ABSTRACT
South Asia's inherited territorial geographies are contested and perplexing. Power shifts and inclinations among South Asian nations are constantly shifting. Providing assistance, Indian remedies to domestic issues in smaller nations were not problematic. In the 1980s and 1990s, Nepal expected India to interfere when Bhutan's cultural nationalism led to the expulsion of Nepali-speaking Lhotsampas. Nepal accused India of not interfering in its neighbour's affairs (Chakraborty 2021a). Nepal recently claimed sovereignty, visibility, and participation in neighbourhood politics, including the revival of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a winding but uninterrupted route to the seas for landlocked BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) countries. Nepal claimed the desired centrality in the geopolitical space between South Asia and the Trans-Himalayas (Chakraborty 2020).
