When Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, he declared the basic tenet of his foreign policy to be “Neighbourhood First”. Eleven years on, the policy has resulted in an arc of hostility stretching east, north, and west of India, drawn from Bangladesh to Nepal to Pakistan, with the keystone of the arch wedged at its highest point, Nepal.
When the former King, Gyanendra Shah, landed in Kathmandu from Pokhara on March 9, milling crowds swarmed around the airport and lined the streets to greet him. It took him two-and-a-half hours to cover the short 5 km stretch to his home. The monarch had been deposed all of 17 years earlier by the Constituent Assembly on May 28, 2008, after massive public demonstrations against the grim excesses of his viciously authoritarian rule—in cahoots with the army—arising from his coup in 2005. That resulted in the closing of parliament, the incarceration of political leaders and civil society stalwarts, the shutting down of independent media outlets, the internet and telecommunications, and shooting at demonstrators. Then the 2015 constitution, adopted almost unanimously, declared Nepal a “federal, secular republican democracy”.
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So, did the tens of thousands who came out to welcome the former King signal a resurgence of monarchist sentiment or reflect the utter public disenchantment with constitutional civil governance in Nepal that has seen 13 (or is it 14?) governments come and go in just 17 years, often involving the same political leaders in alternative cohabitation with foes turned friends. Such instability has been combined with humongous corruption across the political spectrum and bureaucracy, and a steeply sliding economy (real GDP growth having plunged to 3.1 per cent last year), external debt of trillions of Nepalese rupees, fraying infrastructure, high and rising unemployment, spiralling inflation, and poor, inadequate education and health facilities, leaving Nepal as one of the poorest countries in the world despite its transition nearly two decades ago from unfettered feudalism to a modern parliamentary democracy. Does this presage a return to monarchy and, therefore, of the “Hindu Rashtra” that Nepal used to be?
Pro-monarchist sentiments on the rise?
Nepal’s royalist parties, led by the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), are touting the welcome they orchestrated as proof that this is, indeed, so. Sceptics ask how this could be when the RPP and other monarchists won only 3.9 per cent of the vote in 2008, which rose to 9.4 per cent in 2013, but slid to 2.98 per cent in 2017, even if it rose to 5.57 per cent in 2022? Moreover, not only has the RPP split with a dissident wing constituting itself as a separate party (called RPP-Nepal), but numerous royalist groupuscules are also splintering the pro-monarchist vote into even tinier slices, further fractured into internecine mutual denunciation of “hardline” and “moderate” (or “compromiser”) factions. Can such a fractionated force really rouse the people of Nepal? Or are their efforts backed by a “hidden hand”?
Answering this question, a leading Nepali opinion-maker, Pramod Raj Sedhain, writing on the website Nepal News, has pointed out that organising mass rallies takes “money, influence, like-minded coordination and a strong mobilization network”. This, he underlines, is why “seismic political shifts in Nepal… require sustained, large-scale protests with Indian support” (italics are mine, since the Nepalese take Indian interference in their domestic politics as a “given”!)
Former King of Nepal, Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, is welcomed by the pro-monarchy supporters demanding the restoration of monarchy, outside the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu on March 9, 2025. | Photo Credit: NAVESH CHITRAKAR/REUTERS
Gyanendra Shah arrived back in Kathmandu after an extensive two-month tour of religious sites and western Nepal, preceded by a long visit to Prayagraj, Gorakhpur, and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, where Gyanendra had a long secret conversation with the Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath. The erstwhile royal family’s India connection is axed on its long association, going back 12 generations, with the Gorakhpur math, now headed by Adityanath. The Yogi-turned-Chief Minister has openly urged the restoration of the monarchy while Prime Minister Modi would welcome the renaissance of Nepal as “the only Hindu kingdom in the world”.
Indian interference
There is a curious (or is it deliberate?) coincidence that tensions are ratcheted up when the State Assembly election is scheduled in Bihar, the neighbouring State which has the strongest connection to the plains and foothills of Nepal (called the Terai) and the Madhesis who live there: “roti-beti ka rishta” (ties of livelihood and marriage). Bihar is going to the polls in November 2025, and, as winter turns to spring and then summer before the monsoon breaks, Jeshta (May-June) is the traditional season for street agitations in Nepal. Therefore, anxious eyes are being turned in Nepal to India, her Research & Analysis Wing network, and, above all, the accelerated activities of the RSS in Nepal, to see what kind of back-up support the royalists are receiving from one of their two giant neighbours. Is this the usual paranoia of a small country faced with a larger—much larger—neighbour? Or is there something dodgy happening that might be labelled “daal mein kaala”? Even as this column is being uploaded, the Nepal Prime Minister has threatened to reveal all in parliament!
Remember that in November 2015, when the Nepal Constituent Assembly ended seven years of internal bickering and, as suddenly as unexpectedly, adopted a constitution, it ignored a series of amendments proposed sotto voce by India allegedly relating to issues such as Madhesi representation from the Terai, the constitution of additional Terai districts, the designation of the Terai as a single province, and dropping the term “secular”. What was worse for the Modi government championing the Madhesi cause was that an overwhelming majority of the elected Madhesi representatives voted in favour of the constitution. The final vote was 507-25! Nepal government announced a date for the ceremonial proclamation of the constitution in the immediate wake of its adoption.
Caught off-guard, Prime Minister Modi deputed the Foreign Secretary as his “special envoy” to order the Nepalese to back off from the announced date of the proclamation pending further amendments to the constitution. The Nepalese indignantly pointed out that their new parliament would continue to function as a constituent assembly when needed, and if there were any outstanding issues, these could be easily dealt with—even after the joyous proclamation of a constitution to which virtually the entire Constituent Assembly, including an overwhelming majority of Madhesi members, had assented. The “special envoy” met everyone and was apparently so uniformly rude to them in carrying out his instructions from Delhi that the Kathmandu media complained of his behaving as if he were “Curzon”!
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As things turned out, all this was merely a preliminary to the real hit to Nepal’s solar plexus. A massive earthquake had struck Nepal in April 2015, killing close to 9,000 people and causing damage that ran to millions of dollars. Although India rushed relief to Nepal, once the Constituent Assembly passed the Constitution without the amendments reportedly sought by India and rebuffed the “special envoy”, in the following month (December 2015) the Modi government facilitated a blockade of essential supplies, including food, medicines, and petroleum (although blaming the Madhesi strike in the Terai for the disruption, the Nepalese responded that they were convinced India had provoked the strike). Whatever the weight of these charges and counter-charges, ever since the last quarter of 2015—almost a decade ago—the India-Nepal relationship has floundered, even as China has stepped in as a sympathetic and well-heeled friend of Nepal who deeply respects the sovereignty of its southern neighbour, in contrast to India that treats Nepal not as a sovereign nation but as an outlying satrapy.
Blow to Sangh Parivar
Notwithstanding many Nepalese overtures, since then India has been frigid—in sharp contrast to the Chinese who have been quick to step unobtrusively but definitively into the gap caused by the breach with India. Given that India’s main interest in Nepal is its crucial role as the “paasbaan” (frontier guard) in the middle sector of the Himalaya, this is worrisome for us as Indians. For the BJP/RSS, however, what has changed worryingly for them is that apart from abolishing the monarchy in May 2008, the Nepal Constituent Assembly also dissolved the country’s proclaimed identity as a Hindu Rashtra, an identity assiduously promoted by the monarchy and incorporated in the constitution promoted by the royalists in 1990. However, the 2015 constitution entrenched Nepal as a “federal, secular republic” in which the 81 per cent Hindu majority has granted equal citizenship rights to the 19 per cent minorities, comprising primarily Buddhists, as well as Muslims, Christians, and nature worshippers.
This was a blow to the Sangh Parivar, who have long looked at the Himalayan kingdom as the role model they hope to emulate in their homeland. Hence the deep suspicions that the Modi regime arouses in Nepal, especially with the Bihar election in the offing, as opposed to the welcome accorded to the growing Chinese presence. Is this what “Neighbourhood First” was supposed to achieve?
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