The many challenges of being Nepal

Now they get combative. For a long time, whenever you sipped tea with a Chinese mandarin in Kathmandu, she would, without fail, bring up America’s flawed policies.

- BISWAS BARAL

The Americans have always been imperialists, she would tell you. It is also the Yanks who prod New Delhi to take antiChina stands, including in Nepal. Ever since the communists came to power in China in 1949, the US has tried to use Nepal to check the Middle Kingdom’s rise, starting with the CIAinspired Khampa uprising (in the late 1960s and early 1970s). The Chinese had a few more complaints with the Americans. But these were more grumblings than grudges and rarely stated openly.

Sit down with a Kathmandu-based Indian official to discuss Nepal’s foreign policy, and he would speak at length on Nepali elite’s gullibility about Chinese intent. The country’s political and business elites would one day have a rude awakening, you were told. If Nepal didn’t learn the right lesson— and quick—China would gobble it up, à la Tibet. He would then launch into the dangers of inviting a “third actor” (read: the West) into India’s old backyard. On this, the Indians and the Chinese saw eye to eye, even as India and the US were natural partners as two of the world’s biggest democracies.

An American diplomat, for her part, would also emphasise common democratic values of Nepal and the US and how Kathmandu must at all times tread the democratic line and steer clear of autocracies. On prodding, she would take great pains to emphasise that the Americans never see Nepal through “New Delhi’s eyes”, and list out all the projects they have undertaken here of their own accord over the years.