The Echo of 1954: Why Nepal’s India Policy Keeps Repeating Old Mistakes

In the summer of 1954, BP Koirala, one of Nepal’s most respected statesmen, reached Patna after days of travel through the western Terai-Madhesh in Nepal. He met a small circle of journalists, and the conversation, later printed in Nepal Pukar, showed a man troubled not by ideology but by the direction his country’s leadership was taking. Nepal and India were negotiating at uneven levels of confidence and competence. The Koshi project sat at the centre of that imbalance. BP noted a widely held belief in Nepal that if the dam were built slightly further north, the country would gain more and the cost would fall. Yet Nepal’s government could not present a revised proposal. The state that claimed to speak for the people could barely state its own position.