By P.K.Balachandran
June 19 (NewsIn.Asia): Emboldened by its success in arm-twisting Nepal into ratifying the controversial Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) compact in February, the United States took on the equally hard task of getting Nepal to join its State Partnership Program (SPP).
But the ambitious move to give a military dimension to US-Nepal relations has boomeranged. Faced with strident and widespread opposition, even the pro-US government of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba has sworn not to sign up for the SPP.
The SPP is a bilateral program which is outwardly peaceful in intent. But it is perceived to have deep-set military objectives with consequences not only for Nepal’s internal security, but also for relations with its two big neighbors, China and India. The impact on Sino-Nepal relations will be catastrophic if the SPP leads to stronger US-Nepal military ties. The Indian army’s exclusive and unique relationship with the Nepalese army will have got diluted, a prospect the conservative Indian top brass cannot reconcile with.
Be that as it may, a fact that cannot be brushed under the carpet is that from 2015 onwards, successive Nepalese governments, whether pro or anti-US, had sought admission to the SPP, apparently attracted by its potential to help Nepal tackle natural disasters. In October 2015, Nepal wanted US humanitarian assistance to meet the challenges posed by the earthquake and sought membership of SPP. Nepal’s request was repeated in 2017 and 2019.
The SPP got no public attention until very recently. According to veteran Nepalese journalist, Yubaraj Ghimire, this was because there was no requirement for the SPP to get parliament’s ratification unlike in the case of the MCC. But what eventually brought the SPP under suspicion or scrutiny was a flurry of high-level US diplomatic activity in Nepal in a short span of time after the ratification of the MCC. The frenetic US activity made observers wonder if the US…