Nepal’s former foreign minister Dr Bhekh Bahadur Thapa has drawn an interesting analogy around Indo-Nepal border disputes.

In a recent television interview, Dr Thapa likened India to an elephant that has trespassed into your territory, and now the elephant is not willing to retreat. Your predicament, according to Dr Thapa, is that the enormous animal does not listen to your instruction to return, nor do you have enough strength to shove it out. His analogy was in relation to India’s unresponsiveness to Nepal’s concerns about its newly published political map and the associated border encroachment indictment of the latter.

Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary of India who was also Delhi’s envoy to Nepal between 2002 and 2004, recently claimed in an article that such disputes have not been resolved mainly due to Nepal’s lack of interest in resolution. This scribe, however, seeks to argue why it is more of a problem on India’s side instead of the other way around. There are two critical actions/inactions that show that India is unwilling to resolve some longstanding issues with Nepal, including the current border dispute.

Please click here to read the full “Why is the elephant indifferent?” article published at South Asia, written by Griffith Asia Institute PhD Candidate, Bikram Timilsima.