. The imperative of keeping Kalapani et al off the table and the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact on the national agenda is enough to drive the narrative.
The Chinese have brought some of this upon themselves. For long, they have operated in a low-cost enterprise here that owes its success to Nepalis’ relative unfamiliarity with their northern neighbor. What used to be a single litmus test over Tibet continues to swell over several issues. Today China wants firm commitments from Nepal on the Belt and Road Initiative, whose expanse is alarmingly imprecise.
Oli stuck his neck out really far over Kalapani et al. to prove Nepal’s commitment to exercising its sovereign choices. And all the Chinese can say is they sympathize with us but not enough to abrogate their 2015 Lipulekh agreement with India. We’re supposed to settle bilaterally with India what the Indians have already settled with the Chinese.
A neighbor that has paid so much lip service about safeguarding Nepal’s sovereignty mouthing platitudes is bad enough. When China is accused of having fiddled with border pillars, Nepalis go into shock. In that stupor, they tend to believe anything regardless of the source.
Since life is a trade-off, countries have no opt-out. The Chinese are itching to get into Eastern South Asia through Nepal. Or are they just waving the ‘Nepal card’ to increasingly smug Indians? Tibet and Taiwan are no doubt two blunt instruments New Delhi can wield against Beijing. What chance do they have in a three-front war?
Former Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal took great pains to promote his trilateral cooperation concept but got no support in New Delhi. Exasperated, Beijing came up with the ‘2+1 mechanism’ that it hoped to fine-tune with New Delhi for Nepal. Lots of Nepalis now joined the Indians rebuffing the idea. The hawks at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and the Global Times are still at it.
With the Indians and Chinese failing to agree or disagree on Nepal, the Oli government felt it needed to act. So it ordered the Ministry of Education to halt distribution to high school students of the 110-page ‘Self Study Material on Nepal's Territory and Border’, a Nepali-language book that includes a chapter on the campaign to reclaim disputed territory.
How much of a sop to New Delhi might this be when India wants us to withdraw our new map? Alone, probably not much. Hey, things might change if we could help amplify the logic of why – besides how – Indian troops came to be stationed in Kalapani. Chinese encroachments seem to provide good copy down south these days. If we’re good enough to the Indians, we might even get to keep our constitution along with the map.
