Despite knowing Nepal first hand and covering it for years in my columns, I have not been able to stop being amused by the whispers and noises of the ‘conspiracy theories’ found here. Team Oli, which is at the helm in Kathmandu presently, runs on red herrings, not remotely on red communism that also has some crucial thin and thick texts written in the 19th century ranging from The Communist Manifesto to the voluminous Das Kapital. Apparently, practicing a string-free ideology is much easier than running a government and attempting to handle some less glamorous issues like development, governance, migration, unemployment and so forth. Time and again, Prime Minister Oli has effortlessly proved it.

If the Indians next door are now habituated to listening to one-sided ‘maan ki baat’ of their elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the policy wonks, the Nepalis are having their own brush with absurdity where the beginning and the end of matters are ‘conspiracies’. In South Asian politics, conspiracies have long lives. Often known for not wasting time on fact checking, Modi has compared India’s best performing state Kerala with Somalia in terms of human development indicators. Something along similar lines, Oli held ambassador Deep Kumar Upadhyay accountable for his overnight crack in terms with Prachanda.

I did meet Upadhyay on that fateful but slumbering Friday afternoon at his office before he got an unfriendly call from the Nepali prime minister a few hours later. He did not appear to me as someone who was interested or had the capacity to make or break the government in Kathmandu, although his technical weakness as produced by Oli and echoed by a sea of stories include his card-holding gesture of the Nepali Congress and having an extra round of coffee with Ranjit Rae in Kathmandu. Alas, this was not the confused regime’s last sigh, as it travelled in rage to sack Upadhyay, the man who tried doing well in the confines of diplomacy.

Now on Nepal, Modi is a detached observer as seemingly he has passed the baton to his party to deal with. As per sources at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party high command has zeroed in on a comfortable policy of wait and watch. Apparently, due to the failure of the leaderships to engage clearly, Nepal-India ties are hitting hard like never before. This coupled with Oli’s sacking of an envoy who was serving Nepal’s most crucial foreign mission exemplify the comedy of errors. 

Right after Oli’s failed visit to India in February, I met the CEO of Investment Board Nepal (IBN) Radhesh Pant in Kathmandu. While he recounted the number of memorandums of understanding (MoUs) signed during the prime minister’s visit, my query remained linear: How many of them are going to come on the ground? He was yet bullish, and I stayed unconvinced, not because I doubted him but for knowing the realities of the MoUs. As someone with a policy background, my argument was that it is politics that rules economics in our part of the world and not vice versa. Three months later, IBN was asked to search for a new CEO. I felt sorry for Pant who knew policy matters but not the politics of his government.

I had to recall these two cases to get close to the point: Nepal is a land of meddling instability. While Modi and Oli can play the bullying-bullying game, the Nepali masses cannot afford to be its cheerleaders. My brother-in-law had shared with me how out of the total 66 students in his batch, only six are left in Nepal. He lives in the US but naturally keeps his focus on the motherland which is swiftly turning into a country without youths. The outbound migration from Nepal is already above abnormal; and sadly even with the massive potential, their country offers no hope to them. 

Just for the sake of those large numbers of forgotten Nepalis, the Oli government or whoever heads Nepal next must think twice before playing with fire at home or beyond its borders. Whatever lies in the future for Oli, it can be said based on his highly incompetent performance so far that history will be adverse to him for his complete disregard for implementing the post-earthquake reconstruction programme, amending divisive provisions on federalism and citizenship in the new constitution and tackling poverty. A spade is a spade and it can’t be a red rose. This holds true for the government and citizens alike. Oli is bound to count easier survival strategies by stoking ultra nationalism rather than delivering on urgent political and development issues. Thus, the masses should rubbish the manufactured conspiracies and China should not be allowed to do Nepal’s homework.

Thakur is a New Delhi-based journalist