Nepal uprising is latest challenge to India’s backyard diplomacy

Kathmandu: Just weeks before Nepal erupted in flames this month, India had invited the Nepali prime minister to New Delhi on a state visit, partly to smooth over testy ties between the South Asian neighbors.

The prime minister, KP Sharma Oli, never got the chance. He was forced to resign earlier this month as sudden protests engulfed the small Himalayan nation, fueled by a groundswell of anger among young people at corruption, elitism and widening inequality.

A similar uprising in Bangladesh last year upended the authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina. And in 2022, protests in Sri Lanka over a tanking economy forced out a president who was a member of a political dynasty many Sri Lankans saw as brazenly corrupt.

Such instability across South Asia distracts India from focusing on its ambition to be a global superpower. But India cannot leave things unattended in its own backyard. It already faces accusations from its smaller and poorer neighbors that it switches between ignoring them and bullying them, postures driven by self-interest rather than helping their development.

Neighbors such as Nepal have occasionally found themselves depending on India for humanitarian assistance and their economic stability, while chafing at its meddling in their domestic affairs.

Letting power vacuums develop in adjoining countries or failing to show leadership only risks further harm to India’s interests, analysts said. It also emboldens China, which is edging its way into India’s traditional sphere of influence, from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, by providing India’s neighbors with funding for energy, construction and other infrastructure projects.

India “can’t afford to be complacent and conclude that neighbors’ negative sentiment toward India is neutralized by their need for Indian support,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst and senior fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. “The risk for India is that the region’s churn will produce new leaders, or give more space to political actors hostile to Indian interests.”

India has always recognized the importance of nurturing economic ties with partners with whom its history and culture are deeply entwined. “Neighborhood First” is a chapter in its foreign policy playbook. South Asia — which includes Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan and the Maldives — is home to a quarter of the world’s people and has its largest youth population. Increasingly, India’s regional diplomacy is being driven by its rivalry with China as both vie to become leaders of the Global South.

India’s value proposition to its neighbors is that the “Indian economy is growing fast and you, too, can grow along with us by partnering with India,” said Gautam Bambawale, a former ambassador of India to China.

But India’s neighbors have not always made it easy. It already has a hostile neighbor, Pakistan, to its west. To its east lies Bangladesh, a country of 170 million that has sheltered anti-India insurgents, and which has a long-standing conflict with India about migrants crossing their shared 2,500-mile border. Sri Lanka, to its south, invited China to finance a port along a strategic waterway, just a few hundred miles from Indian shores, threatening India’s national security.

Several countries, like Nepal, have complained that they are tools in a geopolitical tussle between the two Asian Goliaths, although they have opportunistically played one against the other. Political parties have campaigned on “anti-India” or “pro-China” platforms.

In Nepal, Oli had a decidedly pro-China bent, but his replacement — Sushila Karki, a former chief justice chosen as a caretaker prime minister until elections in March — reached out to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India before anyone else.

Nepal, a Himalayan nation of 30 million, shares deep cultural connections and an open border of more than 1,000 miles with India, and is dependent on it for crucial supplies including fuel. But relations between the two have soured in the past decade.

In 2015, as Nepal was recovering from devastating earthquakes, India stopped sending fuel trucks into the country, citing political unrest around a proposed new constitution. But Nepal accused India of imposing the blockade as punishment for refusing to amend provisions of the document that would have benefited Nepali groups with close ties to India.

The dispute ignited anti-India sentiments and Nepal began signing more agreements with China, said Apekshya Shah, an assistant professor of international relations and diplomacy at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. That became “a bone of contention with India,” Shah said, which has a “zero-sum mentality” when it comes to Nepal-China relations.

India has also upset some of its neighbors by putting its weight behind certain political players and refusing to recalibrate when they become unpopular. Relations with Bangladesh have deteriorated in the past year after Sheikh Hasina, the country’s former prime minister, was ousted by a popular uprising and fled to India.

Many Bangladeshis are incensed at India’s continued support of Hasina — a politician whose authoritarian tendencies and brutal use of force on protesters alarmed human rights groups, but whom India saw as a staunch ally. At the same time, attacks on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh have angered Hindu right-wing groups in India.

India stopped issuing almost all visas to Bangladeshi citizens, and earlier this year both countries curbed the use of their land ports for exporting goods.

Bangladesh has begun wooing China under the leadership of the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who visited the country in March and signed several trade agreements.

The staunch Hindu nationalism of Modi, combined with India’s regional dominance and a jingoistic domestic media, can alienate other religious groups in neighboring countries, said Husain Haqqani, a former ambassador of Pakistan to the United States.

“Hindutva may be a unifier for Hindu-majority India but it does not help win over Muslims in Bangladesh or Maldives and Buddhists in Sri Lanka,” said Haqqani, using the term for a Hindu-first ideology.

Given India’s hostilities with Pakistan, which has grown ever closer to China, regional integration is virtually impossible. Instead, India has sought to build economic and trade ties via bilateral agreements and smaller groupings.

It has always been quick to extend humanitarian assistance to its neighbors. But in the past year, it has also become a more active lender and backer of infrastructure projects. It has invited neighboring leaders for state visits to strengthen ties.

President Mohamed Muizzu of the Maldives — a tiny archipelago of 500,000 people of great strategic importance to India and China — won its 2023 election on a campaign that called for expelling Indian military troops from the country, using slogans like “India Out.” But last year, Muizzu paid a visit to India and the two countries began warming to each other. In July, Modi announced a $565 million credit line to the Maldives and said the countries would launch free-trade talks.

India still has the upper hand in South Asia, even when it appears close to squandering it, analysts said. Kugelman said the region remained a “powder keg” that was hard to navigate, with hot borders, polarized politics, aggrieved publics and fragile economies.

But “as a nation with great power aspirations, India will have a strategic incentive to ensure its neighborhood doesn’t become a costly distraction from its pursuits further afield,” he said.