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As most of Nepal’s recent foreign policy documents suggest, it’s in the country’s interest to diversify its relations and reap economic benefits from friends near and far. History has time and again shown that over-reliance on any of its two giant neighbors is fraught with danger. This is why Nepal in the late 1940s started reaching out to the US and European states. As a country precariously placed between two regional behemoths, it is a wise course. In this light, the recent announcement that Nepal was being ‘promoted’ from a ‘dialogue partner’ to an ‘observer’ in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—the Eurasian grouping with now 10 members including Russia, China, India and Pakistan—is something to be celebrated. 

Interestingly, Nepal expressed its interest in the organization way back in 2001 when Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala wanted to explore the import of petroleum products from Central Asia via China. This is not as dreamy as it sounds. Nepal and China are already discussing a cross-border electricity grid. A cross-border railway has also long been talked about. So why not a cross-border pipeline to bring Central Asian oil and gas? Alas, the geopolitical chessboard is seldom as simple to figure out. The SCO is basically a Russia-China construct to challenge the supremacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the post-World War II grouping of Western countries. In other words, the organization has a huge strategic component. 

If so, should Nepal embrace one strategic grouping, the SCO, while it shuns another in the form of the American Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS)? With no official statement coming from the government, it is unclear what exactly we want to achieve through a bigger SCO role. Nepal, the current SAARC head, has been unable to play a meaningful role in bringing the moribund organization back to life. Shouldn’t the SAARC be higher on Nepal’s priority than the SCO? The question is not about the rightness or wrongness of joining the SCO. It is rather that those lobbying for Nepal’s greater participation in it haven’t thought it worthwhile to explain their logic. Perhaps they too don’t have a clue.   

Are you a Nepali passport holder? Prepare then to be greeted by suspicious looks and a salvo of queries, whether you are traveling to Amsterdam, Bangkok or Cairo. Nepalis have become notorious among airport authorities the world over for overstaying their visa or even disappearing into thin air. Probe a little and you will be told that Nepalis are also ‘uncouth’ and ‘rude’. It is thus only natural that other countries should try to avoid them. The Nepali passport is unvalued for the same reason. According to the latest Henley Passport Index, the Nepali passport is the seventh worst in the world—even behind the passport of the communist dictatorship of North Korea. While Nepalis are allowed visa-free entry into 38 countries, the North Koreans are welcomed into 40. 

That Nepalis are considered ‘escape-prone’ and ‘mannerless’ in turn has a lot to do with the wretched state of their homeland. Its national politics is in shambles: the country has not had a government that has served out its term in the past 32 years of democracy. The economy is, likewise, in tatters, with the finance minister openly working for vested interests and without a clue about running the country’s financial system. Tourism infrastructure and facilities are shoddy. The influence of black-money ever on the rise. Very few good jobs are being created, and even when they are, the pay and perks tend to be rather poor. Most of its youngsters thus want to escape the country the first chance they get.  

Another reason for Nepal’s continued slide in the passport index is its poor handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Other countries are not assured that those tested in Nepal are virus-free. That the country should find itself ranked alongside the likes of war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan again says much about how the rest of the world sees Nepal. The old bunch of corrupt and immoral leaders are taking the country down with them. Before they fully succeed, it is time to boot them out of office in the upcoming elections. A thorough clean-up of the old, stinking stable could for once attract the right kind of international attention.

Transitional justice is a tricky balancing act between, on the one hand, upholding universal human-rights norms and ensuring justice to conflict victims and, on the other, respecting the legitimacy of a political settlement to a conflict. Sixteen years after the guns in Nepal fell silent following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2006, the Nepali state is still struggling to maintain the delicate balance. The government has just tabled a bill to amend the transitional justice law; make it more ‘victim-centric’ and in keeping with ‘international norms’. The amendment underlines the need for recognition of injustice meted out to conflict victims. Unlike the earlier law, it also bars amnesty in cases of grave human rights violations. The government argues that the amendments are adequate and just. 

But rights activists and conflict victims are not buying it, for various reasons. For instance, although the amendment penalizes killing, rape and torture, it does not specify that such cases can be retrospectively pursued. (The relevant penal code came into effect only in 2018.) New provisions also allow the government to recommend light punishment if the perpetrators confess to their crimes. Moreover, there will be no provision of challenging the court verdict. In other words, the new amendment is no more than a fig leaf for Nepal to cover its transitional justice blunders. 

It was clear from the start that no transitional justice law would be universally acceptable to the two sides to the conflict as well as to the conflict victims. The goal was always to find a middle-ground where neither grave rights violations from conflict-time were excused nor did the victims feel left in the lurch. The proposed amendment bill could have been that middle-ground had there been adequate buy-in of conflict victims. It wasn’t meant to be. 

The National Human Rights Commission has already made public its dissatisfaction with the amendment bill. Victims want more tweaks in it. Yet there is no political will to fairly pursue all war-time cases. The cumbersome transitional justice process will drag on.

The anniversary of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s year in office came hot on the heels of the storming of Presidential and Prime Ministerial residences in Colombo. Following the July 8 incident in Sri Lanka, Nepalis are debating if something similar could happen here. It certainly can. Had King Gyanendra not stepped down in the nick of time during the 2006 anti-monarchy protests, the royal palace too could have been overrun. While a repeat in Nepal of the Sri Lankan crisis is unlikely in the near future, it cannot be ruled out in the longer term. This is because in the past one year PM Deuba has done little to improve people’s perennially low opinion of their government. 

Deuba’s biggest achievement was giving Nepal’s grassroots democracy a new lease of life by successfully holding the May 13 local elections. Besides that it is hard to think of Debua’s any other achievement. Economic indicators have steadily gotten worse. The pandemic’s aftereffects and the ongoing war in Ukraine have weighed heavy on Nepal. Yet the government has also failed to bring comfort to the people in these troubled times. Instead, his (now ousted) finance minister did everything in his power to wreck the already troubled economy by pandering to vested interests.

Deuba liked to bemoan Oli’s authoritarian tendencies but he too has preferred to rule by diktat and concentrate power in Singhadurbar. Or he would have detached vital state organs like the the Department of Revenue Investigation and National Vigilance Center from the PMO. The transitional justice has continued to stagnate under his watch. Nepal’s foreign partners are more suspicious of Kathmandu than ever before. Meanwhile, the prime minister sounds out of sorts as he finds himself hemmed in both in and outside his party.

There was some hope that in these fading days of his political career, the five-time prime minister would try to cement his legacy as a statesman. But he has further tarnished his political legacy. Unlike in Sri Lanka, his offices may not be stormed. Yet the signs of public disillusionment against his government are there for everyone to see.