Nepal has always been more than a neighbour to India. It has been a shoulder along our northern edge — one where no threat was perceived, whose people mingled freely with ours, whose temples we prayed at with fervour, whose Gurkhas came to define valour itself. A long-running narrative of Roti-Beti — sharing bread and bloodlines — defined how India understood and managed its relationship with Nepal. The open border, nurtured on the premise of cultural commonality and civilisational kinship, was treated less as a policy choice and more as a natural condition. For decades, this belief-based narrative held.It has since faced several sharp mutations. And India has been slow to adjust and recalibrate. The same open border that symbolised trust became a corridor for threats India could not afford to ignore. ISI-backed networks exploited the frontier systematically — Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed modules used Nepal as a staging and transit zone. Radicalisation, quietly funded through foreign channels, built institutional footholds. Fake currency, narcotics, and human trafficking created organised syndicates operating with impunity. Bad money even changed hands for election funding.India’s response evolved over time — civil police, then central armed police, and eventually smart border management. The move was necessary. But it hardened the relationship. The warm narrative of shared identity gave way to a colder question: how close should too close be?While India was tightening its border posture, China was making strategic investments in Nepal’s human and physical terrain. Chinese study centres seeded cultural influence. Infrastructure investment targeted precisely the development-arid zones where India had promised much and delivered little — projects announced with fanfare, then delayed by poorly defined timelines and chronic delivery deficits.China built roads and connectivity. India sent goodwill and deferrals, films and fanfare.The result was predictable. Nepal’s political landscape fractured severely. The monarchy faced a complete breakdown. The Maoists came to power. Political instability became the permanent condition of Kathmandu’s governance. Meanwhile, India continued operating through backroom management of Nepali power groups — a habit that reflected a deeper strategic miscalculation. China cannot be balanced at the level of a small country sandwiched between two large nations. China must be balanced at China’s level.India overlooked this core truth for too long. Until 2015, which changed everything. Nearly 80% of Nepal’s population lives on 20% of its land — the southern tarai belt adjoining the Indian border. This demographic and geographic reality has always made the relationship structurally sensitive. In the aftermath of the devastating 2015 earthquake, Nepal was at its most vulnerable. It was at this moment that the Madhesi community — Nepali citizens of the southern tarai belt who share deep ethnic and cultural ties with communities across the Indian border — initiated a trade blockade against Kathmandu, protesting what they saw as their marginalisation in Nepal’s newly drafted constitution. The blockade strangled the flow of essential supplies into an already stricken country. India, perceived as insufficiently pressuring the Madhesi groups to lift it, found itself cast as indifferent to Nepal’s suffering. Whether that perception was fair or not is difficult to conclude either way. What is clear is that India was branded as non-humanitarian at precisely the moment when humanitarian standing mattered most. It was an image India has struggled to recover.The episode exposed a deeper problem: India had invested in a relationship narrative premised on civilisational solidarity, while neglecting the material conditions that give narratives their credibility. We nurtured corruption in our own land, indulged in mere patchwork assistance, and allowed delivery deficits to accumulate — all while China invested smartly in infrastructure, mobility, and connectivity. We remained embedded in belief-based narratives long after the ground had shifted beneath them.The aspirations of Gen-Z saw an outburst, first in Bangladesh and then in Nepal. The demand was consistent: corruption-free, transparent, accountable governance. The pressures driving it were equally consistent — stress in the farming sector, lack of jobs, lack of growth opportunities, unplanned and obtrusive urbanisation, and the challenges of climate change. Taken together, these suffocated a generation that is globally well-linked and locally frustrated.India missed this shift. The religious-civilisational narrative, which once served as a soft anchor in Nepal, has been outright rejected by this cohort. We also missed a time-tested wisdom: when the son grows to stand at equal footing with the father, the right response is to give him dignity, space, and the freedom to choose his own path. Forcing old narratives on a changed generation produces resentment, not affinity.Amid China’s debt-trap diplomacy and this new generational call, India has continued reasoning from premises that no longer match ground realities.The geopolitical environment is highly dynamic, fraught with multiple conflicts and increasingly non-normal patterns of statecraft. New narratives have surfaced globally — cognitive control, balance of power through balance of payments, hybrid pressure zones. China has become a deep-state actor in Nepal, also drawing Pakistan and Bangladesh closer to its orbit through multi-mode mobility, digital encirclement, and high-tech surveillance. The encirclement of India’s neighbourhood is real.Against this backdrop, a foundational principle reasserts itself: all wars eventually end in peace. Wise nations have always chosen diplomacy and negotiation over prolonged turmoil. Collaboration and mutually dignified arrangements are the only sustainable base for long-term relationships. Even the claimants of Buddha’s tradition have drifted from this middle path — but the principle itself remains sound.India must now act with urgency. The 1950 Treaty between India and Nepal needs revision — arrived at through close, confident negotiation on the table, not through the public release of ancient baseline maps that harden positions and invite conflict rather than resolve it.Nepal’s new Prime Minister carries a mandate for corruption-free, transparent, and accountable governance. That is a genuine opening, and India must meet it with sincerity and commitment — not manipulation, not patchwork assistance, not backroom management of power groups.On the ground, this means vibrant village programmes along the border, mutual growth avenues, varied institutional linkages, startup connections, and the promotion of industrial clusters that generate the right environment for workable relationships to take root. Strong, silent communication flows naturally when Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam is put into action — beyond fear psychosis and religious rigidity — and when unquestionable democratic governance backs the words.If we draw bigger lines before the other stakeholders in the system, they too will adjust their posture. The task is not to match what China is doing. It is to exceed it — in sincerity, in delivery, and in the respect we extend to a neighbour whose sovereignty and dignity are non-negotiable.The wind is shifting. The question is whether India will read it in time.(Writer is former DG, CRPF)
