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New Delhi: Nepal’s Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which swept the country’s March 5 general election with a near two-thirds majority, has said it will seek to resolve its territorial disputes with India through dialogue rather than political confrontation, even as it looks to deepen economic and infrastructure ties with New Delhi.

Shisir Khanal, a two-term RSP member of parliament from Kathmandu and the party’s lead negotiator who was instrumental in bringing together RSP chairman Rabi Lamichhane and incoming prime minister Balendra Shah, said the new government intended to move away from treating the border issue as a flashpoint.

“Our commitment is to resolve such issues through dialogue rather than turning them into political contentious issues,” he said in an interview to The Wire on the phone from Kathmandu.

This framing is a departure from the tenor of Nepal-India relations under the previous K.P. Oli government, when territorial disputes created sustained friction with New Delhi and was a political tool domestically.

While soliciting investment from Beijing, the head of RSP’s international department also said that the government does not plan to enter into a framework agreement for all Belt and Road Initiative projects with China.

“At this point we would prefer to examine each project on a case-by-case basis, where we would look at the financing modality, the economic viability of the project, and the returns we would receive from it,” he said.

The RSP secured the strongest single-party mandate in over six decades in Nepal’s snap parliamentary election last week, emerging just two seats short of the two-thirds majority threshold needed to dominate the 275 member House of Representative.

The result marks one of the most dramatic political shifts in Nepal in decades, delivering a sweeping mandate to a party that is barely four years old in an election which was held just months after youth-led revolts toppled the old political establishment.

It caught even RSP leaders by surprise, with Khanal admitting that it was “beyond our expectation”.

With the RSP set to govern a country sandwiched between India and China, New Delhi will be keen to engage quickly with a new administration made up of a generation of politicians it has had little dealings with.

Balen Shah arrives at the prime ministership with his own complicated history with India. As Kathmandu’s independent mayor, he displayed a “Greater Nepal” map in his office in 2023 as a counter to India’s “Akhand Bharat” mural in its new parliament, and in November 2025 posted an expletive-laden Facebook message targeting India, among others, before deleting it within half an hour.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted about his phone call to the two leaders in Nepali, Shah, who had done an MTech in civil engineering in India, replied to say that he looked forward to working together to deepen relations and make them more “outcome-oriented”.

Lamichhane, in his public response, said the party looked forward to taking the partnership with India “to new heights”. He used the phrase “development diplomacy” to describe the direction RSP intends to set, a formulation Khanal elaborated on at length.

Khanal, who spoke to The Wire in RSP’s first interview to the Indian media since the election, comes from outside Nepal’s traditional political world.

The 47 year old spent close to a decade in the United States, studying political economy and then public policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Back in Nepal, he co-founded Teach for Nepal in 2012 before entering politics with the RSP in 2022. He served briefly as education minister in the Prachanda coalition, but the RSP pulled out after 19 days in a dispute over the home ministry portfolio.

Now a two-term MP, Khanal played a central role in the alliance-building that delivered RSP its historic mandate.

In the interview, Khanal offered a detailed account of what drove the mandate, how the party’s agreement with Shah was forged, and whether the relationship between the RSP chairman and PM-elect will impact the stability of the government. He also laid out the party’s foreign policy priorities, particularly with its two large neighbours.

Read the full interview below, edited lightly for clarity.

Are you surprised at the scale of the mandate? Many analysts say that constitutionally, Nepal was not supposed to give a single-party mandate of this nature.

I have a bit of a different view on that. Even though I’ve heard this argument a lot – yes, the mandate itself is a little larger than we had anticipated. We had expected a clear and clean majority, but we now have almost a two-third…we are two votes or two MPs short of becoming a two-third in the parliament, in the lower house.

In Nepal, many political observers and commentators, what they have said all along is that because of Nepal’s nature of electoral system, where 40% comes through PR [proportional representation], it would be impossible for any single party to get two-third, let alone a majority. But facts do not, in my opinion, necessarily agree with that. Nepal’s constitution came out in 2015, and first election based on this constitution was in 2017. And even then, when the Nepal Communist Party, UML and the Maoists said they would merge post-election [when they] went into the election. They were very close to a two-third then as well. But that partnership didn’t last, so they broke up. The government didn’t last a full term. The 2022 elections created a hung parliament.

So, Nepal’s electoral pattern is very interesting. Since 1990, every other election in Nepal has produced a majority government. If you look at Nepal’s history and how voters swing, we expected this to be a very strong majority government, but definitely two-thirds........

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