To its credit, the team of KP Sharma Oli in Beijing somehow convinced the Chinese to sign the BRI framework agreement on Wednesday. The Chinese don’t do hasty negotiations. A day earlier, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli had met his Chinese counterpart, Li Qiang. On the same evening, there was a meeting between Oli and Chinese President Xi Jinping. A joint statement was issued later in the day, outlining all the major developments of Oli’s trip. The much-hyped framework for BRI cooperation had found no mention in the statement. China watchers back home started bemoaning the ‘abject failure’ of Oli’s China trip. But then Team Oli, which included his chief advisor Bishnu Rimal and chief economic advisor Yubaraj Khatiwada, pulled a rabbit out of the bag.

The final terminology used to describe the money that will come into Nepal under the BRI rubric has some ambiguity, as ‘aid financing modalities’ can include both grants and loans. But then, such in-between terminologies are common in bilateral negotiations where each side is looking to keep certain constituencies back home happy. The important thing is that both the top leaders of the Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML, the two largest parties in the country, agreed on the term. And when it was presented to the Chinese, so did they. The ‘aid financing modalities’ do not preclude all kinds of loans. In fact, the understanding seems to be that the term means that Nepal will consider low-interest loans such as it was getting from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. That is how it should be. How can Nepal accept loans from the rest of the world but shun it from China? The Congress leadership also seems to have realised the flaw in its earlier reasoning that no kind of loan from China was acceptable.

The good thing is that the agreement with China is likely to last as it has the backing of the country’s two major parties, who together make nearly two-thirds parliamentary majority. It was the differences between these two on loans from China that helped them flesh out the outstanding issues over the BRI framework. This in turn added clarity to the issues. (Some differences on the BRI persist inside the Congress, but that is to be expected in a democratic party.) Perhaps the Chinese this time thought that even though they were being asked to hurry, the proposal on the table, which had the backing of Nepal’s two major political parties, was worth signing.

There are still many unknowns about the BRI. But at least Nepal stood its ground when necessary, while also not being rigid. This signals a maturing of Nepali diplomacy. After the BRI framework agreement, we again hope that the Congress and the UML and other parties can come to similar understandings on Nepal’s relations with India and the US–and on Nepal’s other vital ties. Consensual foreign policy is the need of the hour. Right now, it is worth celebrating that China, which harboured deep suspicions of the Congress, will be more amenable to dealing with Nepal’s biggest party. Their mutual suspicions were poisoning Nepal-China relations. Perhaps the long-stuck train of the BRI in Nepal will now finally start chugging.