To look North or South? Rethinking non-alignment and neutrality

Discourse on Nepal’s foreign policy has long revolved around the idea of balancing its relations between China and India. After his conquest, King Prithvi Narayan Shah highlighted the importance of maintaining equidistance between the two, famously represented in his maxim ‘a yam between two boulders’ to describe Nepal’s geopolitical reality. 

Whilst the Rana rulers preferred a close alignment with British India, the non-alignment approach gained more credence in the 1950s under the provisional democratic government and particularly since the 1960s with King Mahendra’s look towards the north. 

However, despite significant transformations in international politics that have direct impact on the region, scholars of foreign policy in Nepal as well as various governments have repeated this trope without any critical reflection or practical considerations. This has led to the sidelining of two important questions: Can Nepal’s historical and contemporary foreign policy be accurately described as neutral and non-aligned? Is non-alignment and neutrality a suitable foreign policy approach to Nepal? 

Due to the entrenched notion of non-alignment, which is even a constitutionally embedded provision, there are very few studies emanating from Nepal which view this approach in a critical manner. Gaurav Bhattarai’s book ‘Nepal Between China and India: Difficulty of Being Neutral’ is one of the few exceptions to this rule that challenges Nepal’s foreign policy where he questions the appropriateness to label Nepal’s policy as neutral and non-aligned.

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Surely, with Nepalis recruited into the Indian Army, some even having fought against China, the notion of neutrality seems to be undermined. Even under King Mahendra, widely lauded for his neutral foreign policy vis-à-vis India and China, Nepali Gorkhas participated in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. This reinforces the fundamental question with an additional layer: Is Nepal’s engagement with both India and China a strategy of non-alignment or would it be more appropriate to consider it as dual or multi-alignment? 

This is not a trivial distinction as non-alignment is a passive undertaking that forgoes alliances as well as relationships and is more akin to isolation. Contrastingly, multi-alignment is a more aggressive undertaking which is characterised by indiscriminate relationships with foreign countries. 

There is also a need to view the practicalities of this approach. The dynamics of international and regional politics is not the same as it was 60 years ago when King Mahendra was pursuing this strategy, and it certainly is not the same as 250 years ago when Prithvi Narayan Shah developed it. 

Despite this, we are still uncritically maintaining this strategy. China is now a global power capable of power projection on the same level as the United States. India, despite not having the same material capabilities as China, has an advantage in South Asia due to historical, cultural, and religious linkages. This situation has led to a strategic rivalry where China is credibly challenging India’s hegemonic pursuits in the region and the resulting polarisation has made alliances increasingly zero-sum.

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International Relations scholars have consistently warned the shortcomings of this hedging approach in areas where enmity between regional powers exists. They argue that in a region where there are two or more regional powers that are hostile towards one another and where a security architecture does not exist, a balanced approach is not appropriate. This is because for the regional powers, the alliance of a smaller country becomes zero-sum. In short, either they have influence in the country, or their rival does. 

This raises the stake and leads to heavy handed approaches from the regional powers in order to ensure that the smaller nations fall under their influence. A drastic example is the former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s attempt at playing the middle between the EU/NATO and Russia in the early 2010s. His statement “Ukraine must be a neutral state which should be part of a collective defence system which the European Union, NATO and Russia will take part in” typifies this attitude. Observers posit it as one of the reasons Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea in 2014, as a means to ensure their alignment.

A more practical approach to alignment can be seen with the case of Vietnam. The South-East Asian nation increased their economic engagements with China extensively in the 2000s. However, China’s ascendancy has resulted in an aggressive foreign policy from Beijing in the South China Sea resulting in Hanoi quietly moving towards a stronger alignment with the USA. Vietnam overlooked their worries about Washington’s previous history which overthrew communist governments including their own bloody conflict with the US in order to find a practical solution to their contemporary foreign policy. 

What does this mean for Nepal?

Proponents of non-alignment and neutrality consider it integral to protecting the nation’s sovereignty. However, it can be argued that the Sino-Indian and Sino-US rivalry has already led to an undermining of the nation’s sovereignty and that commitment to non-alignment may continue to worsen the situation. 

Whilst it is unlikely that either China or India will invade the nation like Russia did with Ukraine or Georgia, heavy-handed tactics and attempts to influence politics have already manifested. Take China’s integral role in the formation of the Nepal Communist Party by unifying the Maoists and the UML as an example, including their lobby against the American infrastructure program MCC, or their efforts at educating Nepal’s top-level communist leaders in ‘Xi Jinping’ thought. 

On the other hand, India’s response to the growing Chinese influence shows the zero-sum nature of the strategic rivalry in the region. For instance, India’s imposition of Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) on Nepali goods which is considered as an attempt to limit products with Chinese components. Furthermore, while the government recently visited Beijing—a trip lauded for advancing BRI commitments, India is yet to invite Nepali leadership for an official visit.

In the context of regional and global realities and heightened geopolitical environment worldwide, it is critical to examine Nepal’s long-held foreign policy goals of neutrality and non-alignment through a critical perspective and adopt a pragmatic stance in policy making rather than relying on ossified cliches.