Nepal’s New PM Balendra Shah Faces First Diplomatic Test With Upcoming India Visit |
The Pulse | Diplomacy | South Asia
Nepal’s New PM Balendra Shah Faces First Diplomatic Test With Upcoming India Visit
In New Delhi, he will not want to be seen to be too close to “big brother” India so early in his tenure.
Nepal’s new Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal shakes hands with his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar at a meeting in Port Louis, Mauritius, Apr. 10, 2026.
Balendra Shah became the prime minister of Nepal on March 27. India, it has now emerged, invited him for an official visit on the same day. The impending visit, the date for which is yet to be finalized, could herald a new phase of Nepal-India relations that is characterized by greater trust and cooperation.
Following the Gen Z uprising and ouster of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli in September last year, an interim government under Sushila Karki was quickly formed. India supported her government from the start and kept putting pressure on key Nepali political actors to support Karki’s single focus on timely elections. Prolonged instability on the Nepali side of the border, India feared, could spill over into its own territory. The sooner power was transferred to an elected government in Kathmandu, the better.
Following the uprising, India made a concerted effort to improve ties with Shah, the popular former mayor of Kathmandu who was also the de facto leader of the uprising. As the country burned for two days, the lead actors in the protests had requested Shah to assume the role of interim prime minister and steady the ship. But he declined — instead waiting for the right time to be elected prime minister for a full term in office.
Indian interlocutors also started engaging the top ranks of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), the party helmed by former TV show host Rabi Lamichhane, which Shah joined just months before the March 5 national polls. The RSP projected Shah as its prime ministerial candidate. Under his leadership, the party swept the polls, winning nearly two-thirds of all contested seats for the federal lower house.
Indians had rightly sensed the turning of the tide in Nepali politics — and chose to ride it. There was an ulterior reason for this. Oli, the pre-uprising prime minister and chair of the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), the largest communist force in the country, had become the pivotal Nepali politician following the promulgation of the new constitution in 2015. Since then, he either led the government (thrice) or played the key role in shaping coalitions in Kathmandu.
Yet he had increasingly testy ties with India. First, he and his party won the 2017 polls on an openly anti-India plank. Even after that, he continued pestering the Indians. He sometimes claimed that Lord Rama, the poster god of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, was born in Nepal. He mocked India’s national emblem. Perhaps most egregiously in Indian eyes, he included the territories around Kalapani, which India also claims, in the official Nepali map, and permanently included the map in the new constitution.
If the Indians wanted one outcome from the March 5 polls, it was the diminishment of Oli and his UML party. And it got exactly that: trounced in the polls, the UML was reduced to a shadow of its former self.
In this new........