Oli’s ASEAN Voyage Spotlights Nepal-Southeast Asia Relations

In May, Nepal’s prime minister paid a visit to Cambodia and Vietnam. Though the trip was just one among several interactions between Kathmandu and these countries, it had symbolic and substantive significance in terms of not only these bilateral relationships, but also how Nepal views the region within its broader foreign policy.

While Nepal has some religious and cultural links with Southeast Asia, Kathmandu’s strategic attention to the region is a much more recent phenomenon. Indeed, it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that Nepal began focusing more on Southeast Asia as part of a wider effort to diversify its ties away from India. Today, Nepal’s Southeast Asia outreach involves both managing issues with individual countries amid broader trends – such as the entry of Nepali workers into Southeast Asian states such as Malaysia and the Philippines and the development of ASEAN economies – and developing ties in broader groupings, like the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), founded in 1997, which groups Nepal and four other South Asian countries along with Myanmar and Thailand.

That has continued on over the past year as well under the leadership of K.P. Sharma Oli, who assumed the prime ministership in May 2018. Last year, some of Nepal’s diplomatic events highlighted its ties with Southeast Asian states, including BIMSTEC’s fourth heads of state summit in Kathmandu in August and the Asia-Pacific Summit in December. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen attended the December summit, paving the way for both sides to make advances in economic and people-to-people ties.

This May, Nepal’s relationship with Southeast Asia was in the headlines again with Oli’s trip to the region. Oli was on a pre-arranged official visit to Vietnam and Cambodia, which lasted from May 9 to May 16. On his way back to Nepal, Oli made a brief stopover in Bangkok, where he was greeted by several Thai government representatives. According to Nepal’s foreign ministry, during the visit, Oli was accompanied by several officials, members of parliament, and parts of the business community as well.

This was the first such official visit by the Nepali prime minister to either Vietnam or Cambodia. In Vietnam, both sides discussed the links between the two countries’ ruling communist parties, and Oli attended UN Vesak Day, a festival commemorating the birth, enlightenment, and death of Buddha, whose birthplace was in Lumbini in Nepal.

Substantively, the visits also saw the advancement of tangible cooperation. In Vietnam, the two sides inked an agreement on visa exemptions, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to establish a bilateral consultation mechanism between the two foreign ministries, and a letter of intent on a framework agreement on trade and investment. In Cambodia, four agreements were signed on bilateral cooperation involving air transport, visa exemptions for diplomats and government passport holders, and an MoU to open an embassy in Nepal.

In spite of the significance of the visits, it is also important to keep perspective. Nepal’s ties with Southeast Asian states, in general, and Cambodia and Vietnam, in particular, are in some cases still quite basic. On the economic side, for instance, while Oli’s Cambodia visit saw several references made to enhancing trade and business ties, bilateral trade between the two sides was recorded as being worth only about $170,000 last year, mostly textile products that Cambodia exports to Nepal. And on the diplomatic side, the agreements reached on subjects such as visas, embassies, and foreign ministry frameworks emphasized that even the basic aspects of diplomatic collaboration are only now being established.

More generally, it is unclear as of now whether Oli’s ASEAN voyage will translate into greater attention to the region further down the line. Apart from Nepal’s own large array of domestic and foreign policy challenges, it was striking that Oli’s visit saw questions raised within Nepal about the wisdom of the visit itself. Some experts and politicians in Nepal directly questioned the extent to which this would advance Kathmandu’s interests, given the lack of ties that currently exist, relatively speaking; the burden such visits would put on the government’s budget; and the illiberal nature of the Vietnamese and Cambodian governments.

Irrespective of these uncertainties, Oli’s ASEAN voyage was testament to his government’s willingness to boost ties with individual Southeast Asian states as part of its wider foreign policy. There remain opportunities for Kathmandu in the region, despite the challenges that remain.