Nepal’s not playing the China card

Devendra Gautam

The Oli mission

First things first: It’s not a hunting trip beyond the national borders nor it’s a marriage procession, in response to a cordial invite.

Rather, it’s an official delegation heading up north to discuss some serious business with the leaders of the world’s second largest economy in terms of nominal GDP ($18.273 trillion), the largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity ($37.072 trillion) and the third most powerful country in terms of available firepower with a PwrIndx of 0.0706, lagging only behind Russia (0.0702) and the United States (0.0699).

So, it’s only fitting for Nepal to send under Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli a 78-member delegation to make things happen, isn’t it? As the saying goes, two heads are better than one and 78 heads, as yours truly feels, are far better as the amount of grey matter in each brain adds up to make a huge mass that can come handy during negotiations. Also, if airplane seats are available, why not make the most of them? Besides, a small delegation can easily get lost in a country with an area of  9572678 sq km, so the government must have done quite a bit of homework to make the delegation visible in such a big country.

 

And it’s not every Tom, Dick, Harry, Ram Krishna, Hari and Radha hopping onto the all-important, official flight to Beijing.    

 

Per media reports, the entourage includes the who’s who and who’s whose who from Nepal: the Prime Minister (of course), Foreign Minister, Prime Minister’s Chief Adviser (why not?), Economic and Development Adviser, members of parliament (bring ‘em on), senior government officials, private sector representatives and, of course, spin doctors big and small from the government media. Without the last bunch, who will get to know what exactly happened in the rarified air up north?      

 

What’s the agenda?

That’s a tough question, isn’t it? Let’s delve into this agenda thing a bit as it has stirred the pot.

In fact, there’s no need to enter into the vast world of the void to explore the main agenda.

Well-informed media reports have made it clear that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), formerly One Belt One Road (OBOR), is the prime agenda of this visit.

Quite clear? Well…..

 

The two ruling parties, the Nepali Congress (NC) and the CPN-UML, have actually revised the BRI implementation plan that China proposed in 2020 and sent it back to where it belonged. Needless to say, the ball is now back in the Chinese court. By the way, the middle kingdom of the yore should seriously think about giving the task of revising its global BRI blueprint to brilliant minds that make up the rank and file of the two parties.     

Mother of all surprises is that the two parties are on the same page—and not only in the same government—this time around over the BRI funding modality. Though most probably aware that BRI rarely entails grants, the two largest parties represented in the Parliament and the government are resolute that Nepal should get grant-funded BRI projects. Minister for Foreign Affairs Arzu Rana Deuba raised this agenda with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during her recent visit that was meant to step up preparations for PM Oli’s visit, so China is quite aware of this worthy matter.    

Still, if this agenda does not figure at the summit in Beijing, what will?

Scholarships for politicians’ and bureaucrats’ progenies? That’s quite unlikely.

The debt trap

The largest party in the Parliament appears quite worried about the BRI. The ghosts from Hambantotta have been giving some of its leaders sleepless nights for quite sometime, it seems.

It indeed is our sovereign right to decide what is in our national interest and what is not. But can an instability-plagued polity mired knee-deep in corruption (with a CPI score of 35 and ranked 108th out of 180 countries) defend the core interests of a country?

And is this contraption called debt trap made only in China? Are other countries, multilateral agencies and investors opening their purse strings in this sacred land to absolve themselves of sins committed elsewhere? Is there such a thing called free lunch—except for our politicians and bureaucrats, of course—for the people? Even if it were there, people with even an iota of self-respect would not accept it.     
By the way, has the sellout of Nepal’s major rivers and tributaries through treasonous deals and treaties not been bleeding the country dry for years on end? What is the cost of losses resulting from such deals and treaties?

And what will petroleum import pipelines do to a country that supposedly has a huge hydropower potential, at least on paper? Will an increasing reliance on and consumption of the dirty fuels, whose prices are almost always on an upward swing, ever let our economy take off?       

The China card

Once in a while, Nepal’s political leadership faces charges of playing the China card. Yours truly has written more often than not that Nepal has never been a card-playing nation. It is not the country where the Pandavs lost everything against the Kauravs in the great gamble. In fact, a Nepali song, Nakhelnu Juwa Ra Taas…, warns against gambles and card games, pointing at the plight of King Nal and the Pandavs, who are said to have lost everything in a game or two and gone into exile. Nepal cannot afford to play such games where everything is at stake. The country should play  her cards quite carefully at all times, not to mention in this time of great geopolitical and geostrategic flux marked by the rise of two giant neighbours, the Russia-Ukraine war, increasing hostilities in the Mideast and signs of a gradual decline of the sole superpower.     

Certain mighty countries well-versed in the art of the impossible—diplomacy—see in this ancient country’s attempts to safeguard her interests by diversifying her relations in a fast-changing global landscape a card game or two in progress against them.

 

That’s their fault, not ours. As for occasional card games, the sets for such games certainly come from China. The use of such cards in such games does not mean that Nepal is playing the China card.