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It is strange to hear some of the ‘pro-democracy’ arguments in the new ‘BRI v B3W’ debate. BRI’s critics say it is propagated by a one-party dictatorship determined to bend the world to its will through its opaque and elitist business dealings. The B3W, on the other hand, is a democratic initiative with accountability and transparency at its heart, they argue.

It is naïve to believe that sovereign nation-states consider anything but their core interests while dealing with the outside world. And seldom do these interests have anything to do with democratic norms and values. 

BRI was China’s way of prolonging its economic development by financing projects abroad, in the expectation of juicy returns. While dispensing loans under the BRI, China didn’t bother about the recipient countries’ human rights and governance records. And it would be strange if China, a rising global power, were not looking to secure its interests, geopolitical or otherwise, through those business deals.

The same applies to the US. The new ‘Build Back Better World’ initiative it has pushed, at its heart, hopes to find new markets for American products and clients for international institutions it has traditionally financed. Plus, yes, it also aims to contain China’s economic and military rise. 

But aren’t Western democracies more concerned about human rights and liberal values? It depends. Whatever they do at home, abroad, these are only cloaks to hide their competitive Hobbesian instincts. If the Americans were so concerned about democracy and human rights, why are they abandoning Afghanistan now? Only the American soldiers stand between the Taliban and the seat of government in Kabul. Soon as the Americans are out, the Taliban will impose sharia law, ban girls from attending schools, and outlaw all forms of entertainment. 

Even in Nepal, the Americans backed the party-less regime of King Mahendra after he let the CIA use Mustang to wage a guerrilla war in Tibet. After 9/11, the US administration unequivocally supported King Gyanendra’s ‘war on terror’, with money and guns, helping him add fuel to the Maoist conflict. While our erstwhile Panchayat-era kings got ticker-tape parades in the US capitol, none of our democratic leaders have received similar welcomes there.

The B3W initiative hopes to curb the further expansion of Chinese powers and forestall the loss of American clout in the Asia-Pacific, the new global power hub. Countries such as Nepal will be under increasing pressure in the future to pick between the ‘autocratic BRI’ and the ‘democratic B3W’. So expect more acrimonious debates like the one surrounding the MCC compact. Strangely, the Americans say the compact money could go to some other country if Nepal continues to dither. Yet they keep pushing Kathmandu to gulp it down, no questions asked.  

Am I saying Nepal should pick BRI over B3W? Not at all. Why do we need to choose? Let the two initiatives compete to win our trust, and to help us on our terms. The Americans entered Nepal in the late 1940s to safeguard their interests, but we wanted them here to secure our own interests: the involvement of a strong third actor like the US had become vital as India and China threatened to settle Nepal’s fate between them. Nepal is destined to continue with this delicate balancing act if it is to continue to preserve its independence. 

A lot of what we know about China comes from Western news outlets and books by Western authors. This holds for this writer as well. Besides authors like John Keay, Robert Kaplan, and Martin Jacques, he relies mostly on The Economist and The New York Times to get his fill on China. Besides that, he regularly visits the websites of Global Times and People’s Daily. But is that enough? To understand such a vast country, nay, a civilization, shouldn’t he have lived there for a few years or, short of that, at least understand Mandarin?

This was among the conversation topics in a recent Clubhouse discussion titled ‘Know China’. As ApEx columnist Trailokya Raj Aryal, who studied in China and is fluent in Mandarin, pointed out, outsiders tend to ignore nuances, and much gets lost in translation. Most important pieces of writing on China are to be found on little-known Chinese blogs, he averred. The redoubtable CK Lal, invited to speak, also refrained from saying much because he said he too mostly relied on English texts to decipher China. 

One topic of common interest was Confucius. The ancient philosopher is vital to understanding modern China. His emphasis on human relationships and social harmony is often contrasted with the Western obsession with individual wellbeing. Also, his adherents have no temples to visit, unlike the Chinese Buddhists and the Taoists. Confucianism is more a way of life than a religion. 

Confucius has been resurrected by successive Chinese dynasties to underpin their rule, and even the modern-day Communists are his die-hard fans. There are now Confucius Institutes to teach the Chinese language all over the world and the Chinese foreign policy has a distinct Confucian whiff. In 2013, unveiling his signature foreign policy initiative, the BRI, Xi Jinping assured the rest of the world that China would never seek a dominant role in regional affairs. He instead expressed his interest in reviving the ancient Silk Route networks, linking countries anew based on “mutual support and trust”, not narrowly defined self-interests.

That many Western critics accuse Chinese leadership of using the benevolent face of Confucius to cloak their authoritarian intentions is another story altogether. Another interesting aspect of modern China that emerged during the CH discussion concerned its meritocratic bureaucracy and party system. In the selection and promotion of CCP cadres, prospective candidates are evaluated both on their intellectual breadth as well as the depth of their soft skills like their ability to get along with and persuade others. Most top-ranking CCP members have tertiary degrees, with engineering majors dominating the highest echelons. It is the presence of these technocrats that ensure things get done well and on time. 

Most Chinese communist leaders are clean and efficient and collectively committed to achieving mutually defined goals, which is far from what we can say about Nepali leaders, communists or otherwise. But then the question is: Can we cherry-pick the merit-worthy aspects of modern-day China while blocking out its ugly facets? Is China’s recent breakneck pace of growth and development and its ability to lift hundreds of millions of folks out of poverty in a generation the direct result of its one-party system or did they happen despite it? 

There are many things Nepal and its politicians can learn from China. Then there are the things we must avoid. But we can know the difference only by striving to understand China on our terms rather than by seeing it through Western eyes. May many more discussions on China tailored to Nepali audiences follow, in and outside Clubhouse.  

Prime Minister KP Oli has tried nearly everything to hang on to the prime minister’s chair: Breaking an opposition party to knit together a governing majority, amending the citizenship law via an ordinance to appease the Madhesi leaders joining his government, anomalously expanding his Cabinet, and repeatedly trying to cajole other senior CPN-UML leaders with empty promises into backing his leadership. Most troubling of them all is that he reclaimed the prime minister’s chair by stepping on contentious constitutional grounds. Now the Supreme Court has started invalidating these questionable moves, one after another. That at least is one way of seeing things.  

On June 22 the Supreme Court ruled his two latest Cabinet expansions unconstitutional, as a result of which 20 ministers including three of his deputies have been relieved of their duties. The opposition parties have united against him. Ex-prime ministers believe PM Oli is ready to trade Nepal’s sovereignty to save his chair. Whatever the case, if the prime minister had to make way for someone else, he would have done it long ago. Oli is determined to hang on, any which way, until the next round of elections. 

When it appeared that domestic forces could not keep him in power, he sought India’s help, which duly came. India convinced the Thakur-Mahato faction of the Rastriya Samajbadi Party, Nepal (RSPN) to ditch the party’s Yadav-Bhattarai faction and join the Oli government. In return, Oli promised to work for the restoration of Nepal’s ‘Hindu nation’ status. Modi, meanwhile, is in no mood to listen to ex-Indian diplomats who have repeatedly asked him not to pick sides in Nepal. Instead, the BJP government has passed a law that withholds state pensions of ex-officials who criticize the government in public forums. 

As I have pointed out in this space before, there are many similarities between the governing styles of Oli and Modi. They are a natural match. Both are intolerant of criticism and choose to silence rather than heed their critics. They also believe in using the iron-fist of the executive to undermine other vital state organs. When other state officials cannot be coerced, they are co-opted. Therefore there are now many adherents of Modi’s Hindutwa agenda in the Indian Supreme Court. Despite his recent court reverses, perhaps Oli too believes he still has enough friends in the Nepali Supreme Court to ensure he remains at the helm during the next elections. 

Modi remains popular in India, with 66 percent approval according to a new survey. This is down from his above-80 percent support pre-covid. Yet if the latest approval holds, it will be enough for him to win another election. Perhaps Oli too knows that Nepalis are bitterly divided, and as badly as he has done in the government, the party he leads can still garner a plurality of votes in the next elections. After all, the voting public hardly favors other political figures with chequered records like Madhav Kumar Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, and Sher Bahadur Deuba.

And rest assured: Oli still has a few more rabbits to pull out from his bulging bag of tricks. Oli’s political obituary has been written many times in the past, and each time he has made a roaring comeback. He would love to prove his critics wrong one final time in the next elections. 

Foreign policy, we often hear, is an extension of domestic policy. In Nepal’s case, the opposite may be true. The course of Nepali domestic politics is largely determined from the outside, chiefly from New Delhi and increasingly Beijing and Washington DC. This may sound like an affront to proud Nepalis. But a few examples should suffice to show that is the case. 

KP Oli became the prime minister by cashing in on the anti-India sentiment that had peaked in the aftermath of constitution-promulgation in 2015. Conveniently, to shore up his image at home, he started inching close to China and subsequently rode to power on his ‘pro-China’ image. Now, in yet another volte-face, Oli is now trying to hang on with Delhi’s blessings. The most important event in recent Nepali political history—the decade-long Maoist insurgency—would not have been possible had the top Maoist leaders not found a safe-haven in India. And now the ex-Raw-wallas openly boast that it is they who booted out the Shah monarchy. 

It’s nigh impossible for a Nepali leader to continue his rule without India’s good wishes, as Oli is also finding out. What about China? Well, China too has started treating Nepal as its backyard where no Tibetan protests are permitted, where its ambassador routinely visits residencies of top leaders, and where the Chinese Communist Party conducts training on governance. Arguably, Nepal’s continued sovereignty owes a lot to the presence next-door of a strong China as India’s counterweight. 

The Americans too have historically predicated their support for Nepal on the landlocked country allowing it unfettered access to keep a close eye on China. Even King Mahendra had to agree to let the CIA run guerrilla camps in Mustang. In fact, the US has been using Nepal as a listening post for nearly 70 years now. 

It was in 1990 that the then US Secretary of State James Baker proposed the idea of a ‘third neighbor’ to Mongolia, which, just like Nepal, is precariously sandwiched between two big powers, Russia and China in this case. The idea was that America would help Mongolia manage its tricky geopolitical act between Russia and China following the end of the Cold War. Nepal has similarly been trying to reach out to the outside world beyond India and China, again starting with the Americans in late 1940s.

Recently, NATO, which was formed specifically to counter the Soviet military threat during the Cold War, said that China posed a ‘systemic challenge’ to the world order. This is a monumental development, indicating that the military coalition against China is growing. India is already a part of the Quad, a security dialogue with US, Japan and Australia. Just as worryingly, anti-China sentiments are growing by the day in India. 

But whatever the Americans or Westerners say, India would be loath to give up its traditional sphere of influence in South Asia. In other words, the geopolitical balancing act is going to get a whole lot trickier for Nepal. Geography is not destiny. But it is a huge constraint. Precisely for this reason the country’s politics, arguably, is determined less by domestic forces—which keep changing their allegiance between the ‘revanchist’ communists to the north, the ‘expansionist’ democrats to the south, and the ‘imperialists’ farther away—and more by outsiders.

The most interesting conversations in Nepal take place at the ubiquitous tea outlets. With their tongues set loose by caffeine, people candidly hold forth on life and love. They then invariably jump into politics. These days, fancier tea joints have opened up, but their essence remains the same: to stimulate conversations.  

After the pandemic forced the county and essentially the entire world indoors, these conversations have found a new home: the social media app Clubhouse. I am no expert on this new platform and I have only spent a little time on it. But even so, I am impressed.

I was mostly interested in political conversations, and mighty interesting ones were happening in Clubhouse. Yes, things heated up sometimes, for instance during the discussion on if federalism has served Nepal well. But I was pleasantly surprised by the level of knowledge of most participants, the vast majority of them in their 20s and 30s. They seemed to get the nitty-gritty of contemporary Nepali politics and had a good grasp of history too. (There were also a few idiots. But these days which public platform, online or off, is without them?)

Discussions ranged from dissecting the constitutionality of PM Oli’s recent moves to the prospect of Chure’s exploitation to links between our education system and development to being responsible citizens. These were no amateur conversations.

Healthy argumentation is the heart and soul of democracy. Even in India, the central government has clamped down on social media platforms and messaging apps for circulating anti-government news and views. There have been similar attempts in Nepal, but with much less success. Going by all that I have heard over Clubhouse over the past few weeks, there is no need to regulate it.

Social media platforms are often blamed—and rightly—for creating echo chambers. Increasingly, we see and hear what only we want, and filter out opposing voices. But that is only a part of the picture. Without social media outlets like Clubhouse to bond over and converse in these times of forced isolation, it would be hard to imagine the state of our mental health, which has already taken a pummeling during the pandemic.

The youngsters on Clubhouse were worried about their country. But they also sought innovative solutions. For instance, in one conversation, a speaker wanted coders to develop an app that would allow small businesses and farmers to directly sell to customers by bypassing middlemen. There were other rooms on coping with the mental health challenges from Covid-19.

Clubhouse is sparking the vital political and social debates that the pandemic had made impossible. It is also turning out to be the perfect platform for the articulation of youth voice.

Our major political parties have failed to inspire the young generation to embrace politics. The youths are fed up with the old jargon our leaders routinely spout. This tech-savvy generation wants results and thanks to new social media platforms like Clubhouse they are more articulate than ever before. And they don’t just talk. Many of them are also walking their online talk. 

As desirable as they were, the two recent mergers between political parties were both artificial constructs and duly broke down in time. The Nepal Communist Party had been formed after the merger between the CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Center). As was suspected then, and as time would bear it out, at the heart of the merger was a power-sharing agreement between KP Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal. The deal was to split the government’s five-year term and for each to run the country for two and half years. Again, as feared, the merger carried out without an ideological meeting of minds unraveled, dashing the ho­pe of a stable and prosperous Nepal. 

Another desirable unity happened between the Rastriya Janata Party Nepal (RJPN) and the Samajbadi Party, Nepal, further consolidating national politics. The two main Madhesi outfits completed a midnight merger to prevent PM Oli from ‘stealing’ some Samajbadi MPs to strengthen his hold on the government. The merger had supposedly forestalled the attempt of anti-Madhesi forces to dilute core Madhesi agendas and again proven that the country’s main identity-based forces could work together. That would have been wonderful. In reality, the two sets of leaders were bitterly divided over portfolio allocation right from the start. Oli successfully dangled the carrot of plump ministries before some of them, and they hungrily devoured the bait.   

In return for its support, PM Oli has vowed to fulfill some demands of the breakaway Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal (JSPN) faction, for instance, by releasing its jailed lawmaker Resham Chaudhary. The citizenship law was also amended to make it easier for children of Nepali mothers and foreign fathers to get citizenship, a longstanding Madhesi demand. Yet these gestures fall short of the substantive constitutional amendments mainstream Madhesi parties have sought over the years. 

Again, the Mahanta Thakur faction breaking away and joining the Oli government may be pure electoral calculation. Thakur & co believe aligning with Oli and getting to use state resources to back their electoral campaigns will result in favorable poll outcomes. Likewise, the faction under Upendra Yadav and Baburam Bhattarai will be confident of their ability to mount a potent challenge to the Oli-Thakur alliance in Tarai-Madhes. Their pitch? Why, Thakur sold out to an ‘anti-Madhesi’ Oli at India’s behest! 

A likely outcome of these alliances between national and regional parties will be national issues figuring prominently in future elections in Madhes and beyond, at all three levels. It could also reduce the influence of the more extreme kinds of identity politics. On the downside, without clear ideological demarcation between the choices on offer, elections could again lead to divided mandates and unstable governments. 

With at least another six months to go for the national elections, there is ample time for further political developments. But if the current alignments hold, working under India’s close watch, neither Oli nor Thakur will be able to call all the shots. Nepali political actors have been notorious for seeking India’s support to get to and stay in the government. But an unabashed south-tilt can also be a huge liability in the long run.

Even when Nepal-China relations were supposedly at their warmest following the UML-Maoist merger, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli understood the limits of his engagement with the northern neighbor. However much he admired Chinese President Xi Jinping, he had little to learn from the leader of the biggest single-party system in the world. They presided over two completely different polities, and Oli could never dream of amassing in Nepal even a fraction of Xi’s untrammeled powers in China. So, he looked south for inspiration. 

Narendra Modi had risen from the rock bottom of the Indian society to become perhaps its strongest elected leader ever. He had in the process displayed the extreme effectiveness of cold-blooded majoritarian politics. In budding sub-continental democracies, the secret to getting and staying in power, he had shown, was to consistently stoke the egos of their religious or ethnic majorities. A strong external enemy always came in handy as well. For Modi, it has always been Pakistan; for blockade-time Oli, India was the perfect foil against which to accentuate his nationalist credentials. 

Oli keenly watched Modi subvert state institutions and accrue power for the PMO, and followed suit. Meanwhile, in Nepal, the Chinese were getting unhappy with the Nepali prime minister who was stalling on BRI projects and cozying up to the yanks. As his distance with Beijing increased, and he found himself cornered by the pro-China faction in his own party, Oli realized only India could now salvage his political career and started sending overtures to New Delhi. 

To prove his earnestness, the supposedly communist head of government visited temples and toyed with the idea of a greater political alliance with the royalists. The goal was also to consolidate the Hindu vote bank. There was another uncanny similarity between the Indian and Nepali leaders. Both sought to downplay the Covid-19 pandemic and to peddle bogus cures. Similar political calculations drove Oli and Modi.

If the Covid-19 was not a big deal, the Indian prime minister could train his focus on winning West Bengal, the big price that had eluded the BJP. Oli, too, after assuring his brethren that corona could be cured by no more than guava leaf-gargle, set about preserving his chair by playing fast and loose with the constitution. 

The BJP leadership started paying heed as there seemed to be no other way of doing away with the ‘pro-China’ communist government. Oli also offered them a possibility, if somewhat remote, of the restoration of the Hindu state. But there was little it could do about it so long as the communist unity remained intact. Oli offered it a convenient backdoor. 

Thank god Nepal is not India where Modi has successfully cowed civil society and silenced mainstream media. The sheer diversity of the Nepali society protects against that as does, paradoxically, the geopolitical rivalry here between India and China: If one set of political and social actors are close to India, another set is invariably closer to China. Nor is Hinduism as big a binding force in Nepal as it is in India. 

Modi received an unprecedented mandate to unify India and set it on the path of sustained economic development. As did Oli. Both wasted their chance. In Nepal, the legitimacy of the new constitution is under question. Constitutional organs have been hollowed out. The bar of morality in politics has been set so low that even goondas can canter through. Again, as with Modi’s India, so with Oli’s Nepal. 

A vaccine is a vaccine. If it is approved by the World Health Organization, it is good enough. But the government appears reluctant to import more jabs from China, whose ‘Vero Cell’ vaccine recently received the WHO’s emergency use approval. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is wary of Chinese vaccines as his government has been trying to mend its ties with New Delhi. There is no sign that India does not want Nepal to import Chinese jabs—when India is incapable of meeting its own vaccine needs, let alone export them to Nepal. 

In fact, the civil society in India itself supports vaccine-import from China, India’s next-door neighbor that has largely controlled the Covid-19 contagion. But the Indian government is reluctant. It has allowed individual states to buy vaccines from abroad, but none of the states seems interested in importing Chinese vaccines. New Delhi has clearly instructed them to bypass China. Instead, the states have placed orders for American vaccines that need to be stored at extremely low temperatures, which might not be practical in the mostly hot-weathered India. 

That is not the whole story though. Beijing too has resisted from helping New Delhi with vaccines following their long-standing border disputes and India’s ban on Chinese apps. But that is a problem for India and China to sort out. This cannot be a reason for Nepal to abjure Chinese vaccines. The Oli government seems to have calculated that it would earn some brownie points with New Delhi by bypassing China. This is at best a naïve and at worst a criminal calculation. 

Surely, PM Oli, the person who valiantly stood against Indian bullying during the 2015-16 blockade, is more than capable of striking a new government-to-government vaccine deal with the Chinese government. China has also repeatedly showed its interest to supply vaccines and oxygen cylinders and concentrators to Nepal. Yet Nepal has shown little interest, even though people are dying for the want of oxygen and paucity of vaccines. The private sector’s limited attempts to directly buy vaccines from Chinese companies won’t be enough to meet Nepal’s needs.

Nepali political leaders have over the years tried to prolong their tenure in government by appeasing either India or China. They also frequently switch camps as and when it suits them. The assumption this time is that the Oli government’s ‘gesture of goodwill’ won’t go unnoticed in New Delhi. It is hard to believe that a foreign power will trust the government of a country that bargains with the lives of its own citizens. 

The best way KP Oli can earn the trust of his countrymen will be by getting them enough vaccines at the earliest. That will also boost his international standing. People have queued for hours for a jab of Vero Cell. Most of the unvaccinated Nepalis will be more than happy to get the same, or even Sputnik V. What is the government waiting for?