Former PM Oli stops short of blaming Delhi for downfall, but reminds he asserted Nepal’s territorial claim against India’s boundary

New Delhi: After a mass agitation by students and youths forced him to quit the office of the prime minister in Kathmandu, K P Sharma Oli has now just stopped short of blaming New Delhi for his downfall, but reminded his people that he had strongly put forward Nepal’s claim on the disputed areas claimed by India along the boundary between the two neighbours.

“I am a little stubborn by nature. If it was not for stubbornness, I would've lost long before I reached this far in the midst of this difficulty,” Oli wrote in a letter to ‘Gen Z’ protesters from the Nepal Army Command and Staff College, where he was flown to after he resigned in the wake of widespread outrage over the death of at least 22 agitating students and youths in police firing on Monday and Tuesday. Oli’s biographer, Ganesh Pandey, a filmmaker and journalist, posted the letter on Facebook.

The students and youths, who were already outraged over widespread corruption, took to the streets after the government banned several online social media platforms last month.

Oli, however, justified the ban, arguing that he only insisted that the social media platforms must abide by the rules while doing business in Nepal. He then went on to note that he had insisted that Lipulekh, Kalapani and Limpiyadhura were part of the territory of Nepal, not India’s. He also claimed that he insisted that Lord Rama had been born in Nepal, not in India.

“If I stepped back instead of being stubborn, I'd have many other opportunities, achieve many accomplishments. My life would have been in a different turn if the map of Nepal covering Limpiyadhura (disputed territory along Nepal-India boundary) had not been sent to the United Nations as desired by others,” Oli wrote in his open letter to the Gen Z protesters, adding: “Fame and position have never been important to me.”

Oli’s relations with New Delhi turned sour in 2019 and 2020, when he was in the office of the prime minister for the second term.

The Nepal-India boundary dispute returned to the headlines in November 2019. India published its new political map, showing Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and Ladakh as two separate Union Territories in accordance with the August 5, 2019, decision of the government led by Modi. Oli’s government in Kathmandu objected, alleging that the new map shows Nepal’s Kalapani as a part of the territory of India. New Delhi dismissed the claim, stating that the map “accurately” depicted the “sovereign” territory of India.

In April-May 2020, as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s aggressive moves along China’s Line of Actual Control with India and the Indian Army’s counter-deployment led to a military stand-off in eastern Ladakh and it reached a flashpoint with a violent face-off in Galwan Valley on June 15, 2020.

Nudged by Beijing, Oli’s government in Kathmandu also protested over a new 80-kilometre-long road that New Delhi built from Dharchula in Uttarakhand to the Lipulekh Pass – an India-Nepal-China tri-junction boundary point – alleging that the road passed through Nepal.

India dismissed the claim of Nepal. Oli went ahead, got his government to publish a new map, which showed nearly 400 sq. kms of India’s areas in Kalapani, Lipulekh Pass and Limpiyadhura as part of Nepal. It also got Nepal’s parliament to amend the country’s constitution to endorse the new map and sent it to the United Nations.

Ironically, in the final weeks in the office of the prime minister, Oli had to register protests, not only with New Delhi, but also with Beijing, on the issue of the disputed territory, as India and China on August 18 agreed to restart the border trade through Lipulekh Pass.

He raised the issue during his meeting with President Xi Jinping at Tianjin in China and promised his people that he would take it up with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to India.