Nepal accuses India of colluding with forces to topple elected government

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In a sensational development, India’s neighbour Nepal has accused the Narendra Modi government of making attempts to topple the elected government there.

This stunning charge came a day after Nepal cancelled the visit of its President to India and recalled its ambassador.

A report in The Hindu said that the recent spectacular deterioration in bilateral relation followed a week long battle of nerves during which Kathmandu accused New Delhi of backing a plot to topple the government in the Himalayan country.

“On three occasions over the last one week, we communicated to the Indian Ambassador in Kathmandu, Ranjit Rae, to stop supporting the political adventurism by our rivals which nearly toppled the government of Nepal,” Gopal Khanal, Senior Foreign Affairs Expert in the office of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli told The Hindu on the phone from Kathmandu.

Khanal claimed that the plot to break the ruling alliance, led by Oli, received support from India.

Nepal faced the recent political crisis on 3-4 May when the former Prime Minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ of the United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-Maoist), invited Sher Bahadur Deuba, leader of the Nepali Congress (NC), to form a combine and replace the government of Oli with a national unity government.

Nepal has accused India of facilitating Mr. Prachanda’s sudden rebellion. Prachanda’s UCPN-Maoist is an alliance partner of Oli’s Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML).

Quoting sources, the paper said that India had rejected the allegations. India has reportedly blamed Oli’s “petulant and un-diplomatic behaviour” instead.

“Nepal has been insinuating that India is involved in the efforts to undermine the government of Prime Minister Oli. Indeed, there are a lot of political challenges in Nepal which are enough to unite the rivals against Mr. Oli. Mr. Oli’s rivals came together on their own and India had no role in bringing them together,” said an official source in Delhi.

The latest allegation by Nepal has also come as a huge setback to India’s foreign policy under Modi, who had chosen the Himalayan country for his foreign visit after becoming prime minister in May 2014.

He had showered Nepal of series of ‘gifts’ and the media particularly TV channels had hailed his acts as a beginning of a new era in the bilateral ties of the two countries.

However, within the two years of coming to power, the bilateral ties between India has alarmingly deteriorated with Nepal siding with India’s arch rival China giving strategic blow to India’s foreign policy under Modi.

 

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