After Dahal stand down in round 1, fight with Oli is now for cabinet berths in Nepal reshuffle ahead

Chinese Ambassador to Nepal Hou Yonqi is expected to be the main player behind scenes to ensure that Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli remains in power and NCP remains united.

Updated on: Jul 22, 2020, 12:42:02 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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After a dramatic stand down by Nepalese Communist Party co-chairman P K Dahal during a political duel with Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli last week, the stage is now set for a possible cabinet reshuffle in the Himalayan Republic after the party standing committee meets on July 28. It is the allotment of cabinet berths to various factions of NCP which will define the politics ahead.

The Chinese Ambassador to Nepal, Hou Yonqi, on her part is preparing for another political battle ahead in an uncertain Nepal.

While it is known that the morning meeting between co-chair Oli, Dahal and Madhav Nepal on July 15 was acrimonious to say the least, it is still not clear who ensured the stand down from Dahal after a lunch with Nepalese PM the same day and at what cost. It is only after this crucial lunch meeting with two associates of the two leaders negotiating on the sidelines that Oli refused to step down either from PM post or the party post and Dahal caved in by saying that he was opposed to the division of the party. Oli got a walkover in the duel last week and Dahal is now looking towards more Cabinet berths to maintain his political clout. The Chinese Ambassador to Nepal, Hou Yonqi, on her part is preparing for another political battle ahead in an uncertain Nepal. “We do not know whether it was lure of incentives or threat of vulnerabilities that settled the round last week. But what is definitely know is that the Chinese had a major role to play in avoiding the bust-up,” said a western diplomat based in Kathmandu.

Ambassador Hou, the master handler of Kathmandu

Although the politics in Nepal continues to be fluid and uncertain, Hindustan Times explored the background of Ambassador Hou, who is at the centrestage of the political games in the Republic.

Born in Shanxi province in March, 1970, Hou is a master of arts and holds a major in Urdu language from Peking University, and is fluent in Hindustani language. While many assume that she has an PLA Intelligence background as she was Director, Department of External Security Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2012-2013, Hou for the record is a career diplomat with a firm belief that diplomacy is war by other means.

For the past 24 years since 1996, Ambassador Hou has been attached to department of Asian Affairs and rose up to one of the four Deputy Director Generals in that department from 2015-2018 before becoming a master handler of Nepal. Barring a stint as Attache in Pakistan in 1996-2001 and 2007-2009 tenure as Consul at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles, Hou has served only in Asian Affairs department to date.

While Ambassador Hou has been successful in keeping the NCP flock together and orchestrated Oli’s needling of India through cartographic expansion, Beijing has not been so-successful in reading the Nepalese society. Even though China has now offered to revive one of the two hydropower projects in Nepal for free, the hill people of Nepal are still to be enamoured.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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