Prachanda in power, China renews bid to expand footprint in Nepal

With the coalition led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal and K P Sharma Oli in power in Kathmandu, Beijing has renewed its bid to expand its footprints and geopolitical influence in Nepal – reviving a project to lay a cross-border railway track, which has already raised hackles among the security planners in New Delhi.

Soon after Dahal, a.k.a. Prachanda, took over as the new prime minister of Nepal, Beijing sent a technical team to Kathmandu to start studying the feasibility of a proposed rail-line, which would link Kathmandu with Shigatse in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China.

Beijing also recently restarted allowing goods from Nepal to be exported to China through the Rasuwagadhi-Kerung border, after keeping it suspended for almost three years. Prachanda on Sunday inaugurated the Pokhara Regional International Airport, which was built by China CAMC Engineering Company Limited. China in March 2016 granted a soft loan of $ 215.96 to Nepal for the construction of the airport.

Wang Xin, Beijing’s acting envoy to Kathmandu, in a tweet described the airport at Pokhara as the flagship project of the China-Nepal cooperation within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the ambitious cross-continental connectivity programme, which the communist country’s President Xi Jinping had articulated in September 2013.

A spokesperson of the embassy of China in Nepal stated that the launch of the feasibility study and survey of the rail link between Kathmandu to Kerung (in China just across Nepal-China border) was “a solid step forward” to turn the “land-locked country” to “a land-linked country”. The cost of the 75-kilometre-long rail link was initially estimated at $ 3 billion, but it might go up after the feasibility study. It will be linked to the 550-kilometre-long Kerung-Shigatse rail line.

The strategic implication of Shigatse-Kathmandu rail link has not been lost on the security top brass in New Delhi, particularly given China’s increasing belligerence against India along the disputed boundary between the two nations.

Acting on a petition filed by a construction company of India, Nepal’s Supreme Court last month put a stay on the decision of the country’s armed forces to award a contract to China First Highway Engineering Company Limited for building the Kathmandu-Terai-Madhesh Expressway. The expressway would link Kathmandu with Nijgadh, just about 55 kms away from Nepal’s border with India.

Dahal took over as the prime minister on December 26 after his Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) broke its alliance with the Nepali Congress and tied up with the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) led by K P Sharma Oli.

Prachanda, who had led an ultra-leftist insurgency in Nepal from 1996 to 2006, had once worn on sleeves his ideological allegiance to the Communist Party of China. He had chosen to visit China first after becoming the prime minister of Nepal in 2008, although all of his predecessors in the past half a century had come to India on their first official visits as premiers. When he had taken over as the prime minister for the second term in 2016, Prachanda, however, made it a point to visit India first and sought to strike a balance between Nepal’s ties with China and India.

New Delhi and Kathmandu started exploring the possibility of an early visit by the new prime minister of Nepal to India. Prachanda of late received India’s ambassador to Nepal, Naveen Srivastava, who formally conveyed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s compliments to him. Modi had earlier tweeted to congratulate Prachanda’s appointment to the top office in Kathmandu.

What is more worrying for New Delhi is Oli’s return as the ‘king-maker’. It was during Oli’s tenure in the office of the prime minister in Kathmandu that Nepal had ratcheted up its territorial dispute with India in 2020, apparently at the behest of China. It was around the same time China unilaterally launched an aggressive move to push its Line of Actual Control with India in eastern Ladakh westward, resulting in a stand-off, which could not be completely resolved yet.