The answer given to parliament
Answering the lawmaker Nishkal Rai in the House of Representatives, Nepal's foreign minister Shisir Khanal said the government has no clear information on whether it possesses the official treaty documents. He added that there are traces showing documents related to some treaties are kept at the National Archives, but that nobody knows whether those are the actual official texts. Behind that answer stands the conclusion the National Assembly's Delegated Legislation and Governance Committee reached on 22 July: after a search of libraries, archives, repositories, the Department of Archaeology, the Narayanhiti Palace Museum, the Ministry of Law and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, neither the original of the 1816 Sugauli Treaty nor that of the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship could be found.[1]
This is not Nepal's first encounter with the same gap. In 2016 the Eminent Persons' Group on Nepal-India Relations also failed to find the original of the 1950 treaty. A decade later the same search ran again and ended in the same place; what changed is that the question now came from a minister at the parliamentary podium rather than from an expert panel's report. Sugauli was signed with the East India Company after the Anglo-Nepal War and established the country's territorial boundaries; Nepal's objection in its north-western corner is always tied back to that text.[1]
The missing copy and the missing authority
A state's inability to find its own copy does not void the treaty; texts signed in a year like 1816 go on living in the counterparty's archives and in published collections. What Nepal has actually lost is the institutional order that held that provision in its own hands and worked it year after year: the administrative continuity that keeps the document, governs the line and makes the objection routine. The committee's own list of search sites shows as much; a file that wanders between a palace museum and a department of archaeology is not in the hands of a boundary office. Another explanation is available: the documents may have been scattered in past political upheavals or during the transfer of the palace archive to the state, which would make this a single rupture rather than a settled administrative weakness. The committee's finding cannot separate the two.[1]
Why the question is being asked now also sits inside the report. The Kathmandu Post presents India and China's agreement to reopen the Lipulekh trade route as the development that has sharpened the border dispute. So long as a boundary merely stays contested, where the paperwork sits interests nobody; once goods begin moving across the line, someone asks what the claim rests on. The archival gap had been there for a decade, but its political cost arrived only when the two neighbours put that pass to work.[1]
The lesson from the Indus, and where it stops
This column has earlier taken up a water treaty that survived 1965, 1971 and 1999 and stopped in 2025, arguing that an arrangement's durability rests on what two governments practise more than on its text. The Nepal case continues that thought, though its mechanism differs. There both sides held the text and one chose to withdraw a practice; here Nepal has no practice to withdraw. That is exactly where the comparison breaks: the instrument Nepal has left is the objection itself.[1], [2]
The step to watch from here is clear enough. If the government reports back to parliament before the end of the year on whether the National Archives holdings are the official treaty texts, the argument will separate into a question of authentication or one of absence; if it does not, Nepal will go on objecting by reference to a text it cannot exhibit. The difference looks small, and it decides exactly what a party brings to a boundary table.[1]