Nepal should have paused to reflect on the wisdom of rushing to its parliament for a constitutional amendment to revise the new map of the country, which now officially includes the areas of Lipulekh, Limpiyadhura and Kalapani, territory that is part of the Uttarakhand state’s Pithoragarh district. The constitutional stamp on Nepal’s claim will make it doubly difficult to resolve the issue when the two sides sit down to talk about it, as they must and surely will.
Nepal and India are bound in manifold ways, and Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli should have exercised circumspection rather than plunge into this brinkmanship, but it seems he let narrow political interests take the upper hand. His term in office was on the rocks a month ago, and he was able to retrieve it just in time through the activism of Beijing’s envoy to Kathmandu, who patched up differences between him and his rivals in the Nepal Communist Party, Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” and Madhav Kumar Nepal. Yet this careless attitude towards what is unarguably Nepal’s most important and vital relationship in South Asia is perplexing. With no other country does Nepal have the kind of ties that it has with India, not even with China. Leveraging ties with one side to extract benefits from another is legitimate diplomacy, but also a fine art. It is useful only as long as the balance can be maintained.
After all, India has been engaged with China through both diplomatic and military channels over the LAC standoff in Ladakh. Nothing should come in the way of similarly urgent engagement with Kathmandu. It may need Prime Minister Modi to signal that such engagement has political backing at the highest level.
