A ceremonial head of state is under fire for allegedly conspiring with a democratically elected prime minister to dismantle democracy, prompting an alliance of opposition parties to take to the streets amid widespread public apathy. Nepali politics today is back to where it was two decades ago.
The country abolished its monarchy and became a secular and federal republic today to avoid such crises, the prevailing narrative goes. As the Covid-19 pandemic and political instability feed on each other, a hitherto more obscure reality is becoming starker: Nepal's politics and geopolitics are at odds.
As I argue in my new book 'Backfire in Nepal: How India Lost the Plot to China', geopolitical dynamics drove Nepal's political change in 2006 as much as the popular clamor for change had. India had allied the mainstream democratic parties and Maoist rebels against an assertive monarchy in a grand vision of creating a 'new Nepal'. New Delhi's bet was bold but tentative, a product of prevailing geopolitical exigencies.
By the time Nepal's convoluted peace process culminated in a new constitution in 2015, the document was one India could not wholeheartedly welcome. Much of the international community, thatarrayed behind India, remains equally perturbed, on one account or another.
India has not publicly declared its 2005-2006 mediation as a mistake. But it continues to proffer signs of recalibrating its policy. Former Indian ambassadors in Kathmandu either continue to defend the 2005-2006 initiative or have called for fine-tuning it to new realities. In public, the Indian government maintains a hands-off approach. That posture has hardly assuaged Nepali public opinion, where perceived and actual instances of Indian meddling over the decades have created a momentum of their own.
The rupture in the ruling communist party, the current core malady, has been touted as a setback for Beijing, credited with uniting the Maoist and Unified Marxist-Leninists factions. True, China has withdrawn from an unnatural phase of political and diplomatic assertiveness. But, then, that pullback has been part of the general diminution of Beijing's 'wolf-warrior' diplomacy. Ostensibly confident of having sufficiently reined in Indian ambitions of band-wagoning onto the US-led containment of China, Beijing may have even reverted to some form of positive engagement with New Delhi on Nepal.
Political events in Nepal will continue to unfold as the Supreme Court rules on the second dissolution of parliament in six months. The principal external stakeholders – India, China and the United States-led West – have kept their cards close to their chests.
Five former prime ministers belonging to the opposition have issued a second statement in two weeks against what they call growing international interference. While the target is perceived as India, whose intelligence and security apparatus has stepped into the role hitherto played by politicians and diplomats, all the major foreign powers wield influence across the political spectrum. Thus, it would be foolhardy to anoint winners and losers based on this twist or that turn.
As the two immediate neighbors with the greatest stakes in Nepal's stability, India and China recognize the scale of their challenge. The Dalai Lama succession is emerging to be a potential source of conflict. China insists on its traditional right to ratify the successor, infuriating the India-based Tibetan government in exile.
The United States has asserted that China should have no role in the succession, but India recognizes the additional perils geographical proximity can bring. India's open border with Nepal, which has a large community of Tibetan exiles has long been a source of anxiety for China. And the Tibet issue is only part of the Sino-Indian rivalry in Nepal.
Any understanding between the Asian giants on Nepal will have to overcome their history of animosity. Shared pragmatism – which New Delhi and Beijing have exhibited abundantly throughout their troubled relationship – could facilitate their task in Nepal, to the extent the country's boisterous internal politics would permit.
By Sanjay Upadhya
