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One of the many unintended consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic is the rekindling of people’s faith in religion. It is no surprise though, as we have witnessed resurgence of religions during times of uncertainty throughout history. Moreover, modernity has not lessened the salience of religion. In fact, it has heightened it. Around the world, more and more people are leaving their ancestral lands and heading to cities in search of better opportunities. In doing so, they leave behind their joint families and strong social ties. Even as they are bereft of their social support, the consumerist and individualistic urban lifestyles heighten their sense of alienation. In these hard times, they can find great solace in invoking god. Yet, the inexorable march of urbanization does not stop. 

Officially, as of 2018, around 80 percent of Nepal’s population was rural, down from nearly 97 percent in 1960. The actual percentage of urban population in Nepal could be even higher when considering the effects of seasonal migration. In India, over 30 percent of its citizens now live in cities. In China, around 60 percent do. This has not been missed by politicians, who would like to cash in on this often alienating experience of modernization and urbanization. 

The BJP in India (80 percent Hindu) has openly and successfully pandered to its fast-urbanizing Hindu population. Political parties in Nepal (over 80 percent Hindu) also can’t ignore their Hindu vote bank. The pro-Hindu RPP Nepal emerged as the fourth biggest party from the second Constituent Assembly elections in 2013, with its greatest support reported in the Kathmandu Valley. Had Kamal Thapa not so badly compromised on his Hindu agenda when in power, a big section of the population could still be backing him. Top leaders of the NCP and the NC know this. 

Donald Trump, a serial philanderer and liar, was elected and sworn in by the Bible in 2016. He understands the continued importance of being pictured as a pious Christian once a while. From India to Indonesia, Brazil to Burma, religious politics are making a comeback. Nepal is now a constitutionally ‘secular’ state. But as the country was declared secular almost overnight, with little debate about what it entailed, most Nepalis still don’t know what to make of it. They also see how the ‘irreligious’ communist government, the strongest democratic government Nepal has ever had, is failing the country. 

Because of this, it may also be the perfect time for the revival of religious politics. For whenever there is a big natural disaster, the number of faithful increases. Apparently, most of the devout, whatever their religion, believe these natural phenomena are the result of people abandoning their faith—and not of god abandoning them. There have been countless tales of how people’s loss of fear in gods had contributed to the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. Now, many well-educated Nepalis are visiting temples to ward off Covid-19. 

These are the same folks who never tire of saying that if there is a referendum on religion, Nepal would be declared a Hindu state by a landslide. Even Karl Marx (‘Religion is the opium of the masses’) acknowledged how religion provided succor to those going through hard times. 

People want to belong and for their lives to be meaningful. But urbanization and modernization are pushing them into a seemingly soulless, anonymous existence. The Covid-19 crisis is exacerbating this trend. Expect religious politics to make a roaring comeback in its aftermath. 

“Only the fear or hatred of an external enemy—and, thus, the continuance or fabrication of inter-state anarchy—could give a government adequate authority in the eyes of the requisite individuals to induce them to willingly submit to its power,” writes Michael C. Evans. The professor of political science at Georgia State University is summing up a central tenet in the political philosophy of James Madison, the fourth American president and the ‘father’ of its constitution. A hardcore republican like Madison who played a vital role in the ouster of the British occupying forces from the US was also among the first political theorists on democratic nation-states. 

The democratic actors of republican Nepal can no more ascribe every evil in the country to autocratic monarchs. When their failure as responsible democratic actors becomes impossible to hide, they thus like to invoke the evil designs of foreign forces—or a foreign force, namely India—to cover up their mistake. As Madison argued, summoning an external enemy may be necessary for all governments to get people to ‘willingly submit to their power’. It is indispensable if such a power is being blatantly abused and public criticism against the government is growing.  

Nepali communists have been experts at raising the specter of external enemies, mostly to cut their opponents down to size. In the middle of the Maoist insurgency in 2003, party chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ urged his rank and file to dig up trenches to prepare for a war against “an expansionist India and an imperialist US”. What Dahal wanted to achieve through this bizarre campaign was to silence Baburam Bhattarai, his most vocal ‘pro-India’ critic in the party. In 2009, Dahal, following his forced resignation over the botched sacking of army chief, again tried to play up his nationalist credentials by demonizing India and its henchmen in Nepal.  

Much before that, in 1998, Bamdev Gautam divided the CPN-UML against the party’s decision to endorse the ‘anti-national’ Mahakali treaty with India. Again, Gautam, never a patient man, was itching to take over UML leadership, and saw the aftermath of the Mahakali treaty as the perfect time to bring dislodge general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal. 

Now, the ruling Nepal Communist Party is again on the verge of a breakdown. Prime Minister KP Oli, having failed to govern and feeling besieged in his own party, has been going at India hammer and tongs. He has accused other senior NCP leaders of plotting with India to bring down his government. Without a shred of historical or even anecdotal evidence, he claims Lord Ram was born in Nepal and not India. His opponents in the party are in a spot of bother. If they punish Oli for his incompetence, they will forever have to live with the taint of capitulating before India, a capital offense in Nepali communist movement. 

But for the first time in the democratic history of Nepal, a ruling party is being chastised, not for cozying up to the traditional bully in India but to the increasingly meddlesome Chinese. As China’s engagement with Nepal rises, there is a possibility of creation of a powerful and vocal anti-China camp. Yet as of now, Oli can live with it. In Madison’s formulation, “only the fear or hatred of an external enemy”, real or fabricated, will rally people behind it. Perhaps no other head of government in Nepal has perfected this difficult art of using an external actor to his advantage more than KP Sharma Oli. His communist comrades can only quietly marvel.  

I was recently talking to someone who has worked closely with Prime Minister KP Oli for a long time. In the course of our conversation, I asked him if he had any idea why the prime minister had randomly brought up Lord Ram’s nationality. My contact laughed out loud. “Oli is not someone who listens to anyone, you see, not even his advisors,” he began. “He is also a bit of a gambler and has this tendency to throw out certain ideas in public to gauge their impact.”

So Oli knew what he was talking about? “Certainly,” he replied. Immediately after he had claimed Lord Ram for Nepal, Oli had asked his advisors, with a smiley face, if he had gone overboard. So, basically, Oli wanted to throw out the idea of Ram’s Nepali birth and see how New Delhi would react. 

But the prime minister couldn’t have cooked up something like that out of the blue, could he? “He reads a lot,” my contact replied, suspecting Oli had read about the possibility of Ram being born in Nepal. “Not just in this case. Whenever he pitches an interesting but unsubstantiated idea, nine times out of 10, he would have read about it somewhere.” And that was all the anti-India ammunition he needed at the moment. 

PM Oli publicly aired the ‘Ram is Nepali’ idea because he was getting increasingly irritated with the Indian establishment and its media outlets. The latest Indian media reports suggesting he was amorously involved with the Chinese envoy was the tippling point. If the Indians could make such baseless, humiliating claims about him, why couldn’t he pull one over on them? 

Yet Oli is far too astute a politician not to recognize the implication of such brazen remarks. Perhaps no other senior Nepali politician understands New Delhi and its bureaucracy better than him. He knew the BJP-wallas, for whom Lord Ram might well be their ‘official god’, would not take his claim lightly. 

His increasingly bolder anti-India remarks suggest Oli is not looking for reconciliation. If he still believed he had a realistic chance of prolonging his political career beyond the term of the current government, he would not have broken all channels with India. Oli’s health is failing. The political equations in the NCP are not in his favor. Near the end of his political career, he wants to buttress his image of a true nationalist leader who was not afraid to see eye to eye with the Indians. 

Oli could also have calculated that precisely because there is no historical basis to establish Lord Ram’s birthplace, he might just claim him for Nepal. Historical artifacts could later be ‘unearthed’ from the ground. If nothing else, people of Thori will remember Oli for placing a tiny village near Birgunj on the Hindu pilgrimage map. On the other hand, if an ancient bit of sculpture, stone, house, horseshoe—anything at all—is later excavated and if that bit could be even remotely linked to Ram, why, KP Oli’s exalted place in Nepali nationalist narrative that starts with King Prithvi Narayan Shah is guaranteed.

Just like China has its ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ to govern domestic politics, the country has its own way of doing foreign policy. The rest of the world seems to move by one set of rules, and China by another. Every other major power right now is devoted to battling the Covid-19 crisis. China too has given meticulous attention to the virus. Yet it has also espied the “right time” to expand its footprints abroad.

The country is ultra-active in Covid-battered Nepal as well. Chinese ambassador Hou Yanqi has been doing the rounds of the abodes of top Nepal Communist Party leaders, urging them not to ‘destabilize’ the Oli government. Even though the Chinese are unhappy with the Nepali prime minister’s backing of the MCC compact, they seem to have calculated that Oli is still the man to best secure their interests this side of the Tibetan plateau. Having come to this conclusion, ambassador Hou has thrown diplomatic decorum to the wind in her open lobbying for Oli’s continuity. 

The chief claimant to Oli’s PM throne, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, has understandably refused to meet her. Having spent so much of his political capital in the past few years proving his loyalty to Beijing, he does not want to lose the hard-earn trust. Therefore, only a month and a half ago, he had listened to Hou and let Oli be. But Dahal is in no mood to make such concessions again. But nor can he defy Hou.

Dahal realizes that saying ‘no’ to the Chinese could undo all his efforts to cultivate Beijing. Dahal also understands that as much as New Delhi mistrusts Oli, it does not trust Dahal any more. Dahal was the one who broke the unstated decorum of the Nepali prime minister making New Delhi his first port of call and flew to China instead. The ex-Maoist boss was also the one who tried to sack a sitting Nepal Army chief, despite clear warnings from the south not to engage in such adventurism. 

Above anything else, the recent activism of the Chinese ambassador, her easy access to top leaders, her lack of concern about her conduct, even Dahal’s refusal to see her—all show the enormous power China wields over the NCP. Yet China’s preference for one NCP leader above everyone else is harder to understand. The only way to make sense of it is to assume Oli has told Hou that should other NCP leaders try to take away premiership from him, he would not hesitate to divide the party, China’s most trusted institution in Nepal. In other words, Oli subtly asked her to do the lobbying for his continuity. 

But why blame the Chinese envoy when it is our own leaders who are throwing their doors open for her, any time, any day? And weren’t previous Indian envoys in Nepal—and the bunch of Indian spooks that has now descended in Kathmandu to checkmate Hou—doing the same? Moreover, the misogynistic reporting of sections of the Indian media that shamelessly accused Hou of practicing ‘honey trap’ diplomacy has not gone down well here, and will further dent India’s image.

In the end, we are going about this the wrong way. Were our leaders more mindful of national interests and abided by the diplomatic code of conduct, the question of conduct of foreign envoys and other representatives here could be largely irrelevant.

‘Neutrality’, ‘nonalignment’, ‘amity with all, enmity with none’—what is there not to like about the Oli government’s key foreign policy tenets? But they mean little. Historically, while Nepal has professed strict nonalignment, it has repeatedly tilted between India and China. India, one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, acted as all but a formal Soviet ally until the collapse of the USSR. China too openly flirted with the Soviets before shifting its allegiance to the US in early 1970s. Now, on the face of a hostile America, China-Russia rapprochement is again reaching new heights. 

At present Nepal’s foreign policy exhibits a clear China tilt, as evidenced by its backing of the latest Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, and the CCP’s lockdown-time political training of its ruling party leaders. Indian Army chief M.M. Naravane was wrong to infer that Nepal took up Kalapani at China’s behest. But in the Indian eyes he only said what seemed most logical in light of the India-China border tensions. 

Talking to APEX, both Indian and Chinese strategic thinkers said their countries could ask Nepal to clarify its allegiance in the event of an India-China war. While India would seek Nepal’s backing based on the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, China is likely to invoke Nepal’s BRI membership to do so. Again, the easy way out for Nepal would be to profess its continued neutrality, come what may. But as tensions mount that fiction will get progressively harder to maintain.

There is zero trust in KP Oli in New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s henchmen who deal with Nepal have ruled out meaningful talks so long as Oli is in power. The beleaguered Nepali prime minister may see his labeling as ‘pro-China’ cruel just when the Chinese are losing trust in him over his backing of theMCC compact, which Beijing wants Nepal to ditch. 

If Oli remains in power, India will continue to label him pro-China and refuse to talk. As the status quo in Kalapani suits it just fine, India will have no incentive to discuss border dispute. Luckily for New Delhi, Oli, in a last-ditch effort to save his chair, seems minded to throw his country into another political turmoil. If he splits the ruling party, India could once again get to shape the new government in Kathmandu to its liking, much to Beijing’s chagrin. This is why China is more amenable to the option of Oli quietly handing over power to someone else in the NCP. More likely, Oli will put up a dogged fight and use every trick in the book to hang on.

The Covid-19 crisis and escalating India-China tensions will have all kinds of unforeseeable consequences for Nepal. If India and China start firing on one another, the 40,000 Nepali or Nepali-origin Gurkha soldiers will be on the frontline. When they return to the country in body bags, the pressure to end Gurkha recruitment will grow, to further detriment of India-Nepal ties. Perhaps the government considers an unstated alignment with a stronger power a safer bet. But if India ‘loses’ the war, dealing with the wounded elephant would be a herculean challenge as well. 

Right now, Nepal is relatively autonomous to profess its neutrality and nonalignment. Tomorrow, the question of its autonomous status may be rendered moot if neither India nor China trusts the Nepali leadership to secure its interests.

Going through the Indian press over the past few weeks, it would appear Nepali Prime Minister KP Oli has no bigger friend than Xi Jinping and no bigger foe than Narendra Modi. But it is Modi that Oli looks up to. The similarities between them are uncanny. Both committed themselves to politics early, with seemingly little regard for personal life; and now, both are without progeny. Both like to project themselves as self-assured, not reliant on others for decisions big and small, which goes naturally with their illiberal impulses. Both have aced majoritarian politics, largely by vilifying the minorities and appealing to the majority’s baser instincts. 

Xi presides over a top-down one-party system that offers few if any useful lessons for Nepali or Indian politicians, who must, perforce, heed public opinion. But there are ‘democratic’ ways to persuade people. Oli and Modi are masters at whipping up nationalism by demonizing a particular pesky neighbor and using the resulting anger to cement their hold on power. Oli returned as prime minister with an overwhelming majority on the back of his dogged stand against India during the 2015-16 blockade. Modi, for his part, rode home to victory in the 2019 general elections on Pakistan-bound bombers. 

Both seem adept at cartographic mischief as well. At the end of 2019, with the Indian economy growing at its slowest in six years, Modi changed the national charter to claim all of Jammu & Kashmir (which is partly responsible for the ongoing India-China tensions). This year, after an uproar in Nepal over Indian defense minister’s inauguration of a road in Lipulekh, Oli too amended the constitution to expand the Nepali map. Separately, pre-pandemic, another way the two prime ministers tried to resurrect their flagging domestic images was by going on self-promoting foreign trips. 

Oli, like Modi, is aware that voters are emotional beings. They might vilify Oli for his failure to control corona, to stop corruption, and to lead the country towards prosperity. Yet Oli knows the anti-India nationalism card, played at the right time, will wash most of his sins away: Which upstanding Nepali will oppose measures to stop the big brother’s land grabs in Nepal?

Modi has a similar modus operandi. Before the last general elections, he bombed Pakistan. On the eve of the next one, he might once again successfully project himself as a stout defender of Indian territories—perhaps against China this time. Again, thanks largely to his hard line on Pakistan, in the latest CVoter’s State of the Nation survey, Modi enjoys 65 percent personal approval, with nearly 60 percent people reporting satisfaction with his government. 

But unlike Modi, Oli is losing grip on his own party. His efforts to project himself as China’s most trusted man in Nepal, and hence high in the estimation of the nationalist Nepalis, are now being hijacked by Pushpa Kamal Dahal. To prove his loyalty, the former Maoist supremo has emerged as the most vocal critic of the American MCC compact, even as Oli seems to be in its support, much to Chinese consternation. 

Due to the many pressures he faces at home, it will be hard for Oli to budge on the new map. Modi too will hold fast on to the changed J&K map. All the more strange that there is no love lost between them.

How has Nepal preserved its independence for over 250 years despite its precarious geopolitical positioning? Multiple factors may be at play, their importance ranked in line with your political persuasion and understanding of international relations. Traditionally, one such factor was the ability of Nepali rulers to maintain a delicate balance between India and China. Whenever Nepal felt threatened by India (or by British India), it sought Chinese support to protect its sovereignty, and vice versa. When, at the end of the 1940s, Kathmandu felt this balance was proving untenable, it looked to Western powers for help.

In this process, after the British (1816), in 1947 the US became only the second country to establish diplomatic relations with Nepal, followed by France (1949) and the Russian federation (1956). The US was also the second country to recognize Nepal as a sovereign entity, again after the British. The latter-day Rana rulers realized their rule in Nepal could be prolonged only with a third-country support. It was also the only way to ensure Nepal’s continued independence between India and China, both of which sought to consolidate their territories around the time of Indian independence in 1947.

Rulers of a country precariously sandwiched, not just between two growing powers but between two civilizations, have to, perforce, be flexible in their foreign dealings. Fixed notions and ideologies are of little use for Nepali rulers who need to be perpetually on their toes. Yet we now have a communist government that exhibits a clear bias in favor of its ideological cousin to the north. 

Perhaps no other government in Nepal’s democratic history has as keenly felt the need to diversify away from India. And rightly so. Overreliance on one power is fraught with danger. This applies as much to our relations with India as with China. The 2015-16 blockade created an enormous mass in favor of closer ties with China to balance India. KP Oli-led communist coalition rode to power by cashing on this optics. 

Yet the hard logic of geography—and the cultural and socio-economic similarities it entails—inextricably twines the future of Nepal and India, for better or worse. The goal should thus be to reduce our overreliance on India rather than trying to search for its alternative as our ‘special’ partner. 

Our government issues a statement in favor of China’s crackdown on Hong Kong; our foreign minister is busy rebutting ‘hoaxes’ around the BRI in hit tweets. But when was the last time Nepal issued a statement that was even remotely pro-India? Better, why can’t we be neutral? 

That is not the only problem. Most of the NCP leaders seem to believe that Nepal can do without all other powers bar China. Take the current ruckus over the MCC compact. I have myself been highly skeptical of the MCC process and its murky relations to the ‘military’ Indo-Pacific Strategy. As much as I hesitate to unconditionally support the compact, I am in its favor as good relations with the US are in Nepal’s interest. This is also because the compact is vague enough to be interpreted in our favor.

Ideology cannot come in the way of national interest. India and China are on the brink of an all-out war. What if we are asked to take sides by India (because of the Gurkha regiments) or by China (Oli government’s unconditional backer)? Who will we then ask to get us out of this impossible predicament? Who are our friends besides our two neighbors whose voice counts on the international stage? 

Our future lies not in our confinement within Indian or Chinese spheres but in embodying the spirit of diversification that the Oli government claims—unjustifiably till date—as its central foreign policy plank. 

There is hardly a foreign policy wonk in either Nepal or India who is not publicly in favor of dialogue to resolve the outstanding border dispute. Yet it is also hard to see what the two sides will discuss—much less resolve—if they talk now. The mutual distrust is far too great. The risk is that they will talk more as their country’s aggrieved representatives than as cool-headed negotiators, further complicating matters. 

As Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali has said, Nepal’s bottom-line is the pullout of Indian troops from Kalapani. But at a time of escalating border tensions with China, the Indians will not be ready to withdraw from Kalapani, the strategic outpost that helps them keep a close eye on the PLA garrison in Taklakot. In that case, what other alternative will Nepal offer to India? 

The last thing PM KP Oli—widely criticized for his bungling of the Covid-19 response, and cornered in his own party—wants, is to be seen as compromising on national sovereignty with India. The Nepali blood still aboil, anything short of getting India to fully agree to the new map will be viewed as treason back home. On the other hand, if he can hold his ground against the big brother, Oli will place himself well going into the ruling party’s impending general convention and, after that, the next round of national elections. 

Oli, who returned to power on the back of his resolute stand against the Indian blockade, has no other political card up his sleeve. Even if his government badly botches the Covid-19 response, even if it appears to be profiting from people’s misery, even if it has dashed most public expectations, Oli reckons people will still forgive him if he refuses to blink against India. Traditionally, a strong anti-India posturing has been a foolproof path to power, more so in times of Nepal-India hostilities. 

The more uncompromising the Nepali negotiating team appears on Kalapani, the greater will be the belief among its Indian counterpart that Oli really has sold his soul to China. The Nepali prime minister has not helped his cause with the Indians by belittling India’s national emblem and blaming it for Nepal’s corona crisis. Nepal’s unconditional support for recent China’s actions in Hong Kong will also have been noted. 

If the two sides get talking, the Indians could propose a complete rewriting of bilateral ties—this time with the sole intent of securing India’s security interests. With an end of the ‘special relations’, India won’t be obliged to make any concessions to Nepal. But if they really propose to, say, regulate the open border or cancel visa-free access to Nepali citizens, will the Nepali side be able to accept the proposals? I am unaware of any kind of homework in Nepal on how the country will deal with this kind of monumental change in its foreign policy. 

Nepal-India relations are on the verge of derailment, and it won’t be easy to bring them back on track. One hope could be that, special relations or not, the ever-present threat of China usurping India’s strategic space in the region will make India amenable to compromise, if only partially, in Nepal’s favor. 

But that is a risky bet. China has repeatedly compromised Nepali interests at the altar of its business ties with India. It could do so again. What if India, while it engages Nepal, is simultaneously negotiating with China on Kalapani? PM Oli may think Nepal has China’s back on the region. Verbal assurances aside, where is hard proof?