Pranaya Rana

BEFORE MIDDAY on 6 March, the first winner in Nepal’s general election the previous day had already been declared. Ranju Darshana (Neupane) of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) clinched the Kathmandu-1 constituency with 15,455 votes – over 9000 more than her closest competitor, Prabal Thapa of the Nepali Congress. The other heavyweight candidate from the constituency, Rabindra Mishra of the royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), came in a distant third.

Darshana’s early win seemed to portend the rest of the election results. As of the time of writing, the RSP is leading in the contests for over 100 out of 165 directly-elected seats in the lower house of the country’s federal parliament, and looks poised to dominate it. Even on the ongoing count of votes for proportional-representation seats, which make up the rest of the 275-seat chamber, the RSP has a wide advantage. 

An RSP majority seems imminent; given the way things are going, the party could even achieve a two-thirds supermajority, something that has only happened once before in Nepali politics. In 1959, the Nepali Congress won 74 out of 109 seats in the country’s first-ever democratic election after leading an insurrection against the Rana autocracy. Now, more than half a century later, the RSP looks like it could claim near-total control of the lower house and, subsequently, the executive government.

The RSP wave had been building. The party was all everyone had been talking about ever since Balendra Shah, a former mayor who burst onto the scene by winning the Kathmandu mayoral election in 2022, joined the RSP this January. Shah’s entry into the party galvanised voters both young and old, especially as the 35-year-old embarked on a nationwide tour, making speeches and meeting voters. The RSP promised to make him the new prime minister if it won the election. 

Shah pointedly chose Jhapa-5 as his constituency, aiming to send a message by defeating K P Sharma Oli – the head of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist), who was forced out as prime minister by the Gen Z protests last year – on his home ground. As of 7 pm on 6 March, Shah was leading Oli by over 10,000 votes. Barring some miracle, this will be only the second time in Oli’s long political career that he has lost an election.

 
 

The symbolism of it all is unmistakable. The RSP, a relative political newcomer, was only founded in 2022, but surprised everyone by almost immediately becoming the fourth-largest party in parliament in that year’s election. It struck a chord with voters by calling out the failures of the old political establishment – composed most prominently of the Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML and the Maoists – and promising to clean up a political culture of massive corruption, nepotism and misgovernance. Shah rode the same public discontent as an independent to become the mayor of Kathmandu. With the result of this election, the meteoric rise of Shah and the RSP is complete, and a new guard has taken over Nepali politics, much as the Gen Z protestors last year desired and demanded.

The potential scale of the RSP’s victory, however, has taken many by surprise. The Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML and the Maoists – the latter now part of the new Nepali Communist Party – are struggling to take their directly elected seat tallies into the double digits. Of the familiar faces from the old guard, it appears that only the Nepali Communist Party’s Pushpa Kamal Dahal – the head of the Maoists – will end up in parliament. Everyone else, from senior leaders to influential second-rung politicians, has been rejected. The RPP has been royally trounced, putting an end to speculation over a return of the monarchy in Nepal.

From one perspective, the vote can be read as being less about choosing new, alternative political actors and more about a wholesale embrace of the RSP and Shah. Even some popular new faces, like the Ujyalo Nepal Party’s Kulman Ghising, were trailing at the time of writing. The seeming winner in Kathmandu-3 at Ghising’s expense is the controversial Raju Pandey of the RSP. Pandey was the chief of Kathmandu’s municipal police under Shah and was severely criticised for his role in the manhandling and violent eviction of street vendors. Ghising was earlier the chief of the Nepal Electricity Authority, and was credited with ending crippling power cuts across the country.

This phenomenon could be attributed to the recent “presidentialisation” of Nepali politics. One of the major demands of the Gen Z movement, which saw Nepal’s persistent instability as stemming from coalition politics and parties squabbling over power-sharing, was a switch to a directly elected chief executive. This demand led many parties to declare a prime ministerial candidate ahead of the election, and to craft their messaging around these individuals rather than their parties. 

The RSP picked Shah over its party chief, Rabi Lamichhane, another anti-establishment newcomer in 2022 whose star has dimmed since he became embroiled in numerous fraud and embezzlement cases. He also broke out of prison during the Gen Z protests, earning widespread condemnation. The Nepali Congress chose Gagan Thapa, who had recently ousted the ageing incumbent party president, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and pledged reform to make the party more youthful, in tune with the demographics of a country with a massive youth bulge. The CPN-UML stuck with K P Sharma Oli, who remained obstinate to the end in refusing to cede control of his party or to acknowledge any Gen Z demands. In the end, it seems only Shah managed to really invigorate the electorate with this approach.

NOW COMES the hard part. With a majority, the RSP, if it so desires, will not need to tie up with any other party to form a government. Shah will become prime minister and could form a cabinet composed wholly of his party members. He can thus circumvent the messy process of coalition-building, something that he has little experience with. The second-largest party – likely the Nepali Congress – will become the primary opposition, and things will proceed from there.

The immediate tasks before the RSP are two-fold: institutionalise the demands of the Gen Z protests, and figure out how to navigate the unfolding conflict in West Asia, where nearly 1.7 million Nepalis live and work.

Addressing Gen Z demands must begin with the public release of the Gauri Bahadur Karki Commission report, which was withheld to avoid disrupting the election atmosphere. The Karki commission was formed in the aftermath of the Gen Z protests to investigate state excesses. The reluctance of the interim government headed by Sushila Karki to release the report suggests that the commission has held influential political and state actors responsible for the deaths of 76 Nepalis on 8 and 9 September, the height of the Gen Z movement. The commission itself has no prosecutorial powers, but it can recommend action. It will be up to the new government whether or not to act on those recommendations. 

Shah and many in the Gen Z movement hold Oli, who was prime minister at the time, responsible for the deaths in September, particularly of the 19 people who were shot dead by security forces on 8 September. They believe that Oli and Ramesh Lekhak, the home minister at the time, along with the chiefs of the Nepal Police and the Armed Police Force, were directly responsible for state officers firing live ammunition at unarmed protesters. Shah’s animosity towards Oli has been evident. Shah refused Oli’s offer of a public debate, calling him a “terrorist” and saying that he would not share the stage with a murderer.

If the Karki Commission report has found any of these actors culpable, a Shah-led government will likely move to prosecute, which could set off another violent confrontation. If Shah does not act, the Gen Z activists on whose backs he was elected will protest again, and this time he will be in the executive seat, deciding whether to use force. Given the kind of violence he unleashed against street vendors under the guise of enforcing the law while he was mayor of Kathmandu, some fear he might not act very differently.

There are other longer-term Gen Z demands, including the establishment of an independent commission to investigate corruption and improvements to government service delivery, which will be more complex and process-driven. Setting up a commission on par with the current Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority, which has been criticised by Gen Z for failing to curb corruption and being politically motivated, and improving service delivery by reforming Nepal’s young federal system, will both require constitutional amendments. These require the approval of two-thirds of the parliament. The RSP might be able to cobble together the required support in the lower house, but its amendments could easily be blocked by the upper house, where the party has no representation at present. This could change down the line after provincial and local elections, since provincial and local representatives elect the upper house, but for a party and an electorate seeking rapid change it will be a point of friction and frustration.

But before it gets to this, the new government will have a new and pressing concern on its plate: the safety and security of the nearly two million Nepalis currently working in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Kuwait, all countries that are currently being pummeled by hundreds of Iranian missiles. The primary belligerents in the present conflict in West Asia – the United States, Israel and Iran – all show no signs of backing down anytime soon, which means the war is likely to escalate in the days to come. One Nepali has already died in Abu Dhabi, and thousands more are at risk, given that most of them are workers not afforded the same safety measures as expatriates from the West.

A decision will need to be made soon on whether to bring all these Nepalis home – and, if so, on how to organise and fund such a gargantuan evacuation. Prudence will be necessary here as any decision is likely to have far-reaching consequences. Preemptively evacuating a million Nepalis from West Asia will lead to a massive homecoming of unemployed and angry men who are likely to protest the lack of domestic jobs – a long-standing and potentially explosive problem in Nepal. But waiting until the war gets worse might close the window for evacuations, leaving Nepalis at the mercy of bombs and missiles. Situations like these are where a government must be decisive yet also reasonable and pragmatic, not taking action on emotion alone. This will be the Shah government’s first big test, and it starts immediately.

MAYORS AND MUNICIPAL CHIEFS have considerable executive authority at Nepal’s local levels of government. At the federal level, power is constrained by checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches. As prime minister, Shah cannot act with abandon like he did while he was the mayor of Kathmandu; he will need to work more democratically, which will mean talking to others, including journalists and political opponents, and bringing them on board with his plans and policies. Shah’s democratic test begins now. The years ahead will show whether he is truly committed to the democratic experiment or is simply a populist demagogue with a penchant for authority.

Coalition politics, the norm in Nepal in recent times, might have led to instability, but it also served to constrain the authoritarian ambitions of people like Oli. A majority government could well be stable, but it will also have much more freedom to unilaterally make decisions that could harm the country's long-term health. The latest vote tallies indicate that the opposition will be weak. The Nepali Congress, likely to be the primary opposition, will have to confront its own internal divisions as the ousted Deuba faction will hold Gagan Thapa accountable for the humiliating loss. No other party is likely to have the numerical strength to constrain the power of the RSP. In a parliament dominated by the RSP, Shah might be emboldened to consolidate power to get things done.

But then again, his attempt to centralise authority could meet resistance from his own party. Shah might be a recent entrant to the RSP, but he has already commandeered its image. The party is now more closely identified with Shah than with its chief, Lamichhane. Even during campaigning, Lamichhane took a backseat to Shah, who had a much more visible presence. This situation is not likely to continue for much longer. Lamichhane has as much of an ego as Shah. Nepalis remember all too well the tantrum he threw when he was removed as the home minister in 2023, after a series of media reports alleging he had not legally reacquired his Nepali citizenship after initially giving it up to become a US citizen. They also remember the tantrum that Shah threw as mayor when his wife was stopped for a routine traffic check. Lamichhane called Nepal’s more prominent media editors alcoholics in league with each other, while Shah had threatened to burn down Singha Durbar, the seat of the executive, long before it was actually set on fire during the Gen Z protests. There are reasonable fears that a conflagration between the two is just awaiting a spark.

In some ways, Shah and Lamichhane are akin to Pushpa Kamal Dahal and K P Sharma Oli when the two were co-chairs of the Nepal Communist Party, a short-lived attempt some years ago to merge their two respective parties. Presented with a choice over who to have as prime minister, Dahal was initially happy to allow Oli to take the post first under a “gentleman’s agreement” stipulating that he would have his turn later. But Dahal increasingly grew tired of playing second fiddle, and when the time came, Oli was unwilling to step aside. This clash of personalities eventually led to the dissolution of the country’s largest communist force, which also had a near two-thirds majority in parliament at the time.

Lamichhane currently appears content allowing Shah to become the face of the party and the head of the executive. But, eventually, being second-in-command in the party he founded could well begin to rankle, and he might then not appear so satisfied. The two will have to find a way to work together, which could be difficult. With Shah as prime minister, Lamichhane will likely want to go back to controlling the home ministry. But will Lamichhane be satisfied with this portfolio, or will he eventually move to become the prime minister himself? What happens if Lamichhane is convicted of the crimes he has been accused of? Shah will have to decide whether to sully his image by carrying water for Lamichhane or respect the rule of law and abandon the party chief.

If things come to a head, the RSP could go the same way as so many of Nepal’s political parties – splitting down the middle.

Not all is doom and gloom, though. The RSP’s win brings in a much-needed breath of fresh air into Nepal’s stolid politics. After almost two decades of rule by varying configurations of the same three political parties, Nepalis – especially young Nepalis – are finally optimistic that things can change for the better. Gen Z, a generation assumed to be lazy and apathetic, has come into its own as a political bloc, directly influencing the direction the country will take and, by extension, their own futures. This election saw many younger candidates and a younger electorate, finally more in line with the country’s demographics. It should be noted, however, that the candidates were overwhelmingly male, with women comprising just 11 percent of candidates for direct election, even as they make up 50 percent of the electorate. This cohort of women candidates has been subject to gendered harassment, abuse and hate speech, primarily online. 

The watchword now is “possibility”. The 5 March election has shown that it is possible to cast off the yoke of decades of entrenched political interests. History shows that Nepalis will vote for the possibility of something better when given an opportunity. An electorate galvanised by youthful anger and frustration has overwhelmingly voted to give a new political force a chance – much as it did for the Maoists in 2008, when they first stood for election after laying down arms.

But the danger today is the same as the one that lurked in 2008. The existing system, built over decades of patronage and nepotism, is resilient. The most visible manifestation of this system is the heavily politicised bureaucracy, which remains untouched by the recent changes. Shah and the RSP will have to deal with it and also contend with all the trappings of executive power. If they are not careful, they could end up like the Maoists, coopted and transformed into a shell of their former revolutionary selves. The RSP would do well to remember that the Maoists were soundly penalised at the ballot box after they failed to deliver on the hopes they had raised.

Shah and the RSP now shoulder the hopes of generations – of Gen Z, of course, but also of millennials and Gen Xers who have decided to break with Nepal’s old political powers and put their faith in the young and new. If the RSP does not deliver, there is a very real danger that popular anger will turn not just against individual actors but against the democratic system itself.

The article appeared in the himalmag