In lieu of conducting a Sanatan ritual, a Yajman (client) often offers Daan (charity) and Dakshina (remuneration) to the Brahmin priest. While Daan can be in kind, Dakshina is invariably in cash. When a Brahmin receives more than what he had expected from a client, he often hides his happiness behind the veil of faux humility—“I just did my religious duty. There was no need for the Yajman to show so much generosity"—before carefully picking and packing everything that has been offered.

The naïve Nepalis have already offered more to the political priest Pushpa Kamal Dahal than he rightfully deserves for his ritualistic contribution to the sacrificial yajna for a republican order. He has served thrice as the country’s prime minister, continues to be the opposition leader, remains the Chairman of the Maoist Centre, and has secured a place in history for being the second most important actor in overthrowing the Shah monarchy.

Dahal is now a contented priest, and he vowed to his community of Yajman, the Nepali people, from the pulpit of Pratinidhi Sabha: “Prachanda will no longer engage in power games”. Instead, he alluded to the street protests that had succeeded in ousting the longest-serving Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, and urged politicos in the government to learn a lesson from the experiences of Dhaka.

Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, too, began his career as a Jhapali Naxalite, an early variant of Maoist violence in Nepal, and returned to his Brahmin beliefs after spending 14 years in prison for involvement in a few heinous crimes. Ever since he was released from jail, he has never actively participated in any street protests but has benefitted most from every change. Like any other communist leader, perhaps the only desire of the fourth time Prime Minister Sharma Oli is to remain in the chair for life. It’s natural for him to refute the possibility of any destabilising protest.

Ground realities

The Nepali Congress lost the will to lead any political change in the country when it meekly accepted the formation of an extra-constitutional government in 2013 tasked with conducting the elections of a legislative assembly. Sharma Oli emerged as the unquestioned chieftain of the dominant Khas-Arya community in the wake of the promulgation of a majoritarian and controversial constitution in 2015 through the fast-track.

Somewhat like an empty tin drum with pebbles inside, the monarchist and Hindutva forces make a lot of noise but lack the political strength to agitate for the restoration of the old order. Among all the four established forces of the political mainstream, none seems to have the credibility or the capability to lead a political protest.

Perhaps there is some truth in the proverb that a hungry man is an angry man and relative deprivation drives revolution. However, the cause-and-effect relationship between mass impoverishment and popular uprising is seldom so straight. Natural disasters or manmade calamities such as wars, unbearable taxation or brutal oppression can fuel desperate revolts, but even such eruptions require competent leadership to channel the raw energy of the masses against the existing regime.

Despite all the hoopla about “new forces”, Rabi Lamichhane has exhausted his appeal, Balen Shah lacks organisation and relies upon metropolitan police, Harka Sampang is too mercurial, CK Raut has lost direction and none of the Madhesh-dependent “national” parties have succeeded in breaking the hegemonic barrier of ethnonational politics in Nepal.

Unlike revolutions, reform movements often result from bourgeois aspirations for more self-expression, better representation, improved public services, lower taxes and against rampant corruption. Iranian-American scholar Asef Bayat describes such “refolutions” as feeble movements of change “dangerously vulnerable to the whims and intrigues of the incumbent elites”.

After the ethnonational upsurge of 2015, a hegemonic UML under chieftain Sharma Oli has succeeded in mobilising the entire Khas-Arya bourgeoisie with its demagogic, jingoistic and populist slogans of ultra nationalism. The present dispensation has declared all dissent inflammatory, and any protest is liable to arbitrary arrest.

In the 1960s, political scientist Samuel Huntington proposed that modernisation can lead to “unmet expectations, popular frustration, and violent revolution in societies lacking strong political institutions”. Nepal’s slow modernisation has forced frustrated youths to flee the country rather than fight for change.

External factors

Sometimes overhyped, often mere accusation and seldom apparent, the role of external players in the internal affairs of an independent country cannot be ruled out. Even in a supposedly advanced and secure democracy such as the United States, allegations are being made that several right-wing influencers were duped to work for covert Russian operation.

The historical information provided on the webpage of the Foreign Ministry is completely true: Ranas were indeed overthrown in “a democracy movement of the early 1950s with support from the-then monarch of Nepal, King Tribhuvan”. However, it fails to mention that King Tribhuvan's support came in the form of his escape to New Delhi through the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu. Without the backing of the Western powers, it’s extremely unlikely that the absolutist Shah rule would have lasted till the end of the Cold War.

Were it not for the economic blockade in 1989, the restoration of parliamentary democracy in 1990 would have taken much longer. The 12-point understanding between the Seven Political Parties and the Maoists was negotiated, signed and sealed in New Delhi. Once the South Block backed out of its support for the Madhesh Uprising in 2015, brutalities against protests escalated and the historic agitation collapsed like house of cards.

The Chinese usually play safe, wait for the game to conclude and appropriate the winner. But the role of Beijing in trying to bring the old and the new Maoists together—the UML and the Maoist Centre respectively—through Xi Jinping Thought has been obvious.

The US seems content with the current regime. The Indians may be unwilling to burn their fingers in fresh fires in the neighbourhood. The Chinese aversion for coloured revolutions in its periphery is well known. Perhaps Dahal and Sharma Oli are shadowboxing to deflect the

attention away from the failures of every government since 2017 that they had taken turns to lead or support.

Hasina had lost political legitimacy after the prepoll manipulation of conducting an election without opposition. The performance legitimacy of Gotabaya Rajapaksa nosedived due to a combination of government’s profligacy, Covid-19 and an immature management of the national economy. Like a broken clock that gives accurate time twice a day, Sharma Oli is perhaps correct in his assertion that a situation like Colombo or Dhaka can’t arise in Kathmandu.

Somewhat like the politics of Pakistan, anti-Indian rhetoric is all the legitimacy that a regime in Nepal needs to claim its authority. When combined with anti-Madheshi policies, the ethnonational authenticity of any demagogic ruler in Kathmandu becomes unchallengeable.

But not all political protests follow a predictable path: Some of them erupt unpredictably like a force of nature and shake slumberous societies. Such upheavals may dissipate as quickly, but they do help in adding new rules to the grammar of politics. Memories too sometimes bleed: Humble homage to the martyrs of “the 9/11 in Madhesh”.