By Phurbu Thinley
Dharamsala, October 12: Prime Minister of Nepal, Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, has urged China for extending the Beijing-Lhasa railway line till Kathmandu, PTI reported.
The report indicated that the new demand could have strategic geopolitical implications for India.
“The economic ties between Nepal and China could be taken to a new height if the railway line that has reached up to Lhasa from mainland China could be extended up to Kathmandu, and economic infrastructure could be developed on the Himalayan transit points between Nepal and China,” Prime Minister Nepal noted.
In return, the Nepalese Prime Minister has assured not to allow any anti-China activity from its soil.
“I would like to assure our Chinese friends to become assured on behalf of Nepal that the Himalayan republic will not allow any anti-China activities on its soil,” the Prime Minister said, during the inauguration of the Chinese cultural festival in Kathmandu on Sunday.
Nepal has recently announced its decision to tighten Tibet border by deploying armed police along its northern Mustang-Tibet border, raising criticism that the move was prompted by pressure from China against the Tibetans.
In recent times, the government in Nepal has come under increasing pressure to suppress anti-China activity on its soil. Although Nepal government denies it is acting under pressure from Beijing, Tibetan activists, however, complain that Nepal has responded by adopting a harder line against the exiles.
On October 1, as Beijing marked the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, police in Nepal quietly rounded up dozens of Tibetan exiles they said were suspected of planning to hold anti-China protests in Kathmandu. Later on the same day, police in Kathmandu arrested around 80 Tibetans as they tried to stage a protest outside a Chinese embassy building.
The pre-emptive arrests in early morning raids across the capital Kathmandu on October 1 has been seen by analysts as a new sign of an increasingly hardline approach by Nepalese authorities to the country’s Tibetan population.
More than 20,000 Tibetans live in Nepal since fleeing their homeland in 1959 with the Dalai Lama after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Every year nearly 2,500 Tibetans cross the Himalayas and pass through Nepal en route to India where the Dalai Lama runs a Tibetan government-in-exile.
Activists now say that since the March 2008 unrest in Tibet, the number of people travelling through Nepal from Tibet has slowed dramatically. The latest plan revealed by Nepal’s home minister to bolster security along the northern border with China could restrict arrivals further still.
