EDITORIAL

If ‘Demokhabar Online’ is right, Prime Minister K.P. Oli saw to it that king Gyanendra’s consultations were sought in the inclusion of a new map of Nepal incorporating the Nepali territory that India seeks to occupy and has been doing saw for the last half century. Of course Nirmal Niwas will not corroborate it. Government has yet to deny it. Not that the news is authenticated in any way. But the fact is that the king’s granddaughter had to take to the media to jostle memories that the long disputed and occupied territory was demarcated with dotted lines for many years. Of course, when the practice was discontinued seems to recede in memory drawing inferences of monarchical compromises with India for sake of Indian amity. Whatever, Prime Minister K.P. Oli has done national service with the map, just as he did with his response during the Indian blockade. If the country can sustain what he has augured in and he has done so with open eyes, we are in for a new Nepal-India phase. If he has done so, as with his wooing his nationalist vote previously, just momentarily, the deluge he is invited will serve neither him nor the country. The people are at the tail’s end of fortitude. This was   demonstrated in Jhapa where the reluctance to not to reissue passes for the former king’s journey to Kathmandu almost brought the locals to protest on the streets, vacating their habitual anonymous perch in the internet. Populism’s gradual erosion of national foundations has perhaps become too visible and repetitive these days for an increasingly vocal systemic opposition to continue to lay low as, among others, the ‘honorable’ Sarita Giri will have found out in response to her postings on the ‘net’. The Nepali legislator who wanted ‘new’ Nepal to have a new name in the very first sessions of the reconstituted parliament sitting for a new constitution wanted the new map to be drawn only after consultations with India and China. Of course, India has made its own map version public some six months ago provoking another round of street drubbing in Nepal-India relations. China, on the other hand appears a casual bystander to the consternation of Nepal who sees the Sino-Indian agreement to use that disputed territory for bilateral trade close to a betrayal of traditional Nepal-China ties. Cooler heads in Nepal, though, cannot but be embarrassed when reminded that the newly nominated Nepali ambassador to China is none other than a former Nepali foreigner minister who decided to state publicly that King Mahendra sold the disputed territory in exchange of two boxes of gold. Covid-19 and its resultant lockdown in Kathmandu prevent Mahendra Pande from taking up his duties in Beijing. However, this should not have prevent mandarins in that country from growing through the pages of Nepal-China treaties that cannot but have touched upon the disputed areas since it is, after all, as we maintain, a tri-junction. If one recalls rightly, if the late King Mahendra had made such nefarious deals, his counterpart Liu Xiao Chi would have known something to prevent signature on a Nepal-China border deal.