Nepal foreign minister on India trip, to meet Jaishankar today

The visit was seen as a reciprocal gesture following Oli’s August 15 outreach via a phone call to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. (File)

Nepal’s Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali will meet External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday for their first face-to-face meeting since the border row led to a slide in ties.

Gyawali, who arrived in New Delhi Thursday afternoon, will co-chair the India-Nepal Joint Commission meeting along with Jaishankar on Friday. This comes against the backdrop of a political crisis in Nepal, where Nepal PM K P Sharma Oli has dissolved the Parliament and is now heading a caretaker government.

“The Joint Commission is an important mechanism that provides the opportunity of reviewing at a high level the entire gamut of our bilateral partnership and providing political guidance to further enhance the special and unique ties that we enjoy. We look forward to constructive discussions on the numerous sectors that encompass our bilateral agenda,” Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said.

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Bid to reset ties

India’s inauguration of a new road from Dharchula to Lipulekh on the Mansarovar Yatra route had angered the Oli government which came out with a new map of Nepal, adding to it an area at the tri-junction of Nepal, India and China (Tibet) which India maintains is its territory. A Constitution amendment Bill was passed by Nepal Parliament to legitimise alteration to the country’s map. After Shringla’s visit, Gyawali’s trip is an effort to reset bilateral ties hit by the row.

On whether there will be talks on the boundary issue, the MEA spokesperson said, “Our position on the boundary issue is well known. Let me say that the JCM and boundary talks are separate mechanisms.”

Also Read | Ahead of minister’s India visit, Oli says issues should be settled by dialogue

The Nepal Foreign Minister’s visit comes about a month and a half after the first high-level diplomatic visit to Nepal in November when Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla went to Kathmandu and met the country’s leaders, including Prime Minister Oli and Gyawali, among others.

Sources said that the conversations will pick up the threads from the conversations between Foreign Secretary Shringla’s discussions with PM Oli — the two had a one-on-one meeting, apart from the delegation level talks — which had included a “candid review of the state of the bilateral relationship”, and the potential for bringing India and Nepal closer.

Shubhajit Roy

Shubhajit Roy, Diplomatic Editor at The Indian Express, has been a journalist for more than 25 years now. Roy joined The Indian Express in October 2003 and has been reporting on foreign affairs for more than 17 years now. Based in Delhi, he has also led the National government and political bureau at The Indian Express in Delhi — a team of reporters who cover the national government and politics for the newspaper. He has got the Ramnath Goenka Journalism award for Excellence in Journalism ‘2016. He got this award for his coverage of the Holey Bakery attack in Dhaka and its aftermath. He also got the IIMCAA Award for the Journalist of the Year, 2022, (Jury’s special mention) for his coverage of the fall of Kabul in August 2021 — he was one of the few Indian journalists in Kabul and the only mainstream newspaper to have covered the Taliban’s capture of power in mid-August, 2021. ... Read More

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