Will Nepal save itself from gerontocrats?

There is an interesting parallel between the upcoming general election in Nepal and the mid-term one in the United States—the unprecedented uncertainty of what the outcom will be.

- DEEPAK THAPA

I daresay this is the first time that Nepal is going into an election without any indication of how the electorate is likely to vote. The one closest instance is probably the 1959 parliamentary election since none of the parties had ever been tested at the hustings till then. But if anyone had to make a guess then, they would have had to recognise the towering persona of BP Koirala to conclude that the Nepali Congress stood a good chance of forming a government.

Following the restoration of democracy in 1990 and despite the strong presence of the left during the 1991 election campaign, it was more or less taken for granted that the Congress would return to power. In 1994, the disarray within the Congress, and in 1999, the split in the CPN-UML was enough to correctly assume heavy losses to both.

Then came the election to the Constituent Assembly in 2008. The upset the Maoists pulled off was surely somewhat of a surprise, but in hindsight not altogether unexpected given the widespread hankering for a fresh start. That the Maoist call for change proved to be a sham was to come later. But none of that was known when we went into the elections with conventional wisdom having written off the Maoists in third place behind the Congress and the UML.

In the election to the second Constituent Assembly in 2013, the staleness of the Maoist brand, further sullied by the unrequited promises of 2008, meant they fought as underdogs, and the votes duly reflected that premise. In 2017, the pre-poll comunist alliance taken together with Sher Bahadur Deuba’s pre-election blunders had made it clear the Congress would be worsted even if few expected the kind of drubbing it received.