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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.