Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, after hyping how seductively he had shifted Nepal’s geostrategic locus northward, failed to impress Beijing subsequently by doing anything more substantive.
Dragging its feet on agreements already signed, the Oli government purportedly reneged on a pledge to sign an extradition treaty during President Xi Jinping’s visit last year. The irate Chinese went on to detect the premier’s eagerness to secure legislative endorsement of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with the United States.
Under internal and external pressure, Oli escalated a war of words with New Delhi, rallying Nepalis behind a new political map incorporating land occupied by India and securing an amendment to a constitution the Indians already hate.
And the Chinese? They seemed to blame Nepal for letting India and China get away with their 2015 confidence-building measure on Lipulekh that concerns Nepali territory. After all but taking Beijing’s side on Galwan.
Predictably, Oli decides to go easy on the Indians, who reciprocate by sending, consecutively, their top spy, army chief and foreign secretary.
The Chinese aren’t about to let Oli guilt them into anything. Before India’s top diplomat arrives, Beijing sends a team of military and strategic officials supposedly to express its own growing displeasure with Oli and everybody else. Publicly, China’s ire seems to have fallen on the Nepali Congress, but the mandarins want Nepal as a nation to listen up.
To reinforce China’s sentiment, State Councillor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe virtually invited himself to Kathmandu for a daylong working visit. Although you couldn’t tell from his demeanor and deportment, Gen. Wei seems really worked up. In his exasperation, he tries to do more than what Samant Goel, Manoj Mukund Naravane and Harsha Vardhan Shringla had attempted together.
Some Indians were put off by Nepal’s northern overtures at a time when it was reviving ties with the south. Others were elated by Oli’s supposed demarche to Chinese ambassador Hou Yanqi. By the time Gen. Wei left Kathmandu, New Delhi, too, was trying to make sense of it all.
The bizarre election aftermath in the United States may have given Oli a breather, but January 20 is fast approaching. The Chinese want to prevent a split in the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) at all costs – even if it mean Oli relinquishing the premiership.
Now, that really offends Oli. He believes he should have more street cred with Beijing. After all, he spent more years in Nakhhu than Pushpa Kamal Dahal et al. did at NOIDA. Oli hadn’t done so as a Brezhnevite. Nor had he desecrated the memory of the Great Helmsman.
So Oli decided to send his own message. Flouting the NCP’s prior undertaking to keep the dispute civil, he ensured his response to Dahal’s charge-sheet was heard far and wide, including through a full audio version on YouTube.
While we were alternately tickled and disgusted by the tawdriness of it all, Oli slipped in a reference to Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s one-time designated successor who died in a plane crash en route to the Soviet Union after a failed coup against the leader in 1971. India, like many of us, must be left wondering whether Chinese or American ears perked up first and what each heard.
