The UML senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal is the single Nepal’s political personality, among the crowd, who has maintained “balanced” policy while dealing with Nepal’s immediate neighbors-both South and North.

True to Nepal’s balanced policy, Mr. Nepal talks high of India while being in Indian Territory and has very high regards for the Northern neighbor, China, when he is invited by the Chinese authorities. He knows how to balance the ties.

In fact he is the only one who has realized that Nepal was in reality a yam in between two boulders as had been defined by Nepal’s Unifier Late King PN Shah long time ago.

In a way thus Mr. Madhav Nepal could be taken as the one who has kept this country so far non-aligned or say have maintained equidistance or even practiced the notion of equi-proximity in the foreign policy conduct of Nepal in her dealings with both India and China.

Very recently, Madhav Nepal was in China wherein he assured his Chinese hosts that Nepal shall honor all those agreements and protocols that have been inked by China and Nepal in the past and thus the Chinese must not suspect that Nepal may not remain true to its made commitments with China.

Needless to say, Mr. Nepal who equally is close to the Indian establishment and thus he may convince the men in the Indian establishment, including PM Modi, with the same vigor and energy to how he takes the Chinese into confidence as and when he lands in the Indian soil.

Nepal as a nation-state is fortunate to have such a son, as Mr. Nepal, who is in himself a pride of the entire nation at least in the domain for foreign policy who could balance the tricky ties of Nepal even in between the two giants, the Dragon and the Elephant in an easy manner.

The Kathmandu based Chinese Ambassador paid a courtesy call on Mr. Nepal on Monday and had a very fruitful discussion in between the two wherein the present state of Nepal-China relations were discussed.

During the meeting, Mr. Nepal is reported to have requested the Chinese envoy to think of the very proposals of Nepal wherein the latter needs greater road connectivity’s with the adjoining autonomous region of Tibet, China.

In the meantime, the Indian PM Modi is all set to meet President Xi Jinping, April 27-28, wherein the two leaders are to “reset” their disturbed ties with each other during the Doklam incident.

Analysts are afraid of that as and when Modi meets President Xi, the former may “reset” Nepal’s relations with China as we, the Nepali population, have had witnessed during the Lipulek issue.

To recall, China and India had mentioned the inclusion of LIPULEK area for their bilateral trade without consulting Nepal as the Lipulek land mass belongs to Nepal.

A blunder that China has yet to correct.  China takes Nepal as one of its reliable partners though.

The Chinese envoy perhaps met Madhav Nepal in Kathmandu to remind the senior UML leader that Nepal FM Pradip Gyawali have had an intensive discussion with the Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan on Nepal-China relations when the former was in China and that the verbal agreements made then by the two must be taken due care of.

Ji Liang writes, ( Source Twitter) that, “Wang Qishan met with Gyawali and expressed the hope that the governments of China and Nepal will jointly implement the existing consensus and agreements and take the construction of the “Belt and Road Initiative” as an opportunity to push bilateral relations to a new height.

Whether Madhav Nepal requested the Chinese envoy to correct the Lipulek blunder or not remains yet a puzzle.

April 23, 2018.