Nepal’s New PM: Balancing China, India and a Yak-Dung Economy on the Roof of the World
KATHMANDU—When Nepal’s parliament swore in Sushila Karki as the Himalayan republic’s 38th Prime Minister last week, the world’s reaction was a polite golf-clap followed by the usual Google search: “Nepal still has a government?” Indeed it does, though like most things Nepali—yaks on airport runways, Everest traffic jams, constitution-drafting that outlasts the average houseplant—it arrives a decade late and several Sherpas short of expectations.
Karki, a 61-year-old former Supreme Court justice who once compared politicians to “leeches with LinkedIn profiles,” now commands a fragile coalition stitched together with the same dexterity used to patch up altitude-sick trekkers. Her ascent matters beyond the Kathmandu cocktail circuit because Nepal sits squarely between two nuclear frenemies—India and China—who treat the country like the last slice of pizza at a G20 sleepover. Whoever holds Singha Durbar gets to referee Beijing’s Belt-and-Road creditors and Delhi’s rice-and-refugee diplomacy, a task roughly as pleasant as moderating a Twitter space between Musk fanboys and ayahu shamans.
Internationally, Karki’s installation is being parsed for tea leaves on everything from hydropower contracts to the global opium supply chain. The Biden administration, fresh from remembering Nepal exists, dispatched a “congratulatory” cable that read suspiciously like an invoice for 1.2 million surplus AstraZeneca doses. Meanwhile, the EU lauded Nepal’s “gender milestone”—Karki is the first woman to run the country without being royalty, a matriarchal upgrade that plays well in Brussels PowerPoints next to slides on Rwandan coffee and Mongolian wind farms.
Yet seasoned observers (read: people who’ve had their luggage lost by both Turkish Airlines AND Yeti Airlines) note Karki inherits a state held together by trekking permits and remittance duct tape. One-third of GDP comes from citizens abroad—mostly stoic Gurkhas guarding Gulf sheikhs and convenience-store clerks in Sydney sending cash home so their villages can afford… more plane tickets out. It’s the kind of circular economic model that would make a Nobel laureate weep into his regression model.
Still, the West needs Nepal to work. Climate diplomats require Himalayan glaciers for PowerPoint doom loops; NATO needs a neutral venue for “retreats” where spies can pretend to meditate; and Instagram influencers demand uninterrupted vistas for sunrise selfies captioned #innerpeace #sponsored. If Karki’s cabinet collapses—historically, Nepali governments have the half-life of a TikTok trend—those stakeholders will be forced to convene in actual conflict zones, where the Wi-Fi is as reliable as a Russian ceasefire.
China, for its part, has already gifted 1.6 million vaccine vials and a 3-D printed statue of a smiling Xi Jinping, presumably to remind Nepalis that viruses—and sovereignty—are best imported in bulk. India responded by reopening petroleum taps it had pinched during the 2015 blockade, proving that nothing says “fraternal affection” like the threat of winter starvation. Between them, Karki must pirouette on a geopolitical tightrope woven from copper mines, prayer flags, and the occasional Yeti meme.
Domestically, her first test is a fertilizer shortage that has farmers trading cow dung like crypto. If she can’t fix agriculture before the monsoon, the country will reenact its 2009 rice riots, only this time with better smartphones and worse Bollywood soundtracks. Then there’s the post-quake reconstruction: seven years after the earth shrugged, 800,000 Nepalis still live in sheet-metal origami, a housing policy IKEA would describe as “minimalist to the point of criminal.”
Will Karki survive? The smart money says she’ll last about 18 months—long enough to legalize same-sex mountaineering and ban TikTok on Buddha’s birthday, but not quite long enough to move the capital out of the seismic bull’s-eye. When she finally resigns, the international community will issue grave statements about “democratic erosion,” then book the next flight to Lukla before the runway cracks widen.
And so the global carousel spins: another prime minister, another power-point, another chance for the world to pretend that stability in Kathmandu is one hydro-dam, one gender quota, one IMF structural adjustment away. Meanwhile the Himalayas keep crumbling, the glaciers keep melting, and somewhere a yak coughs up a face mask. Welcome to the top of the world—population 30 million, elevation 1,400 meters, cynicism unlimited.
