For Nepalese PM, gains of successful India visit dissipate on protests by opposition parties, SC ruling on Citizen Law

Pushpa Kamal Dahal

Nepalese Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal or 'Prachanda,’ walked into a storm of protests in Kathmandu after his ‘outstandingly successful’ visit to Delhi, as a united opposition in Nepal called his four-day trip a total "sell out" to India.

The opposition parties disrupted parliamentary proceedings on Sunday and continued their protest the next day, demanding that the Prime Minister convene a special session to tell the House about his visit.
In another setback for Prachanda on Monday, the Supreme Court, through an interim stay order, stopped the new Citizen Law from being implemented.

The law passed on the eve of the Prime Minister’s departure to India would have allowed children born to Nepalese women married to non-Nepalese men to be citizens of the country.

Many see the new law signed by President Ram Chandra Poudel as a decision to make India happy since it would mostly benefit people in the Terai region who have Indian origins.

Much significance was attached to Prachanda’s visit to India from May 31 to June 3.

Agreements 

It was seen in both capitals as an opportunity to put bilateral relations back on track since they had been strained in recent years.

The two sides succeeded in signing a number of agreements during his visit. These ranged from trade and investment to transit and connectivity, hydropower development, power trade, irrigation, agriculture, the expansion of petroleum pipelines, and the construction of integrated check posts.

Besides, there were agreements on air entry routes, railways, bridges, and transmission lines.

During their discussions, Modi and Prachanda also agreed to take up the pending and contentious land boundary issues like Kalapani, Limpiyadhura, and Lipulekh urgently.

The leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) and a former prime minister of Nepal, K P Sharma Oli, had included the three disputed areas as part of Nepalese territory in a new map and got it passed in parliament in 2021.

The incident evoked strong protests from India, and Oli claimed he was forced to step down as prime minister and lost the support of his coalition partners because he included those areas in the map of Nepal—implying an Indian hand in his ouster.

Oli is now the leader of the opposition in parliament and is one of the most prominent pro-China leaders in Nepal.

The protests that greeted Prachanda on his return from India were largely engineered by him.

Course correction

Prachanda, the main leader of the 10-year-long Maoist insurgency in the country before he decided to join the mainstream and became prime minister in 2008, was once seen in India as a pro-Chinese leader of Nepal.
To burnish his anti-India stand, he chose to visit Beijing first and not Delhi, as most newly-elected leaders in Kathmandu do, when he became prime minister.

He followed it up by sacking the army chief of Nepal. But with India’s backing, the army chief managed to stall his dismissal. Instead, Prachanda lost his support in parliament and had to step down as prime minister in 2009.

In the subsequent years, he was forced to do some introspection and came to the conclusion that he could not play a prominent political role in Nepal by alienating India.

The fact that his visit to India was his first foreign visit since he became Nepal’s prime minister in December and not to China shows Prachanda had made a course correction.

His visit to India took place at a time when India and China’s tussle over expanding their influence in the region, particularly Nepal, has become more acute.

India and China are also locked in a military standoff at the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the informal border between the two countries, since May 2020 and the strains in their bilateral relations are also felt in the neighbourhood.

During his visit, Prachanda appreciated Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s "Neighbourhood First" policy, which calls for strong India-Nepal ties.

Prachanda also told his media delegation that the personal intervention of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ensured the success of his visit.
He said "Modiji’s" initiative allowed the two sides to move forward when a breakthrough seemed difficult to reach during negotiations.

But given the current fractured polity of Nepal, Prachanda is likely to find it difficult to undo the decision that Oli took to include the disputed territories as Nepal’s.

Though Prachanda has the support of Nepali Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deoba, Madhav Nepal of the Communist Party of Nepal (United Socialist), and other parties in the House, he may find undoing the map a huge challenge.

But the Nepalese Prime Minister’s bigger challenge will come from his ability to juggle his relations with India on the one hand and China on the other.

It is reported that he met senior Chinese leaders before his visit to India to assure them of his country’s commitment to strengthening bilateral ties with Beijing.

He is scheduled to visit China either in late July or early August, when he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and other senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Prachanda has made it clear that both India and China—the two big neighbours of Nepal—are important to the country.

But many experts are growing sceptical about the Nepalese leadership’s ability to maintain equidistance from its big neighbours.

They feel that sooner or later, Prachanda may have to make his choice clear.
In the next few months, when he visits China, he may be forced to end this ambiguity.

Until then, neither India nor China would like to lose Nepal to the other.