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Balen Shah is changing Nepal’s India-China balancing act. It’s a risky foreign policy

If Balen Shah sticks to the much speculated ‘no foreign visits for a year’ policy, the cost of such a risk needs to be weighed against the current geopolitical churnings.

Balen Shah is back in the headlines, and this time, for the foreign policy choices he has made since taking office as Prime Minister of Nepal. With almost two months in office, Shah has sought to do away with Nepal’s traditional foreign policy, under which leaders leaned ‘first’ either toward India or China—a framework shaped largely by the country’s landlocked location between the two giant Asian powers.

The advent of democracy in 2008 was supposed to change that struggle, but it did not. The only change contributed by the 1996-2006 Maoist Insurgency was in the country’s political setup—establishment of a democratic republican state—and foreign policy remained a matter of practice.

While each movement brought a new government, leaders, and practices in foreign policy remained largely the same. However, following the Gen Z movement, the mandate of the new government has been to overhaul the entire system, in which foreign policy is driven by pragmatic national interest rather than by what the past has set as practice.

Attempts to overhaul have not been easy for Prime Minister Balen Shah. Although he has made efforts, including hosting ambassadors and representatives from two dozen countries in Kathmandu in a group rather than giving them separate individual audiences.

However, can avoiding one-on-one meetings with foreign delegates be called a balanced, neutral stance? Or is it a way to safeguard Nepal’s foreign policy from external influence?

Struggle finding neutrality and balance

This is not the first time a nationalist leader like Balen Shah has attempted to make Nepal a fortress against foreign intervention. In the 1970s, King Birendra Shah sought to galvanise global support for recognising Nepal as a ‘Zone of Peace’, which many considered a ‘stance of neutrality’.........

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