Mr Musk, may I put to you, with the greatest respect, a question my country has long hesitated to ask: is Starlink a militarised vehicle? I raise it not as a challenge but as an invitation to clarity. Upon its answer rests a decade of Nepali policy shaped less by our interests than by our apprehensions. I suspect the world already knows the answer. Kathmandu has simply not yet found the confidence to hear it.
The regional ledger speaks with quiet eloquence. India has embraced the service. Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are free to choose it. Scores of nations recognise low-Earth-orbit connectivity for what it truly is: critical civilian infrastructure and a public good. It carries high-speed, low-latency bandwidth to the remotest classroom, sustains communication along disaster corridors when terrestrial networks fail, brings telemedicine to mountain clinics days from the nearest specialist, and gives a free press a voice no severed cable can still.
For Nepal, this is not a convenience; it is a lifeline. A mother in labour in Humla, a rescue team on a collapsed trail in Rasuwa, a farmer checking market prices in Dolpa, a student in Mugu attending a lecture from Kathmandu or Boston: each is served, and none is threatened. The satellites overhead carry lessons, diagnoses, weather warnings and livelihoods to places the fibre may not reach in our lifetimes.
Yet the official answer has barely changed from one government to the next: Starlink, we are told, might cause discomfort to our northern neighbour. It is reported that the Honourable Foreign Minister, Shishir Khanal, offered a similar reflection when a former Budhanilkantha contemporary raised the matter with him. I hold the Minister in regard and appreciate the delicacy of his office. I would only observe, gently, that a sovereign nation need not write its connectivity policy around the anticipated sentiments of any neighbour, however valued.
A Door Opened, and Quietly Closed
I did not merely ask the question from a distance. I worked to bring the answer to our door. I approached Mr Musk's office through two of its most capable leaders: SpaceX's President, Gwynne Shotwell, the remarkable executive who has guided the company's rockets from ambition to routine, and Lauren Dreyer, who leads Starlink's business operations. At my request, they were persuaded to engage directly with the then Prime Minister, KP Sharma Oli. It was a rare opening: the world's foremost satellite enterprise, reaching out in good faith to a Himalayan nation that needed it more than most.
What followed was instructive. The conversation did not become a partnership. Instead, the one who had initiated it was set aside. I record this without bitterness, for it tells us something important about how decisions are made in our capital. An opportunity that would have connected millions of Nepalis was weighed not on its merits for our people but on the discomfort it might cause elsewhere. The door had been opened from the outside. It was closed from within.
I share this so that Mr Musk's office knows its courtesy was not wasted, and so that Nepal's citizens know the connection they were denied was, for a moment, within reach.
A Note for President Zelensky
At the United Nations General Assembly, President Zelensky named Nepal among forty-seven nations whose citizens have been drawn into Russia's war. He appealed to governments to protect their people from the deceptions that lead young men to a distant front. I am grateful to him for naming us, and for speaking with moral seriousness about lives that too many had chosen not to count.
If I may add a note to the record, it is this: the issue did not begin in New York. It was first raised in Nepali, on the floor of our own Parliament, and I was the one who raised it. At a time when the government preferred silence and the chamber preferred comfort, I stood to say that Nepali young men were being recruited into the Russian army, many through agents who presented a battlefield as a contract of employment, and that some were already dying in a war that was never theirs. I broke this issue in our Parliament before it was a headline, before it was a diplomatic concern, and long before it reached the podium of the General Assembly.
I flew the Ukrainian flag when doing so invited ridicule rather than applause. When Israel suffered the assault of 2023, I raised its flag above my home and wore it upon my cap in the House, in solidarity with a friend in grief. Some neighbours smiled; some colleagues thought it eccentric. I bore it gladly. There was no audience to impress, only families at Tribhuvan International Airport waiting for sons who came home in silence.
Israel, I have long believed, deserves a warmer place in our diplomacy. It is not our adversary, our largest market, or our neighbour. It is a friend: a small, innovative democracy that has trained our young farmers, welcomed our caregivers, and mourned with us when Nepali students lost their lives on its soil. Friendship of that kind should be treated as policy, not ceremony.
President Zelensky, you did not know who had spoken first. That is no fault of yours. The first speech was delivered in a language the General Assembly does not read.
How Great Powers Actually Operate
Every great power pursues its own interest. This is not a complaint; it is the settled grammar of international relations, and small nations that forget it pay for the lesson. I was reminded of it, most instructively, over a cup of coffee in Kathmandu with a distinguished diplomat of a major capital.
She was candid, and I valued her candour. Her government's assistance, she explained, follows its own short-term and long-term strategy; its priorities are set in her capital, not in ours. A Nepali's goodwill, however sincere, cannot reshape another nation's strategic framework. I shared my reflections on our geography, on our place between two great neighbours, and on the growing relevance of the Indo-Pacific to the Himalaya. She listened courteously and held to her brief, as any good diplomat should. We each settled our own bill and parted cordially.
That meeting distilled the whole method of great powers. They do not act on gratitude, sentiment or history. They act on assets, timing and return. A small nation earns attention in one of three ways: by possessing something they need, by standing somewhere they cannot ignore, or by offering a partnership that serves their long-term design. Nepal possesses all three, in its water, its position above the Tibetan plateau, and its people. What we have lacked is the discipline to present them as a coherent offer rather than a collection of requests.
Henry Kissinger, who spent a lifetime observing how powers rise and endure, captured the distinction in Diplomacy: "Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them." Nepal has produced many fine analysts. The great capitals are waiting, whether they say so or not, to meet its builders.
President Ronald Reagan understood that the most powerful instruments are often the quietest. At London's Guildhall in 1989 he foresaw that "the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." Within months the Berlin Wall had fallen. The microchip fired no shot; it let people see, speak and know. That is the true case for open skies over Nepal: connectivity is not an instrument of conflict but of knowledge, commerce, safety and dignity.
A Word for Those Who Prefer Shepherds
India knows our geography as intimately as we do. We share treaties of long standing, an open border, sacred rivers and a civilisational inheritance no communiqué can diminish. I have spoken for India in our Parliament when it was not the prevailing fashion: on Galwan, where Indian soldiers fell guarding a frontier in the high cold; on Kargil; on Operation Sindoor; and on the closure of the Kodari crossing, which weighed heavily on our traders and pilgrims. I spoke when few others would, because I believed it right.
It is in that spirit of friendship that I offer a candid observation about how New Delhi calculates. Its arithmetic in Kathmandu has tended to favour predictability over conviction. It invests in shepherds, the party intermediaries who can be briefed, guided and relied upon, and it discounts speakers, because open voices are harder to forecast. An officer of the Research and Analysis Wing is said to have wondered aloud what purpose my writings now serve, describing me, with some humour, as an ulcer. If the remark was made, I accept it in good spirit. An ulcer is simply the body's honest report that something deserves attention.
The difficulty with this arithmetic is that it measures the wrong asset. Managed relationships appear stable until the day they are not. The events of September 2025 showed how quickly a political order that seemed settled can be swept aside by a generation no intermediary had consulted. Influence banked with a few individuals depreciates when those individuals fall. Goodwill earned among a people appreciates across generations.
There are, I would respectfully suggest, three lessons New Delhi might yet draw. First, that Nepal's youth, not its intermediaries, now set the direction of its politics, and they notice who listens to them. Second, that friends who speak publicly for India carry a credibility no quiet arrangement can purchase, and they should be valued rather than dismissed. Third, that a Nepal which is connected, prosperous and confident is a better neighbour than one kept dependent, because a secure neighbour has no reason to look elsewhere. India's greatest strategic asset in Nepal has never been any single government. It has been the affection of ordinary Nepalis, and that affection is worth tending.
A Respectful Request to Washington
I have long been among those in Nepal who spoke for a constructive American presence in our region, publicly and at some personal cost, because I believe the United States, at its best, is a steadying safeguard for the democratic world. My advocacy was never directed against any nation. The Indo-Pacific; Taiwan, within the One China framework Nepal respects; resilient connectivity; a free press at home in its own mountains: these were contributions toward placing Nepal on a map wider than the two neighbours with whom we share our borders and our lasting friendship.
I would respectfully invite Washington to see Nepal not as a footnote to wider regional strategy but as a partner in its own right. If there is interest in the perspective of a Nepali parliamentarian who spoke consistently for American engagement, for Israel's security, for Ukraine's survival, and for the peaceful benefits of satellite connectivity, the record is readily available: the speeches, the flags, the opened door to SpaceX, and the names of young Nepalis who went abroad for work and did not return.
The Record Is Open
I have sought, from the floor of the House and in many quieter rooms, to draw the attention of the world's capitals to Nepal's interests, not as a petitioner for favour, but as a Nepali who believes our people, including those who fell far from home, deserve to be seen and remembered. That effort continues, with or without a seat in Parliament.
Mr Musk, the question remains open, and your office already knows how far we came toward answering it. President Zelensky, the first speech was not in New York; it was in Kathmandu, and it was mine. Friends in New Delhi, the shepherds are easy to find; the speakers are not, and they are worth more. And to every great capital that weighs Nepal by its own interest: we understand the method. We are learning to answer in kind.
The record is open. You are warmly invited to consult it.
