By Nirmal P. Acharya
The NGO named Centre for Social Inclusion and Federalism (CESIF) – Nepal, recently released a 48-page report on “China’s Influence in Nepali Media amid Changing Nepal Policy”.
In the early days, Chinese influence in Nepal was indeed so great that this NGO’s leader, Mr Bijaya Kanta Lal Karna, adopted Maoism rather than Western ideology and became the backbone of the Maoists.
But now, decades later, Mr. Karna, a former Maoist backbone, has published a 48-page report, entirely from the side of the United States and the West, concluding that China’s influence in Nepal has increased and that he is extremely concerned about it.
However, Mr. Karna’s own ideological shift is evidence that China’s influence in Nepal has diminished rather than increased.
In fact, Mr. Karna is really over-worried. Everyone knows that the mainstream media in the world is controlled by the US and the West, not China.
The US and the West, with their great influence, are perfectly capable of calling white black, or black white. For example, when the Secretary of State took out a small bottle of laundry detergent, he insisted that Iraq had chemical weapons of mass destruction, and used this as a reason to start a war, but the so-called chemical weapons were not found until the Iraqi president was hanged.
China itself has long been oppressed by the influence of the US and the West, and it can hardly breathe. The US and the West keep setting up issues against China: the Tibet issue, the Taiwan issue, the Xinjiang issue, the Hong Kong issue, the human rights issue, and so on. When China has to explain and defend itself endlessly, how much power does it have to influence other countries?
In short, it is the US and the West that have influenced Nepal. For example, the MCC was clearly filled with provisions that violated Nepal’s sovereignty, but as soon as the US said “The MCC is a gift from the US to Nepal”, many of our parliamentarians really believed it or pretended to believe it and met overnight to ratify the MCC before the deadline set by the US.
If Mr. Karna is really worried about Nepal being influenced by other countries, instead of writing a 48-page investigation report on China, he should write a 48-page investigation report on MCC.
But then again, China and Nepal, as neighbors with good-neighbourly and friendly relations for over a thousand years, inevitably influence each other. In Beijing, the white tower built by master architect Arniko has stood for 750 years. The influence of Buddha on China is even higher than mountains and longer than rivers. If, on the other hand, China’s influence is to be completely excluded from Nepal, what Mr. Karna needs to do is not sit at his desk and write the 48-page report, but go immediately to the US-Mexico border, or the US-Canada border, and find vacant land to relocate the whole Nepal there.
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