Opinion Express View on Nepal PM’s India visit: Upbeat notes
It cements a new beginning in an old friendship. Delhi must build on it
The two sides have signed an agreement under which India will buy 10,000 MW of electricity from Nepal in the coming year. (Express Photo) 
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The four-day visit by Nepal Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” is expected to cement an outreach to Delhi that began last year when Sher Bahadur Deuba was in office. Nepal’s location between India and China has turned it into an arena of geopolitical rivalries, in which the United States is the latest entrant.
On the equally treacherous ground of Nepal’s domestic politics, Prachanda has decided that his own future in office is better served, at least for the foreseeable present, by making friends in Delhi than in Beijing. His skilled post-election navigation to become PM saw him join hands with Khadga Prasad Oli, whose pro-China tilt as PM did not make him popular in Delhi. But as Prachanda wobbled in March after Oli’s withdrawal of support, his fall was broken by the Deuba-headed Nepali Congress, an old India friend and the very party that the new PM had ditched as he shopped for the top job.
Not surprising then that Delhi, which was wringing his hands at Prachanda’s shock move to team up with Oli six months ago, gave the Maoist leader who had once threatened India with a “tunnel war” a warm welcome. Prime Minister Narendra Modi added a rhetorical flourish with his promise of a “superhit” relationship that would scale “Himalayan heights”.
The upbeat notes for the visit were set with newly elected President Ram Chandra Paudel giving his assent — hours before Prachanda’s departure to India — to a controversial amendment to Nepal’s citizenship law that grants citizenship and guaranteed political rights to women foreigners who marry Nepalis. It will enable Indian women in the Terai region who marry Nepali men to become citizens without the earlier seven-year cooling-off period. But the new law is unlikely to please China, which views this as a move to give descendants of Tibetan refugees citizenship and property rights in Nepal. The previous president had blocked the law for months. Prachanda also visited Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh to worship at the Mahakal temple on the second day of his four-day trip.
The real substance of the relationship, however, is economic co-operation, particularly in the hydropower sector, and in the land-locked country’s access to markets abroad through India, and, in the people-to-people relationship. The two sides have signed an agreement under which India will buy 10,000 MW of electricity from Nepal in the coming year. This follows changes that Nepal has made to bring its hydropower policies in line with Delhi’s new rule of not purchasing electricity from a project which has Chinese involvement.
With this, the boot is now on the other foot. India has to step up to the challenge of delivering projects on time. A transit agreement to help Nepal trade via India’s inland waterways, and other connectivity agreements were also signed during the visit. While the open border with Nepal has helped to keep up ties between people on both sides, India’s perceived “micro management” in Nepal, as Prachanda once called it, does not go down well. Kathmandu has wanted to regulate the movement across the border as part of an overall revision of the 1950 India-Nepal Friendship Treaty. The border issue remains live. India has to be mindful of its “big brother” image in a country where the domestic political power play produces a new surprise every few months.
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