Trickle-down Effect
On 9 July, Nepal’s cable operators suddenly announced that they would stop airing all private news channels operating from India. The decision had come in response to a Zee News show that claimed the Chinese ambassador in Kathmandu, Hou Yanqi, had enticed—or, as they put it, “honey trapped”—Nepal’s prime minister, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, into acting at China’s behest. The story was one in a series of unsubstantiated, and often absurd, reports that have emerged from a section of Indian media following the territorial disputes of May.
Less than a week later, cross-border tensions between the two countries flared up once again, when Oli remarked that the real Ayodhya lies near Birgunj—making Nepal, and not India, the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. More recently, only days after India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, laid the foundation stone for a new Ram
