Facing the House of Representatives for the first time since assuming office, Prime Minister Balendra Shah revealed something startling. He told lawmakers that he had only recently learned that Nepal and India faced border complications extending beyond Nepal’s own territorial claims.

Nepal’s Foreign Ministry scrambled within hours to clarify that the Prime Minister was referring to cross-border holding in no-man’s land, the Dasgaja strip, and not to any sovereign territorial concession. The clarification was technically defensible. The damage, politically and diplomatically, was not so easily undone.

This was not a gaffe. It was a symptom.

Tzvetan Todorov, drawing on the 12th-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor, once wrote that the highest form of political maturity is the ability to see one’s own country from the outside. Statesmanship requires precisely that disposition. What we witnessed in the parliament suggests that Nepal’s Prime Minister has not yet acquired it.

As the negotiation theorist, I. William Zartman observed that when leaders make bellicose or conciliatory speeches, such statements are—or at least should be—carefully calibrated signals of attitude and intent to another country. Understanding the diplomatic signals is easy. Deploying them with precision is the work of statecraft. A prime minister who discovers “only after becoming Prime Minister” that his country has border complexities with its larger neighbour has not been doing his diplomatic homework. He has been doing something else entirely.

Political scientists use the term ‘idiosyncratic foreign policy’ to describe moments when a leader’s personal instincts override institutional judgment. Some of the most consequential foreign policy failures of the modern era have emerged from precisely this dynamic. In Nepal’s case, the consequences may not be catastrophic in the short term. But the direction is troubling.

Precision matters here because careless language in border politics carries lasting consequences. Nepal has not encroached upon Indian territory. This is a documented legal and cartographic fact. Former Ambassador Deep Kumar Upadhyay stated categorically, on the very day of the Prime Minister’s remarks, that no record exists of Nepal extending occupation into Indian land. What exists along parts of the open border are cross-holding arrangements—a product of riverine boundary shifts and traditional agricultural practice—where farmers on both sides have historically cultivated land that a technically drawn boundary places on the other side. These are not acts of state encroachment, but the lived realities of borderland communities.

And those are the communities, overwhelmingly Madheshi, that bear the sharpest edge of this unresolved situation. Not officials in Kathmandu who debate it abstractly, not the scholars who publish on it, but the farmers of Susta, whose fields have been consumed by the shifting Narayani River and Indian occupation. The families along the Sarda and Mahakali corridors, whose livelihoods straddle a boundary Kathmandu has never been serious about protecting. The young men shot by India’s Sashastra Seema Bal in disputed zones, whose deaths are mourned locally and forgotten nationally. The Eminent Persons Group (EPG), a bilateral panel established in 2016 precisely to address these ground realities, produced a report that has since gathered dust. That institutional attempt at resolution has been abandoned. The border remains a wound dressed with ceremony and left to fester.

For Nepal’s first Madheshi Prime Minister, whose political legitimacy is rooted in the very plains most scarred by the disputes, to frame the issue as one of mutual encroachment is not merely inaccurate. It reflects a failure to recognise the unequal realities of the border communities that live with them every day.

It is worth pausing to ask what political science and diplomatic history would make of a sitting head of government who announces without evidence, in a national legislature, that his country has been conducting territorial encroachment, without prior institutional consultation.

Scholars of comparative foreign policy would classify Sunday’s parliamentary statement under what Robert Putnam called the breakdown of the ‘two-level game’: The essential discipline of managing domestic political messaging without undermining international negotiating positions. When a leader speaks in parliament without that discipline, he is handing leverage to the other side. India has said nothing official in response. It does not need to. The statement sits in the record. It will be retrieved, quoted and deployed the next time Nepal asserts a position of Lipulekh, Kalapani or Limpiyadhura.

The parliamentary statement did not occur in isolation. On the same day, Rabi Lamichhane, chairman of the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party, travelled to New Delhi at the invitation of India’s Ministry of External Affairs to meet Prime Minister Modi, Foreign Minister Jaishankar, NSA Chief Doval and Foreign Secretary Misri. Every official that Nepal’s Prime Minister had declined to engage under his ‘equal stature’ doctrine is now being engaged by his party chairman, in the other country’s capital, at the other country’s invitation. This is institutional confusion. Kathmandu is sending Delhi contradictory signals, and Delhi will take note.

This pattern of turning international engagement into a theatre of competing performances is what happens when a political movement built on disrupting domestic institutions attempts to apply the same logic to foreign affairs. Algorithms reward disruption. Diplomacy punishes it.

Transformative leaders have understood this distinction. Manmohan Singh used the enormously complex and politically costly India-US nuclear deal to reposition India within the global non-proliferation architecture. He nearly fell from power. But he understood that foreign policy capital, once spent wisely, generates compound returns. Lee Kuan Yew spent decades building Singapore’s foreign policy as a precision instrument, understanding that a small state’s survival depends on being more institutionally serious than its larger neighbours, not on performing symbolic resistance to them.

There is a trajectory that Nepal must confront honestly. In 2023, as the Mayor of Kathmandu, Balendra Shah placed a Greater Nepal map in his office, as a symbolic counter to India’s Akhand Bharat mural. Constitutional experts pointed out that international territorial claims fall entirely outside municipal jurisdiction. The gesture played well on social media. As the Prime Minister in 2026, that same instinct produced Sunday’s parliamentary statement. The performance has simply moved to a larger stage, with higher stakes and a more attentive international audience.

Nepal deserves a foreign policy commensurate with its geography and its history—one built on institutional seriousness, strategic clarity and leaders who understand that the open border with India is not a metaphor. It is where the Madheshi farmer rises before dawn. It is where an unmarked pillar determines whether a field belongs to one country or another. It is where, when things go wrong, a young man is shot, a ministry sends a diplomatic note, and the note goes unanswered.

That is Nepal’s foreign policy challenge. It cannot be addressed through symbolism, viral messaging or rhetorical improvisation. Borders demand statecraft. And foreign policy cannot be learned after taking office.