In the early 1980s, Nepal’s firebrand communist leader, Mohan Bikram Singh, split from his comrade Nirmal Lama to establish a radical political alternative. Lama and Singh had earlier revolted from the Communist Party of Nepal to establish their own faction after the party’s fourth convention in 1974. Among Singh’s trusted leaders were Mohan Baidya, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, CP Gajurel and Dev Gurung. But Singh was forced to spend most of the following years politically exiled in India.

As a result, Baidya effectively captured the party, renaming it the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN), “Mashal,” pronounced slightly different from Lama’s CPN “Masal.” However, Baidya and many senior party leaders faced self-imposed demotion after the party suffered a strategic setback in the now infamous ‘Sector Scandal’. Baidya was forced to nominate Dahal as the party leader in 1989, a position Dahal has held for three and a half decades.

During the first two decades of his leadership, Dahal reigned supreme, as his party led the country into a decade-long violent political conflict that claimed, by some estimates, over 16,000 lives. Despite substantial economic and political costs, the conflict accelerated Nepal’s transition from a semi-feudal society with an exclusive political system into a more inclusive and secular republic. To that end, the Dahal-led Maoist party received due recognition through a popular mandate of the 2008 first Constituent Assembly elections.

But Dahal’s unnecessary distrust of Nepal’s more established political parties, which had played a considerable role in bringing his party back into the political mainstream, made him commit blunders and unseated him from a comfortable majority government. His suspicion against fellow comrades who questioned his leadership style and decisions led to multiple splintering of the Maoist party.

An insecure leader

Despite leading the country in and out of a transformative political conflict and becoming one of the key signatories of the new constitution, Dahal has remained an insecure leader who takes every opportunity to remind the Nepali people and the world about his “revolutionary contributions”. Possibly, this deep-seated insecurity emerges from the fact that he is neither seen as an intellectually gifted politician like his fellow comrade Baburam Bhattarai, who is known as an ideologue of the Maoist conflict or as a leader with integrity and simplicity like that of his political gurus Singh and Baidya. The thought of losing the political legacy of the ‘People’s War’ despite clinging onto the leadership of the party must constantly haunt the Maoist supremo.

Dahal’s insecurity and political hypocrisy were also palpable in the way he derided the Madhesh Movement, which also raised the agendas of federalism and inclusion. Instead of considering them allies, Dahal ordered his party cadres to attack the Madheshi party leaders and their cadres. A large part of the political onus of escalating the tensions leading to the unfortunate Gaur massacre in 2007 will always rest on Dahal.

Over the past decade and a half, Dahal has repeatedly failed to display the leadership he is ironically fond of discussing. Despite mobilising thousands of Tharu youths during the conflict, he failed to support their genuine claims on provincial boundaries during the federal structuring. And despite claims of his ‘one-sided love’ for Madhesh, he remained silent as more than 50 Madhesi protesters were indiscriminately killed by the security forces in 2015.

Unreliable coalition partner

There was a time when Dahal led a party that had shaken the country’s political core. Less than two decades later, he now leads a party that has mostly eroded its political base and only relies on a stronger coalition partner to remain relevant. But has Dahal even proved to be a reliable coalition partner? Let’s take a closer look.

After Baidya split the party in 2012, the CPN-Maoist was reduced to the third position in the second Constituent Assembly elections, a significant loss from its commanding majority in the first CA. In the following two years, Dahal’s party was not only kept out of power but also forced to endorse a constitution that the Nepali Congress and rival communist party CPN-UML tabled. Having lost the capacity to dictate the political course, Dahal resorted to coalition politics. When the opportunity came, he supported UML’s Khadga Prasad Oli to cobble up a coalition government in October 2015. However, when the Nepali Congress offered him to lead a new coalition, he abandoned Oli and became Prime Minister in 2016.

With the 2017 elections on the horizon, Dahal knew his party would not be able to compete with the larger parties that had successfully led the constitution drafting. With some active external mediation, Dahal persuaded Oli for an electoral alliance and even agreed to an eventual unification of the communist forces. When the left unity won a landslide victory, Dahal was convinced that Oli would honour the agreement to hand over power to him mid-way through the four-year period. When Oli refused, he split the united CPN in 2020, convincing several disgruntled leaders like Madhav Nepal to abandon the party and join a coalition with the Nepali Congress.

The new coalition also offered Dahal and his party a comfortable division of electoral seats in the 2022 local, provincial and federal elections. But soon after the elections were over, Dahal bargained for power with both Deuba and Oli. Despite having won only 32 seats in the federal parliament with only 11 percent popular vote, Dahal managed to become Nepal’s 33rd Prime Minister in December 2022.

Impending downfall

In 2014, political analyst CK Lal had told me that Dahal’s political opportunism would make him relevant in Nepali politics for at least another decade. The Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML took exactly a decade to realise that Dahal had been cashing in on Nepal’s fractured politics. This week, the two parties agreed that Nepal’s long-term political stability requires an introspection into the present electoral system, which allows electorally less popular outfits to dictate the course of national politics. So, not only have the two large parties decided to pull the plug on the Dahal government, but they also agreed to form an independent commission to study and propose amendments to the current electoral provision.

While there is little disagreement that the current electoral system paved the way for more representation of the hitherto marginalised sections, the opportunity to correct inefficacies like expensive election campaigning and manipulation of the proportional candidacy lists by the parties must not be dismissed either. There are also serious doubts about the intention of the two parties to strike a deal at a time when the Nepal Police and the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority are investigating some high-profile corruption cases.

It is up to the two parties to vindicate their intent by ensuring that the new political course does not interfere in these investigations. And even if the two parties agree to amend the constitutional provisions regarding elections, they will need to gather a national consensus or at least a two-thirds majority. Whatever happens in the next few weeks and months, it is evidently clear Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s eventual political downfall is on the horizon.