All kinds of questions are being asked about Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli’s upcoming trip to India (April 6-8), in what will be his first foreign visit after assuming office. If he is determined to maintain a balance between India and China, as he has consistently done in recent times, why is he blindly following the ritual of a Nepali prime min­ister always making New Delhi his first foreign stop? Why couldn’t he make a strong statement by, for instance, going to China first? Is he afraid of India? Or does it indicate that mending frayed ties with New Delhi will be his top foreign policy priority? “I have a feeling that Oli’s India trip is a bluff,” says Khadga KC, head of the Tribhuvan University’s Masters in Interna­tional Relations and Diplomacy (MIRD) program. “I think PM Oli wants to gain India’s confidence to the extent that he can then freely pursue his pet agenda—enhancing Nepal’s relations with China.”

 

KC makes an interesting suggestion. “The best-case sce­nario would be for the prime minister to first fly to New Delhi and from there directly go to Beijing,” he says. “In fact, if you follow interna­tional relations, you will see that foreign leaders routinely make such back-to-back visits to two rival countries to show that these leaders value both equally.” Such smart diplo­macy, KC reckons, would place PM Oli in good stead with Nepal’s two neighbors, whether or not he is bluffing India right now.

 

Indra Adhikari, deputy executive director at the Institute of Foreign Affairs, has a slightly different reading. “Whether we like it or not, the depth of relations between Nepal and India is incomparable to Nepal’s relations with any other country, including China,” she says. “I think by making New Delhi his first foreign stop, the prime minister is acknowledging this indubitable fact and doing what is in the national interest.”

 

That is how it should be, says Adhikari, as “India’s per­ception towards Nepal has also changed markedly since the time of the blockade.” There is no need to provoke India unnecessarily, she adds, when we have repeatedly paid the high costs of doing so.

 

Those close to Prime Minister Oli say the visit will focus on economic issues and steer well clear of any contentious polit­ical ones, as this is a ‘confidence-building’ trip. We may have to wait for PM Oli’s subsequent visit to Beijing, whenever that happens, to find out who is bluffing whom.