Every September, Nepal gets about 15 minutes at the world’s biggest podium, the UN General Assembly. For most of the last decade, our prime ministers used that time the same careful way to praise Nepal’s Himalayan and Buddhist heritage, ask the world for climate justice and development support, and, whatever else is said, avoid naming India and China in the same sentence. However, that habit broke this year. And the reasons why matter for every Nepali, not just diplomats.

Look back at Sher Bahadur Deuba’s 2017 address, delivered as Nepal was still rebuilding after the 2015 earthquake. He spoke of building connectivity ‘with countries on both sides’, never naming India or China, even though everyone in the hall knew exactly who he meant. Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s 2023 speech called Nepal ‘a bridge between two large economies’. KP Sharma Oli’s 2024 statement spoke only of ‘our large neighbours’ while discussing trade and investment, again, never India, never China, by name, together.

Sitting between two giant, nuclear-armed neighbours whose combined economy dwarfs our own, Nepal’s leaders have long treated silence as protection, a way to avoid looking closer to Delhi than Beijing, or the reverse. It has been, in its own way, a form of survival diplomacy.

Then the floods came, and the silence broke. On September 25 this year, Prime Minister Balendra Shah, Nepal’s youngest-ever prime minister, stood at the same podium and did something none of his three predecessors had done. In his full address, he thanked ‘our immediate neighbours, India and China’ by name for helping after catastrophe struck, and proposed a named ‘Himalaya Climate Resilience Mechanism, led by Nepal, India and China’ to monitor dangerous glacial lakes and coordinate disaster response.

The context explains why. Four weeks earlier, the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods, triggered by a surge that crossed into Nepal from the Tibetan side of the border and swept downstream toward India, became one of the deadliest disasters in Nepal’s modern history. By September 24, Nepal Police had confirmed 1,453 dead and nearly 4,800 still missing across Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and Chitwan. 

“Climate change does not recognise borders,” Shah told the Assembly. “Glaciers and floods do not travel with stamps on passports.” You cannot ask ‘countries on both sides’ to share satellite data and coordinate rescues. You have to say who you mean.

What makes this more than a one-off is that Shah had already tested this same instinct earlier this year, and it went badly. In late May, he told Parliament that border encroachment was not only India’s fault but Nepal’s too, and revealed Kathmandu had raised the matter with both China and the United Kingdom. India read this as an attempt to internationalise a bilateral dispute, and Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal had to travel to New Delhi weeks later to calm the fallout, insisting Nepal was not seeking outside mediation.

Seen against that episode, Shah’s UN speech looks less like a young leader speaking out of turn, and more like a deliberate correction: the same willingness to name our neighbours, but this time wrapped in gratitude and cooperation instead of grievance. That is a meaningful lesson learned in six months of office, and it deserves to be recognised as such.

Shah’s proposal also lands at a genuinely useful moment. India and China have spent the last two years cautiously rebuilding trust after their 2020 border clash, resuming direct flights, pulling back troops, and, importantly, agreeing this year to restart cooperation on sharing data about rivers that cross their shared border. Nepal is not asking two estranged giants to start from zero. It is asking them to widen a partnership they are already rebuilding, to include the country sitting in the middle of them.

The real test comes in six weeks, when world leaders gather in Türkiye for COP31, the UN’s biggest climate summit, focused this year on adaptation and delivering long-promised climate finance. Nepal should use the opening created by Shah’s speech to press for three concrete things, not vague appeals.

First, turn the Himalaya Climate Resilience Mechanism from a UN speech into a signed agreement before or during Belém; even a modest, technical pilot on glacial-lake monitoring would be more valuable than a grand announcement with no substance behind it.

Second, demand that the Loss and Damage Fund and Global Environment Facility, which Shah correctly called ‘grossly inadequate’, commit specific, fast-disbursing grants, not loans, for mountain nations facing glacial-lake outburst floods, since Nepal cannot afford to borrow its way out of a crisis it did not cause.

Third, push for the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, home to nearly two billion people downstream, to get the same dedicated attention at COP31 that small island states have long received. Nepal should not let its case get lost between the more visible sea-level-rise narrative and its own less-photogenic mountain crisis.

None of this is guaranteed. A proposal from a podium costs nothing; building it costs political will on three sides, and Nepal’s own foreign ministry is still managing the bruises from Shah’s May remarks. But the comparison across four speeches tells us something worth holding onto: Nepal’s old caution was reasonable, not cowardly, given our position. What changed this year is that a flood too large to talk about, combined with a leader with less to lose from being direct, opened a door that his three predecessors, for good reasons of their own, chose not to walk through. Whether India and China walk through it with us will say a lot about what kind of neighbours we actually have, and whether naming names, done carefully, might sometimes be the wiser risk for a small country to take.