The name Sapana means dream in Nepali. Sapana Pradhan Malla’s, the senior-most justice on Nepal’s Supreme Court, parents gave this name to her not as a wish but as a lament. They had wanted a son. She trained at Harvard and Delhi, spent three decades fighting for women’s rights in law, and served nine and a half years on the bench. She was Acting Chief Justice when her government looked at her record and chose someone else.

On May 7th, the Constitutional Council chaired by Prime Minister Balendra Shah, the former Kathmandu mayor who rode a Gen Z wave to a landslide election victory in March, recommended Justice Manoj Kumar Sharma as Nepal’s 33rd Chief Justice. Sharma was fourth in the seniority order. Two other justices ranked above Sharma were also passed over. The decision was not unanimous though as the National Assembly chair and the leader of the opposition registered formal written dissent, saying they could not accept a recommendation that “violated established procedures and tradition.”

The Prime Minister’s response was blunt. Tradition alone, he said, cannot justify appointments. Merit, expertise, and judicial capability must also matter. He is not wrong about that and that is where the conversation must begin, and where Nepal’s commentariat has mostly refused to go.

Nepal’s constitution does not require the most senior justice to become Chief Justice. Article 129 sets a floor at least three years of Supreme Court service but leaves the selection to the Constitutional Council. The convention of appointing by seniority dates, as defenders of the practice note, to the post-Rana era, making it roughly seven decades old.

What made this particular departure explosive was not merely the breach of protocol. It was the identity of the person bypassed. Nepal had its first female Chief Justice only in 2016, when Sushila Karki, a septuagenarian former advocate known for her zero-tolerance approach to corruption became the 26th to hold the post. Her tenure lasted less than a year before an impeachment motion, widely regarded as politically motivated, suspended her. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time said the attempt to remove her gave rise to “serious concerns about the Government’s commitment to the rule of law.” She went on to write a memoir, Nyaya (Justice), and a novel, Kara (Prison), and then, in a twist that only Nepal could produce, became interim Prime Minister following the Gen Z protests of September 2025 that toppled KP Sharma Oli.

Karki handed over power to Shah’s government only six weeks before his Constitutional Council sidelined Nepal’s second woman in line for the same court’s top post. She is among those who have publicly raised concerns about the recommendation process.

Two days after being bypassed, acting Chief Justice Malla addressed the 74th Law Day ceremony in Kathmandu. “Justice cannot prevail under fear or influence,” she told the assembled legal fraternity. “Whether it is the fear of a powerful government or the threat of impeachment, judges must rise above such narrow constraints.” She called on the Nepal Bar Association, civil society, and the media to protect judicial independence from what she described as “structural conspiracies.” She also said, for those paying attention, “I myself fought discrimination and injustice throughout my life. Our fight is still not over.”

These are stirring words. They are also, it must be said, the words of a litigant in her own cause, delivered from a judicial platform, directed explicitly at the government that had just declined to elevate her.

The response to this speech in Kathmandu was largely celebratory. Legal activists filed a writ to annul the Constitutional Council’s recommendation. Former prime minister Baburam Bhattarai added his voice to the chorus of criticism. The framing was consistent and simple. A qualified woman had been denied what was rightfully hers, and the motive must be understood as political suppression of women.

Shah’s government chose Justice Sharma because, by their account, he is the better-qualified candidate for the specific institutional challenges facing Nepal’s Supreme Court. More than 22,000 cases sit pending. Public trust in the judiciary has been eroded by years of allegations about corruption and political interference. Whether Sharma is genuinely better equipped to address these than Malla is a question that deserves examination but in the resulting storm, almost no one examined it. The story was, from the moment the decision was announced, entirely about gender.

Malla’s own career offers a clue to the complication. She left a lucrative corporate law practice in the 1990s because, as she has said, she was troubled by how the law discriminated against women. She founded the Forum for Women, Law and Development. She contributed to the drafting of the Human Trafficking Bill, the National Women Commission Bill, gender equality legislation, and succession rights reform. They are also the achievements of an advocate, a campaigner, a person who came to the bench with a defined mission.

But Nepal’s judiciary does not need more advocacy. It needs the kind of judge who looks at a case and follows the law wherever it leads including, sometimes, to conclusions that cause discomfort to the causes one holds dear.

There is a serious and largely taboo argument worth making here. Because activist lawyers produce a particular kind of judge. One who is sensitive to outcomes, oriented toward correcting past wrongs, and inclined to weigh human stakes alongside legal merits. These are not neutral qualities. In a house or office, they may even be virtues. At the highest bench in a country, they become a problem. Claire Lehmann, the founder and editor of Quillette, has written and published extensively on the distinction between what she calls the “care” orientation more commonly found in the moral psychology of women and the “justice” orientation that formal legal reasoning demands. Her argument is not that women make bad judges. It is that when institutions responsible for dispassionate adjudication are staffed or led by people whose identity and professional history are inseparable from advocacy for a particular group, the result is not neutrality but a different kind of bias, one that wears the costume of principle.

This is an argument that polite opinion in Nepal and in most of the Western-influenced discourse that shapes elite conversation there refuses to have. It is easier to say that any bypassing of a senior female judge is automatically discriminatory than to ask whether the career that brought her to seniority is the right preparation for the role.

There is a version of this story in which Shah, having promised to run Nepal differently from the corrupt machine politicians who preceded him, decided that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should be the most capable jurist available rather than simply the next in line and that this decision happened, in this instance, to disadvantage a woman. That version deserves at least as much attention as the version in which a misogynistic government kicked women out of their rightful place.

It is worth noting that Shah’s government includes women in senior positions. His Constitutional Council meeting was attended by the Deputy Speaker, a woman. His Law Minister is a woman. The framing of this decision as an act of gendered malice requires one to ignore quite a lot of contradicting evidence.

It is also worth asking what the seniority convention was actually doing. Seniority systems exist, in part, to depoliticise appointments to remove discretion from powerful actors and replace it with a neutral rule. But Nepal’s recent history suggests the convention was already failing at that purpose. Shah’s decision to select on grounds other than seniority is, in this light, less a revolutionary break than an honest acknowledgment that the convention had become a fiction.

And yet the breach matters. Not because Malla was entitled to the post as a woman, but because predictable rules protect the independence of any judiciary. If a chief justice can be chosen on the basis of executive preference even well-intentioned, merit-based preference then future executives will do the same, and not all of them will have Shah’s stated reasons.

Nepal has made genuine, hard-won progress on women in public life. Sushila Karki became chief justice, then prime minister. The constitution mandates representation. Women now make up 13.8% of judges, still low, but higher than a generation ago. Sapana Pradhan Malla’s career, whatever one thinks of the outcome here, represents a real advance in the range of people who can reach the top of the country’s legal establishment.

But progress is not served by the refusal to ask hard questions. It is not served by the assumption that any outcome disadvantageous to a woman is ipso facto unjust. And it is certainly not served by a sitting acting chief justice who uses a ceremonial platform to deliver what amounts to a political speech directed at the government and receives nothing but applause for it.

Malla said, “Our fight is still not over.” But if the Chief Justice of Nepal’s Supreme Court understands her role as a fight, one must ask what it is being fought for, and against whom, and what happens to the litigants who find themselves on the wrong side of it?That is the conversation Nepal is not having. It is the one it needs.

“Today RSP/Balen government completes one month,” wrote Rabindra Mishra, former vice-chairman of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party. Mishra, a veteran observer with no particular loyalty to the new dispensation, offered a remarkable ten-point audit. Ministers, he noted, are no longer seen draped in garlands weighing kilograms; they are not turning up to ribbon-cuttings and pointless receptions; roads are not blocked when the prime minister travels; and, for the first time in decades, there is “a sense of new and clean politics.” 

He concluded with a pointed wish, “the day the government legally dissolves the party-affiliated fraternal organisations of teachers, professors and civil servants, I would celebrate with a feast.” Those organisations, he wrote, are the termites of good governance. While they survive, clean administration is a fantasy. But it is one particular act – the clearing of squatter settlements along Kathmandu’s riverbanks – that has made the Balen government’s first month genuinely historic.

The operation began in the early hours of a Saturday. Hundreds of security personnel from the Nepal Police, the Armed Police Force and the Kathmandu Metropolitan Police fanned out along the Bagmati riverbank in Thapathali. Most residents co-ordinated and bundled their belongings into trucks. By midday the corrugated-iron shelters that had lined the riverbank for a generation were rubble.

The scale of the operation, as detailed by Deepa Dahal, the prime minister’s press and investigation officer, was considerable. Settlements in ward 9 (Gairigaun) and ward 31 (Shantinagar) of Kathmandu Metropolitan City were cleared of structures on encroached riverbank and public land. The Thapathali settlement in ward 11 was vacated by 12:30 in the afternoon. Nepal Police and metropolitan police officers did not merely stand guard but physically helped residents carry and transport their belongings. Residents themselves, Dahal reported, expressed solidarity with the government’s move, making the Thapathali transfer “peaceful and cordial.”

By the dusk, 144 families from Thapathali, Gairigaun and Shantinagar had made contact with government authorities. They were first taken to Dasharath Stadium in Tripureshwor, where their details were recorded. Temporary accommodation was then arranged for them in various Kathmandu hotels, while household goods were stored in two designated locations: the stadium itself and the Radhaswami Satsang Byas Nepal facility in Sundarighat, Kirtipur. Search and rescue teams continued working to ensure no residents had been left behind. Plans to clear settlements in Gothatar Buddhachowk and Manohara Tol in Kageshwari Manohara municipality were paused for the day.

The clearance of these three settlements is the most dramatic act yet of a government barely one month old. It is also, in ways that go well beyond urban planning, a political earthquake.

Nepal has a squatter problem of formidable proportions. Kathmandu Metropolitan City alone has an estimated 2,245 landless squatter families along its riverbanks. Across the country there are reckoned to be millions more. Fourteen separate commissions were formed after 1990 to resolve the issue. None succeeded. The settlements became a fixture of the capital’s landscape, and crucially, a fixture of its politics.

Communist parties, principally the CPN-UML, have dominated Nepali politics for most of the past three decades. Their leaders discovered early that squatters, disproportionately poor, landless and politically malleable, made reliable constituents. Promises of land titles and legal recognition were dispensed before elections. Nothing was delivered afterward. KP Sharma Oli, the CPN-UML’s four-time prime minister, was among the loudest critics when Balen, as Kathmandu’s mayor in 2022, first tried to clear the Thapathali settlement. Balen’s response was withering. The squatters, he said, had been “just a vote bank” for Oli and his party, used when convenient and abandoned otherwise.

The charge stung because it was true. Repeated efforts to relocate the settlements ended in failure, not least because federal governments, dominated by the left, declined to provide the municipal authorities the security forces needed to do the job. Balen’s own first attempt as mayor, in November 2022, ended in a violent clash that left 36 people injured, including the municipal police chief.

What changed is that Balen now controls the federal government. His Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a four-year-old anti-establishment outfit, won a landslide in the snap general election of March 5th, triggered by the September 2025 Gen Z uprising that toppled Oli’s government and left 77 people dead. The RSP won 124 of the 164 counted seats. It swept all ten Kathmandu Valley constituencies. Balen himself defeated Oli in the latter’s home constituency of Jhapa-5 by nearly 50,000 votes, the largest winning margin in Nepal’s parliamentary history.

Mishra was generous in acknowledging a point that Balen’s admirers sometimes gloss over. The RSP’s triumph was not Balen’s alone. Without Rabi Lamichhane, the party’s founder and formal chairman, mired in legal controversies but the architect of the RSP’s organisational infrastructure, none of what is now visible would have been possible. Balen and Lamichhane together delivered, in Mishra’s words, “an extraordinary electoral result rarely seen in the world.” They brought not a political but a generational transfer of power to Nepal, one that, Mishra judges, “will not easily be reversed.”

The eviction drive is part of Balen’s 100-point governing roadmap. The plan promises a GIS-based national database of landless squatters, verification of genuine beneficiaries within 60 days, and resolution through relocation and land allocation within 1,000 days.

Not everyone is applauding this move though. Amnesty International called the evictions a “dangerous erosion of the rule of law,” warning that clearing families without prior verification or guaranteed alternative housing risked turning a governance challenge into a human rights crisis. Few lawyers and Gen Z activists filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging the evictions as unlawful, arguing that affected families were not consulted and have nowhere to go.

The government has arrested Narayan Pariyar, the acting chair of the Squatter Front and a CPN-UML leader, on what police described as banking charges unrelated to the eviction. Critics find the timing convenient. And residents themselves tell a more complicated story. Manisha Lakandri, whose family has lived in Thapathali for over fifty years, said she had been asked to find her own housing. “We are searching for rooms, but we haven’t found any,” she said.

The government’s response is that eviction and rehabilitation can proceed in sequence.Verification of genuine squatters will follow promptly and land will be distributed. Senior advocate Raju Chapagain is unpersuaded. Eviction first, verification later, he argues, is simply not a lawful approach.

Whatever the legal merits, the political logic is clear. For three decades, Nepal’s communist parties built power partly by managing, rather than solving, the squatter problem. They positioned themselves as protectors of the poor against an indifferent state, while ensuring that the poor remained dependent enough to keep voting. Balen has scrambled this calculus entirely. By acting where the left only promised, he has stripped the communists of one of their most durable grievances. The electoral data from March tells the same story. The RSP did best in urban and semi-urban areas with high internet access, among voters who had grown up watching the left govern Nepal into stagnation. The CPN-UML was reduced to 25 seats. The Nepali Congress, once the country’s dominant liberal party, won just 38.

Nepal’s communists now face what one analyst called “a huge ideological crisis.” They lack a platform to rally citizens around. Their failures in government contributed directly to the emergence of a rapper-engineer who made cleaning up Kathmandu – literally and figuratively – his political identity. The Gen Z uprising that opened the door for Balen was itself a repudiation of a political class that the left had long led.

Balen’s approach carries its own risks. Moving fast without adequate resettlement guarantees could generate genuine suffering and political backlash. His own party shows signs of internal strain. Second-tier RSP leaders say they were not consulted before the eviction decision. And his record as mayor, which included accusations of using police against street vendors and demolishing structures without full due process, suggests a governing style that prizes speed over procedure. But in a country that has watched fourteen commissions do nothing, speed may be exactly what voters wanted.

  

Nepal’s Home Minister Sudan Gurung has tendered his resignation, citing conflict of interest concerns stemming from his shareholding in companies linked to Deepak Bhatta, the controversial businessman arrested on April 1 in connection with a Rs 3.7 billion money laundering investigation. In his resignation statement, Gurung wrote that ethics matter more than the position, and that no power is greater than public trust. He said he was stepping aside so that any investigation into his affairs could proceed without the shadow of influence that comes with holding the country’s most powerful law enforcement portfolio.

The gesture was, on the surface, noble. But it has left Prime Minister Balendra Shah in a political minefield.

The controversy erupted over the weekend when media outlets reported that Gurung held shares in Star Micro Insurance Company Limited and Liberty Micro Life Insurance, two firms also linked to Bhatta and the Shanker Group. Gurung’s name appears in the insurance company’s preliminary share register at number 49, representing an investment of approximately Rs 2.5 million. Neither company had yet gone public through an IPO.

The shares, reportedly purchased after the Gen Z movement, were not listed in Gurung’s public asset declaration submitted on April 12. Gurung maintained this was a matter of classification — that his broader stock market investments of over Rs 20 million had been declared — but critics found the distinction unconvincing. “I would not hide Rs 2.5 million worth of shares when my total declared assets exceed Rs 20 million,” he said in his public clarification. “This is simply a matter of classification.”

It was a very Nepali scandal. A minister who had spent months casting himself as the embodiment of clean governance was now explaining, with considerable urgency, why shares he held in a money laundering suspect’s associated companies were not, technically speaking, hidden. The interpretation of asset declaration rules may well be complex. But in politics, the appearance of wrongdoing often travels faster than the facts.

Bhatta, who chairs Infinity Holdings, had long faced scrutiny for allegedly leveraging political and bureaucratic connections to secure lucrative government contracts, operating with perceived impunity under multiple administrations. His arrest followed years of failed attempts to hold him accountable. Previous investigations were reportedly halted due to political pressure, but the case was revived after the new government led by Balendra Shah was formed. 

Making matters worse for Gurung was an old photograph that surfaced showing Bhatta being honoured as a donor at a 2021 event hosted by Hami Nepal, the NGO founded and chaired by Gurung himself. Critics raised concerns about the lack of detailed disclosures on Gurung’s part regarding investments tied to the very figures that his Home Ministry was in charge of investigating. For years, Gurung had been one of the loudest voices demanding transparency from Nepal’s political class. 

Gen Z Movement Nepal called on the government to immediately dismiss Gurung, arguing that allowing him to remain in office could influence the investigation process and represents a clear conflict of interest. CPN-UML demanded his resignation and called for a high-level investigation mechanism to be formed immediately. Nepali Congress issued similar demands. Even within the RSP, the mood was deeply uncomfortable. An RSP lawmaker and party office-bearer said that allegations against the home minister were more serious than those that brought down Labour Minister Deepak Kumar Sah just two weeks earlier. 

Prime Minister Shah held a separate meeting with RSP leaders late Monday evening as calls for Gurung’s resignation intensified. He also sought a written clarification from his Home Minister, which Gurung’s secretariat duly submitted. The procedural formality did little to quiet the noise.

Gurung spent Tuesday fighting back. On Facebook, he was unsparing: “Those who have had their eyes fixed on state money for years are scared now. The media trial and the orchestrated noise is nothing but their desperation. The action won’t stop, I won’t be rattled. I haven’t seen them work this hard even when someone was embezzling Rs 500 million a day.” Less than 24 hours later, he was gone.

It is worth pausing to remember how electric Gurung’s tenure felt just weeks ago. When he took office on March 26, he immediately captured the public imagination. He directed the arrest of former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and former Home Minister Ramesh Lekhak, names that had long seemed untouchable. He published arrest lists on Facebook like dispatches from a campaign. He named the Shanker Group’s Sulav Agrawal among those brought in as part of the broader Bhatta probe. For a country exhausted by the spectacle of powerful men walking free, it felt, briefly, like something had genuinely changed.

His tenure was nevertheless marked by controversy from the start. Party lawmakers complained that he failed to coordinate with elected representatives during inspections and interfered in matters handled by other ministries. Senior police officials had pushed back when he directed the arrest of Oli and Lekhak, insisting that legal procedures be followed first. The two were eventually released on a Supreme Court order after 15 days. Critics from the security establishment said Gurung had turned policing into a social media performance, treating operational decisions as content rather than process.

None of that diminished his popularity with the public. He had built his following not as a politician but as an activist, a disaster responder, a face of the movement that toppled a government. People wanted to believe in him. That is precisely what made the share controversy so corrosive.

Gurung’s resignation statement struck a starkly different register from his combative Facebook posts. It was reflective, principled and, in its way, unexpectedly moving. He invoked the sacrifice of 46 young people killed during the Gen Z uprising and said the government born of that sacrifice must be held to a higher standard. “My tenure has been one of honest work,” he wrote. “For me, ethics matter more than the position, and no power is greater than public trust.”

He was direct about his reasoning. He said he was stepping down so that an impartial investigation could take place without conflict of interest, and so that his continued presence in office could not be used to question the integrity of that process. “I have fulfilled my moral responsibility,” he wrote. “Now my appeal is this: if we truly want change, everyone must stand on the side of truth, honesty and self-accountability.”

He added, with some pointed edge, that some journalists who had covered him also held undeclared shares in various companies, and that those demanding a clean republic from others must be willing to demand the same of themselves. “Those who want Ram Rajya,” he wrote, “must also be capable of sacrifice and moral courage.”

It was a dignified exit, and a strategically intelligent one. By resigning on his own terms, invoking the movement’s martyrs and the language of conscience, Gurung denied his critics the satisfaction of a sacking. He left the door open to a return.

This is now the second minister to exit the Shah cabinet under a cloud in less than a month. Labour Minister Deepak Kumar Sah was removed after the RSP’s central disciplinary commission found he had misused his position to keep his wife on the Health Insurance Board. That looked like a government willing to police itself. Two departures in rapid succession looks like something else entirely.

The Bhatta investigation, which the RSP government had been actively championing as proof of its anti-corruption credentials, has now entangled its own Home Minister. Sources indicate the probe gathered pace following the formation of the new government, with instructions to expedite the case. The irony is sharp enough to cut. The minister tasked with overseeing law enforcement held shares in companies at the centre of the very law enforcement operation he was directing.

Investigators have said that anyone connected to Bhatta’s network remains under scrutiny, and the web of companies, politicians and businessmen continues to widen. The Shanker Group alone has borrowings estimated at close to Rs 200 billion from banks and financial institutions. With Gurung gone, the Home Ministry is now a vacancy at a sensitive and dangerous moment in that investigation.

For Prime Minister Shah, there is a deeper problem that no reshuffle can easily fix. The RSP came to power riding a wave of public hope cultivated through the blood and protest of the Gen Z movement, that a new generation could actually be different. The party won a landslide on March 5 on promises of transparency and good governance. Each cabinet controversy erodes that promise. Each resignation, however honourably framed, raises the uncomfortable question of how thoroughly the party vetted its own people before placing them in positions of enormous power.

The small mercy for Shah is that Gurung went of his own volition, and went with grace. He can say, as Gurung himself said, that the system is working, that questions were asked, pressure was applied, and a minister stepped back rather than dig in. The rather greater difficulty is that a government only weeks old has already lost two ministers, is managing one of the most consequential corruption investigations in recent Nepali history, and must now find a credible replacement to run the ministry at the heart of it all.

In his resignation statement, Gurung reminded the country of why so many had believed in him in the first place. He spoke of the youths who died, of the obligation their sacrifice creates, of the standard a public life must meet not by compulsion but by conscience. It recalled the way Nepal’s Gen Z movement itself had spoken, with a moral seriousness that felt new in this country’s politics.

Whether history judges him as the man who blinked under pressure, or the man who showed Nepal’s political class what accountability actually looks like, may depend entirely on what the investigation finds next. If he is cleared, his exit will read as an act of rare integrity. If investigators find more, the resignation will be remembered as the moment the floor gave way.

What is certain is that the story of Sudan Gurung, the DJ-turned-disaster-responder-turned-Gen Z icon-turned-Home Minister, is far from over. He remains a parliamentarian. He retains a platform. He has shown he can command both a crowd and a news cycle. In Nepal’s turbulent new political chapter, this is not the end of a career. It reads far more like the end of the first act.

The night before he was sworn in as Nepal’s prime minister, Balen Shah released a rap song. The track, “Jai Mahakali,” called for unity across the ethnic and regional lines that have for decades made Nepal so difficult to govern. His supporters shared it hundreds of thousands of times before dawn. The following morning, in black trousers, a matching jacket and his signature cloth cap, he took the oath of office and became the 47th prime minister of Nepal, its youngest ever and the first from the Madhesi community of the southern plains. That combination, the song and the ceremony, the artist and the engineer, the outsider and the head of state, tells you most of what you need to know about why this government feels different from everything that came before it, and why so many people with so many competing agendas are arguing about what it means.

His critics have settled, with some relish, on the comparison to Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president was an actor and comedian before a Russian invasion thrust him onto the world stage, and the argument runs that Mr Shah, similarly unburdened by diplomatic training or foreign policy experience, risks steering a landlocked nation between two of the world’s most powerful and assertive states into exactly the kind of miscalculation that a more seasoned hand would avoid. Nepal sits between India and China, each of which has strong and sometimes contradictory ideas about what a well-governed Nepal should look like and neither of which is above expressing those ideas through infrastructure budgets, trade routes or quiet political pressure. The fear is that a prime minister who campaigns with the emotional directness of a rapper and governs with the impatience of an engineer might, in a moment of nationalist sentiment or diplomatic overreach, say or do something irreversible.

His admirers, for their part, have settled on a different comparison, one that flatters more generously and instructs more usefully. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, transformed a tiny resource-poor island with an anxious geography into one of the wealthiest and best-governed nations on earth through sheer administrative will, the ruthless deployment of talent, and an absolute refusal to tolerate the gap between what a government promises and what it delivers. The fans who invoke his name when they look at Mr Shah are pointing at something real. The 100-point reform agenda approved in the first cabinet meeting, with its tight deadlines, named responsible officials and public monitoring dashboard, is precisely the kind of governance-by-accountability that Mr Lee pioneered. The cabinet of technocrats and young professionals, filled on merit rather than by party affiliation, is a Singaporean instinct applied to a Himalayan state. The willingness to move fast, make enemies and trust that the mandate will hold long enough to do lasting damage to the old order is, unmistakably, the Lee Kuan Yew method.

The difference, and it is a crucial one that Mr Shah’s admirers should hold onto, is that Mr Lee built his miracle without democratic accountability and Mr Shah must build his with it. Singapore’s founding father managed elections to prevent any serious opposition from emerging, used defamation suits against critics and tamed the press into compliant silence. Mr Shah arrived in office having beaten a four-time prime minister in his own stronghold by nearly 50,000 votes, the largest winning margin in Nepal’s parliamentary history. His authority rests not on suppression but on an extraordinary act of public trust. That is both more demanding and more durable than anything Singapore’s model required. If Mr Shah delivers, Nepal will have proved something that Lee Kuan Yew never tried to prove, that a state can be both accountable and efficient, that democracy and competence are not, as the Singapore story seems to suggest, in tension with each other.

Nowhere is this argument more pointed than in the question of political party-affiliated unions. Mr Shah’s decision to dismantle party-linked bodies in government institutions, and to replace student political organisations on university campuses with non-partisan student councils, has been called his most controversial reform but, in the view of this media, his most necessary one. Nepal’s trade unions and student bodies have not, for the most part, functioned as the engines of worker protection and civic education that their defenders now claim. They have functioned as patronage machines, through which the major parties colonised the civil service, staffed ministries with loyalists, and ensured that every institution of the state was, at some level, an instrument of political survival rather than public service. A nurse who wanted a hospital posting, a teacher who wanted a school placement, an engineer who wanted a government contract learned quickly that the right union card mattered more than the right qualifications. It made it dishonest in ways so deep and so normalised that most Nepalis had stopped expecting anything different.

Dismantling that system is not an attack on organised labour or on student politics. It is an attack on the capture of both by party machines that used them as tools of control rather than protection. Workers in Nepal’s public sector will retain the right to organise; what they will not retain is the right to do so under banners that serve the interests of party leadership rather than their own. Students will continue to debate, advocate and push back against authority; what they will lose is the system by which Nepali Congress and UML and their various satellites used campus politics as a recruitment pipeline for future political operatives. This is an entirely defensible reform in a country where the blurring of party interest and institutional function has been the root cause of almost every failure of governance in the past three decades.

The cabinet that will attempt to implement all of this is itself a statement of intent. Ten of fifteen ministers are under 40. Sasmita Pokharel, who turns 30 this year, runs the education ministry. Sudan Gurung, 38, who rose to national attention during the Gen Z protests of 2025, is home minister. Swarnim Wagle, the finance minister and the oldest at 51, is an economist of genuine distinction who has spent years arguing for exactly the structural reforms the government is now attempting. Nisha Mehta at health, Sobita Gautam at law, Pratibha Rawal at general administration represent a generation of professionals who built their credentials outside the party system and who have now been asked to reform the state that the party system built.

The Lamichhane question also hangs in the air, as it must. Rabi Lamichhane, the RSP chairman who remains Mr Shah’s formal party superior, faces serious allegations of fraud and money laundering. Their alliance was, in the phrase of one Tribhuvan University political scientist, a marriage of convenience. Marriages of convenience tend to become inconvenient at the worst possible moments, and Mr Shah will need to manage that relationship without allowing it to stain a government that has staked everything on probity. It is the one vulnerability in an otherwise unusually strong position, and his critics are right to watch it carefully.

But critics watching that vulnerability would do well to keep the wider picture in frame. Nepal has had 32 governments since 1990 and not one of them completed a full term. It has cycled through prime ministers with a regularity that made serious policy impossible and made the word reform, in Nepali political discourse, almost meaningless from overuse. What Mr Shah has done in three weeks is not merely announce reforms. He has arrested a former prime minister, sacked a minister for nepotism within days of appointment, published a public scorecard against which his own government will be judged, and filled every significant portfolio with someone who appears to have been chosen because they know their subject rather than because they know the right people. He released a rap song the night before his inauguration that asked, simply, to see Nepal smiling. He is now the one responsible for making that happen. The 30 million people who voted for him, marched for him, sang his songs and held their breath through the counting of ballots, are not going to let him forget it.

As a young economist in Washington in the early 2000s, Swarnim Wagle spent his days at the World Bank writing reports about countries that could not implement them. Nepal, the landlocked Himalayan republic where he was born, featured often in the footnotes. Its problems were well-documented: a tax base propped up by the remittances of young men working in Qatar, capital budgets that went unspent year after year, and an economy captured by a small circle of businessmen with better access to ministers than to markets. Mr Wagle knew the diagnosis. He is now, at last, in a position to attempt the cure.

On March 27th he was sworn in as finance minister in the government of Balen Shah, a rapper-turned-mayor whose Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) swept Nepal’s elections with 182 of 275 parliamentary seats, the largest majority in the country’s modern democratic history. Mr Wagle, the party’s vice-chair and intellectual architect, holds degrees from the London School of Economics, Harvard and the Australian National University. He spent 25 years at the World Bank and the UNDP’s Asia-Pacific bureau, where he shaped economic policy for 36 countries. He is also, unusually for a Nepali technocrat of his pedigree, a politician with a growing personal mandate. His majority in the Tanahun-1 constituency expanded from 15,000 votes in a 2023 by-election to nearly 22,000 in March.

The RSP’s central promise is to grow Nepal’s economy from below $45bn today to $100bn within five to seven years, sustained by annual growth of 7%. Mr Wagle is not the first Nepali finance minister to arrive with large numbers and good intentions. He may, however, be the first one who has read enough economic history to know why his predecessors failed.

His structural thesis is that Nepal need not follow the conventional path of industrialisation. Landlocked, seismically active and chronically short of the infrastructure that factories require, it should instead leapfrog into a knowledge- and service-driven economy, using digital transformation, fintech and eco-tourism to generate growth that geography cannot strangle. IT exports, currently negligible, are to reach $30bn within a decade. A target of 30,000 megawatts of hydropower is meant to shift the economy from remittance-funded consumption toward something that actually produces tradeable goods. Some 1.2m domestic jobs are to be created, enough to make emigration a choice rather than a condition of existence.

The diagnosis behind this agenda is accurate even if the ambition is steep. Bank deposits have swelled to nearly Rs 7.7 trillion, yet credit expansion remains anaemic and investment demand subdued. Capital is piling up in vaults rather than building anything. Capital expenditure has slipped to just Rs 63.7bn, a figure that reflects not a shortage of money but a chronic inability to deploy it. Nepal is not a poor country pretending to be rich. It is a reasonably-resourced country governed, for decades, as though the principal purpose of the state were to distribute its proceeds among those who ran it.

On his first day in office Mr Wagle announced the abolition of the Revenue Investigation Department, long regarded as an instrument of harassment rather than compliance, and committed to scrapping or amending fifteen separate acts on the recommendations of a high-level reform commission. He promised 100-day, semi-annual and annual action plans. It was the behaviour of a man who understands that in Nepal, where announcements routinely substitute for action, the only way to be believed is to move before anyone can organise against you.

Budgets, however, are intentions. Between Mr Wagle’s intentions and a $100bn economy stand three institutions whose leaders he cannot instruct and whose cooperation he cannot assume.

The most consequential is Nepal Rastra Bank, whose governor, Biswo Nath Poudel, a UC Berkeley-trained economist, took office last May. On arriving he pledged to align monetary policy with the government’s fiscal priorities while preserving the independence of the central bank. Those two commitments are compatible only up to a point. Mr Wagle’s growth agenda requires credit to move from deposits into investment; the governor’s mandate requires it not move so fast as to stoke inflation. The finance minister will need to build the kind of working relationship, through regular consultations and shared targets, that makes coordination possible without making the central bank look like a subsidiary of the treasury. That requires trust, which requires time, which Mr Wagle is acutely short of.

The second figure is Gunakar Bhatta, the newly appointed vice-chair of the National Planning Commission. Dr Bhatta spent fifteen years at Nepal Rastra Bank, rising to executive director, before resigning in the expectation of becoming governor, a post that was blocked by political manoeuvring under the previous government despite what he had been led to believe were firm assurances. He is, in short, a man of considerable ability who has been treated badly by the establishment he served, and who now sits at the apex of the institution responsible for sequencing Mr Wagle’s entire investment programme. Handled well, he is a validator with unmatched knowledge of Nepal’s financial architecture. Handled poorly, he is a vice-chair who files meticulous plans that nobody implements.

The complication is that Poudel and Bhatta are not strangers to each other’s professional shadow. The Nepali Congress originally backed Dr Bhatta for the governor’s post before the appointment eventually went to Poudel after weeks of coalition deadlock. Two accomplished economists, one of whom was passed over for the job the other now holds, are being asked to align their institutions behind the country’s most ambitious economic programme in a generation. Mr Wagle must ensure that coordination meeting does not become a cold room.

His published vision calls for a competitive social market economy built on rule of law, meritocracy and production-led growth. The language is unimpeachable. The Competition Promotion and Market Protection Act has existed since 2007 and has been enforced approximately never. The syndicates and cartels that his manifesto promises to dismantle are not abstractions; they are organisations with lawyers, lobbyists and, until recently, ministers of their own.

His 100-day plan will be the first real signal. If it sets measurable outcomes, credit-to-GDP targets, disbursement rates for capital spending, time-bound reforms to the investment climate, it will suggest that Mr Wagle intends to be judged by results. If it reads like the vision documents his predecessors produced, investors will draw their own conclusions.

Nepal has never lacked for economists who understood its problems. It has lacked politicians willing to make enemies in fixing them. Mr Wagle, for the first time in a long while, has both the intellectual tools and the parliamentary numbers. Whether he also has the stomach for it is what the next hundred days will begin to reveal.

There is a particular kind of modern activism that mistakes the performance of outrage for the substance of it, that confuses the emotional intensity of a gesture with the moral seriousness of a cause. We see it in the world’s most photographed protest movements. 

The point of such activism is never really the cause itself. The cause is the currency with which the activist purchases their identity, where outrage becomes a credential and grief an aesthetic content. The slogan exists not to demand change but to announce the speaker’s virtue to whoever is watching, and in the age of Instagram, someone is always watching.

Nepal’s so-called GenZ leadership has given us a domestic version of this pathology, and it is time we said so plainly.

On the morning of September 8, 2025, thousands of school students and young professionals gathered at Maitighar Mandala in Kathmandu, many of them in uniform, carrying banners that read “Youth Against Corruption.” The movement had no manifesto, no party colours. Its organisers insisted, repeatedly and explicitly, that it had no leaders, and this was not a weakness of design but its central moral claim. 

By early afternoon, police opened live fire on the crowd outside parliament. By September’s end, at least 75 people were dead, the overwhelming majority shot above the waist, in the head, neck, and chest, in what Amnesty International would later call “a shocking and callous disregard for human life.” A 12-year-old child was among those confirmed dead. Over two thousand were injured. 

Those deaths were not background noise to a political event. They were the event. They were the price Nepal’s youngest generation paid for the right to demand that the people who governed them be held to account. It is worth sitting with that before examining what followed.

Consider Tanuja Pandey, who turned 25 four days after September 8, and who by that time had already become the “poster girl” of Nepal’s GenZ protests. A lawyer and climate justice activist from Jhapa who had built the @gen.znepal Instagram presence and coined the rallying cry “Enough is Enough”. Pandey had genuine activist credentials going back years. She founded Harin Nepal, an environmental organisation, at nineteen, and had been writing about climate justice long before the September uprising gave her a national platform. One would be churlish to deny any of that.

But here is what else is true, and what Pandey would rather you not examine too closely. Multiple reports indicate she was associated with the youth wing of the Nepali Congress, the very party whose coalition with KP Sharma Oli’s government had made it an accomplice in the conditions that produced the uprising, and whose headquarters were burned by protesters in September for precisely that reason. 

The Nepali Congress was not a bystander to the rot GenZ rose against, it was one of its institutional authors. When Pandey’s critics raised this, she was, by her own account, “crestfallen”, she denied links to the party with some vigour. Her grandfather, Ramesh Nath Pandey, served as Nepal’s Foreign Minister during the royal regime, a connection the family has deep roots in, and reports of her earlier Congress youth-wing association have never been cleanly refuted.

None of this would be disqualifying in itself. What makes it significant is the gap between Pandey’s self-presentation‚ the scrappy, organic, grassroots challenger to the old order‚ and the actual contours of her biography, which places her closer to the political establishment than her brand identity suggests. Pandey has built her public persona entirely on the premise that she represents a clean break from the old way of doing things. The premise is, at best, complicated. At worst, it is another form of the nepo-kid culture, only wrapped in denim and a climate-justice hashtag.

Rakshya Bam is a more interesting case, and in some ways a more troubling one, because the gap between her stated principles and her conduct has been so consistently and specifically documented. Bam, who grew up in Kailali in the far-west and moved to Kathmandu to study, has spoken movingly and often about the systemic neglect of provinces like Sudurpaschim. “Kailali is not poor, it is made poor,” she has said, with a bluntness that commands respect. 

She walked out of Army Headquarters in the days after September 9 when the army chief tried to seat GenZ representatives alongside Durga Prasai and the pro-monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party, saying the grouping would undermine the movement’s credibility. In the aftermath of protests, she told the press without ambiguity that her GenZ friends risked their lives and were shot in the chest and head while shouting slogans for good governance and against nepotism and cronyism, nothing else.

These are the words of someone who appears to understand exactly what is at stake. They are also, it turns out, words that do not constrain her own behaviour. By December 2025, Bam had accepted an invitation to private political negotiations at the Kupandol home of then-Kathmandu’s mayor Balen Shah’s close aide, negotiations in which she was specifically tasked, according to Setopati’s reporting, with coordinating which GenZ figures would join Shah-affiliated Desh Bikash Party, and with holding discussions with martyrs’ families on behalf of Shah’s electoral project. 

To be precise about what this means: the families of people who were shot dead by the state were being approached, through Bam’s coordination, as potential assets in an electoral strategy. The Nepali Congress, the party that co-authored the coalition government whose police opened fire on those families’ children, was by January 2026 proposing that Bam herself contest from Kathmandu-1 on their ticket, a proposal whose significance should not be lost on anyone. 

The party whose headquarters was burned by GenZ protesters in September was, months later, hoping to recruit GenZ’s most prominent coordinator as its candidate. Bam declined. But the fact that the conversation happened at all, that she was a participant in it rather than someone who refused the meeting outright and said so publicly‚ tells you something about the distance she had already travelled from the movement’s founding logic.

Bam has also said, with an apparent sincerity that “some of us should stay outside so we can keep reminding and challenging the people who come to power.” She said this while, by all available evidence, manoeuvring inside the political architecture. Reports suggest she was a trusted aide to Home Minister Om Prakash Aryal of the interim government. The problem is not the access. The problem is that she apparently saw no contradiction between holding it and continuing to perform opposition for an audience that did not know she had it. Bam, so far, has not denied the reports.

Majid Ansari presents a third variation of the same disease. A law student from Morang, the son of a woman who once watched a court officer extort a Musahar villager and who resolved from that moment to use the law as an instrument of justice, Ansari has been more consistent than either Pandey or Bam in his actual advocacy, calling out the Attorney General over the Hope Fertility case, raising questions about the rights of Madhesi and Muslim students, warning against electoral delay with genuine constitutional seriousness. These things matter. 

But Ansari arrived at September 8 as an ordinary law student who joined the protest on that day, watched the crowd grow, escaped through Thapagaun when the gunshots began, and went to Civil Hospital to donate blood. This is not the biography of a movement leader. This is the biography of a citizen who showed up for his country at a critical moment, as hundreds of thousands of others did.

The difference is that Ansari, unlike most of those hundreds of thousands, understood very quickly how to monetise‚ in terms of visibility and platform, the GenZ identity that the movement had made valuable. He was soon being quoted on constitutional matters, and he started issuing public statements demanding the dismissal of the Attorney General, and began advising the nation on how to conduct its democracy. 

This would be admirable if Ansari had some formal institutional relationship to the movement he was representing. He does not. The movement said it had no leaders. Ansari simply became one by insisting, repeatedly and publicly, that he was one, and by understanding that in the media ecosystem that surrounds a successful uprising, a confident voice with the right vocabulary and the right background story is indistinguishable from an actual representative.

This is not a personal failing peculiar to Ansari. It is a structural feature of how leaderless movements get captured. The movement’s great strength, the absence of a named leadership, becomes its greatest vulnerability once the streets go quiet, because the name-shaped void gets filled by whoever shows up consistently in front of cameras.

What connects all three of them, and what connects Nepal’s GenZ leadership more broadly, is the philosophy of activism as performance. The slogan “Don’t Forget the Blood of Martyrs” was chanted in the streets of Kathmandu by such activists as early as September 9, and it has since appeared on banners, been invoked in press releases, and referenced in speeches with a frequency that should make anyone who actually cares about those martyrs feel something close to revulsion. Not because the sentiment is insincere, but because sincerity, by itself, is not accountability. 

As of the time of writing, the commission set up to investigate protest deaths has not released its findings. The people who ordered those 2,642 live bullets, the police logs confirmed that number, have not faced court. The families of the martyrs received 10 lakh rupees each in compensation and a declaration from the interim government that their children were martyrs, which is the kind of gesture that soothes a news cycle without disturbing a power structure. Our self-declared GenZ voices issued suitably outraged statements at appropriate intervals. None of them has made this their consuming, daily, non-negotiable campaign in the way that justice for the dead actually requires.

Meanwhile, at least 49 GenZ-affiliated groups had registered at the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers by December 2025, according to reports. Most were led by prominent faces of the protest movement itself. The political economy of the martyrs had, within three months, been converted into a registration drive.

This is a specific kind of dishonesty that is more dangerous than ordinary hypocrisy, because it is indistinguishable from genuine conviction on the surface. Tanuja Pandey wrote, in reference to someone else, that “history never forgives traitors who turn the people’s hope, pain and sacrifice into a game of self-interest.” Rakshya Bam, in the same breath as accepting a political brokerage role, said the new forces must not forget “the essence of the GenZ revolution.” Majid Ansari tells young Nepalis to question leaders rather than idolise them, while allowing himself to be idolised as a leader. None of these people, I suspect, believe they are being hypocritical. 

This is the endpoint of activism-as-performance, the final stage in which the performer can no longer tell the difference between what they are saying and what they are doing, because the saying has become, for them, a form of doing. This happens everywhere. Greta Thunberg, a popular young Swedish climate activist, once refused to fly to climate conferences, and crossed the Atlantic by sail to honour her stated convictions. But recently, she crossed the Mediterranean twice on diesel vessels to participate in political theatre. The distance between who she was and who she became was not measured in kilometres but in the slow erosion of the distinction between gesture and action. Nepal’s GenZ leaders have travelled a similar distance in considerably less time.

The movement of September 2025 was, in the strictest sense of the word, heroic. It was heroic because it was leaderless, because it was waged by people in school uniforms who had nothing to gain and everything to lose, because it refused the logic that change requires a saviour, and because it paid a price, in blood, in real blood, on real streets, that no amount of subsequent Instagram content can retrospectively justify or redeem. 

The 75 people who died did not die so that Tanuja Pandey could become a commentator, or so that Rakshya Bam could be courted by the Nepali Congress as a candidate, or so that Majid Ansari could be quoted as a constitutional authority. They died because they believed, with the desperate and unstrategic conviction of people who have run out of patience, that this country could be better than it has been.

Honouring that belief requires requires the willingness to remain angry past the point where anger is fashionable, past the point where the cameras have moved to the next story, past the point where the political opportunities have been distributed and the movement’s leaders have found their way into the rooms they always, on some level, wanted to be in.

The way of common decency is to pay the price for what you stand for. The martyrs of September 8 paid it fully. The least their self-appointed inheritors can do is stop making speeches about their sacrifice and start earning the right to invoke it. If that is too much to ask, then consider a much smaller request: say nothing. We do not need moral instruction from people who have learned to speak the language of sacrifice while quietly collecting its dividends. The families of the dead do not need elegies. They need justice, and justice, unlike outrage, does not trend.
 

The Nepali Congress was never meant to be the kind of party it has become. Founded in 1947 in the twilight of Rana autocracy, it drew intellectual and moral inspiration from the Indian National Congress but was shaped by Nepal’s own peculiar conditions of a feudal monarchy, a fragmented society and a nascent middle class. Its leading lights, most notably B. P. Koirala, articulated a vision that combined political freedom with social justice, but not at the expense of individual liberty.

Mr. Koirala’s thought is often misread through a modern ideological lens. He spoke of “democratic socialism,” but in practice this meant something closer to European social liberalism than to redistribution. He believed in parliamentary democracy, civil liberties, and a mixed economy in which the private sector would play a leading role. The state, in his view, was a body to correct wrongdoings rather than a dominator of economic life.

In short, the Nepali Congress was born as a liberal party with conservative instincts. Cautious about upheaval, respectful of institutions, and attentive to the realities of a poor, agrarian society. It was a party of reform, not revolution. So how did such a party come to be perceived as indistinguishable from the socialist and even communist forces?

The answer lies partly in Nepal’s turbulent political history. Its early years in power were cut short by King Mahendra’s royal coup in 1960. When democracy returned in 1990, the ideological terrain had shifted. The global Cold War was ending, but Nepal’s domestic politics were increasingly shaped by leftist insurgency, culminating in the Maoist civil war.

Faced with the rise of the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist–Leninist (CPN UML), the Nepali Congress made a fateful choice of convergence rather than differentiation. It embraced populist rhetoric, expanded state commitments, and blurred its economic philosophy. Over time, “democratic socialism” hardened into something more programmatically statist. It gained pace more so in the era of Sher Bahadur Deuba, party’s former leader and five time prime minister. 

This was not merely an ideological shift, it was an organisational one. The party became less a vehicle for ideas and more a coalition of factions competing for state resources. Its leaders spoke the language of redistribution while presiding over a system that delivered neither efficiency nor equity. The result was a slow erosion of credibility. To the poor, the party seemed ineffective; to the middle class, it seemed unprincipled; to the young, it became irrelevant.

After it ousted Mr. Deuba and elevated Gagan Thapa as its chairman from the special convention in January this year, the party attempted to position itself as a centrist force. A moderate alternative to both leftist radicalism and conservative reaction. But centrism, when untethered from a clear philosophy, becomes mere opportunism. Mr. Thapa did not realise that. Maybe he did not have enough time? 

On economic policy, the party oscillates between promises of welfare expansion and vague commitments to private-sector growth. On governance, it speaks of reform while perpetuating the same networks of patronage. On ideology, it invokes Koirala while ignoring his emphasis on individual freedom and institutional integrity.

This ambiguity might once have been electorally viable. It is no longer.

The general election held on March 5 has upended Nepal’s political order. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a party barely a few years old and led by the former journalist Rabi Lamichhane, swept to power in a landslide that few predicted. It secured a commanding majority of 182 seats in the 275-member parliament, while the Nepali Congress was reduced to a distant second with a fraction of that tally.

The scale of the victory is unprecedented. Final counts in most constituencies showed RSP’s candidates far outpaced both the contenders of Congress and the UML. This was not a routine anti-incumbency swing. It was, in the words of observers, a “tsunami”.

The rise of the RSP cannot be understood without reference to the youth-led September protests of 2025, which toppled the UML’s KP Sharla Oli-led coalition government. The demonstration, driven by frustration with corruption, unemployment and political stagnation, created the conditions for a new kind of politics.

RSP positioned itself as the vehicle of that anti-establishment discontent. Most of its members: young, technocratic, and digitally savvy. Its PM-candidate, Balendra Shah, former mayor of capital Kathmandu, cultivated a direct connection with young voters, bypassing traditional party structures and media channels. The result is a generational realignment. 

Nepal is a young country—more than 40% of its population is under 35—and this cohort has had enough. And they displayed the youth power in the ballot box quite loudly. 

For the Nepali Congress, this is an existential threat. It is no longer competing with the ideological rival, because there are hardly any differences in Congress and RSP’s beliefs. Faced with such a challenge, the temptation for Congress is obvious: to imitate the RSP. To adopt its rhetoric, its style. But that would be a mistake. 

The RSP’s appeal lies precisely in its novelty. It is unburdened by history, untainted by governance, and unencumbered by internal factions. Five years in the government is unlikely to turn this upside down. Even if RSP fails to deliver on its promise, the party will have the excuse to sell that it took them five years just to clean the mess left behind by Congress and the Communists. 

The Nepali Congress carries the weight of decades in power. It cannot credibly present itself as an outsider. Nor can it outbid the RSP on populism without further eroding its own identity. More importantly, the RSP already occupies the space of reformist activism. If imitation is not the answer, then what is?

The Nepali Congress should return to its roots. It should embrace a coherent ideology that speaks to contemporary realities. That ideology is best described as conservative liberalism. This does not mean a retreat into reactionary politics. It means a commitment to institutional stability, market-led growth, fiscal responsibility, and social pluralism. These principles are not alien to the party’s history. They are, in fact, implicit in the vision of its founders.

Across the world, centrist parties that have survived the populist wave have done so by clarifying — not diluting — their ideological positions. In Europe, for instance, social-democratic parties have embraced market reforms while maintaining a commitment to social protection. In Asia, successful democratic parties have combined economic pragmatism with institutional conservatism.

Nepal’s context is different, but the lesson is similar. Voters reward clarity. It would be a mistake to assume RSP’s success as just a rejection of the old parties. It is a reward for a party that, however loosely defined, offered a distinct narrative. The Nepali Congress, like the CPN UML, currently holds no story to narrate.

For Congress, ideological repositioning is necessary but not sufficient. The party must also address its organisational weaknesses. First, it must renew its leadership. The dominance of ageing elites has long alienated younger voters. Second, it must reform its internal structures. Patronage and factionalism have undermined its effectiveness. Transparent processes for candidate selection and decision-making are essential. Third, it must reconnect with voters. This requires not just better communication, but a willingness to listen, to understand the frustrations that drove millions to support the RSP.

The enormous power has given RSP an opportunity to reshape the country’s political and economic landscape. If it succeeds, even partially, it will likely entrench as the dominant force for decades to come. In such a scenario, the Nepali Congress risks becoming a relic of a bygone era. So, the stakes could not be higher.

Even if the RSP falters, the space it occupies will not automatically revert to Congress. Other challengers will emerge, perhaps more radical, perhaps more disciplined. We saw the rise of the Shram Sanskriti Party, led by former mayor of Dharan, Harka Sampang, in this election. The Nepali Congress still has assets such as nationwide organisation, legacy of democratic struggle, and a reservoir of goodwill among older voters. But these assets are depreciating rapidly.

To arrest the decline, the party must make a choice. It can continue on its current path which is hedging its bets, diluting the message, and hoping for the best. Or it can undertake a more difficult but ultimately more rewarding course of redefining itself as a party of conservative liberalism. Mr. Thapa, or whoever leads the party next, should remember that brands decay long before they die. It is pretty clear that walking in the current path, there is only one destiny for the party.