PL Singh, 88, passed on peacefully in the wee hours of the morning on December 16, 2024. Having seen historic events unfold from close quarters, PL knew about the feet of clay of many illustrious figures of politics and society. But he also knew what to show to hide revealing details. When probed, he would deftly turn his banter towards love, life and the pleasures of singledom followed by a belly laugh.

Even though a long-time close associate of Ganeshman Singh, PL came into prominence during the nationwide Satyagraha (Civil Disobedience) in 1985 that the-then proscribed Nepali Congress (NC) lad launched against the autocratic Shah regime called Panchayat. With many important leaders taken into preventive custody, he was left to face the press with staid stories of democratic struggles. He would often add anecdotal spice to get some space in the international media.

After the restoration of democracy in 1990, PL first became the Mayor of Kathmandu and subsequently a member of Parliament, but he felt constrained by the limits any official position puts upon personal freedoms. By the late noughties, he had had enough of everything—party, family, friends and even trusted lieutenants of the younger generation that adored him—and had begun to find contentment within himself.

On a sunny afternoon in a darkened room at Chaksibari about a year or so ago, he had slowly gotten up from the bed to enjoy a few spoonsful of his favourite buff dish thathale with some beaten rice and declared to ‘unannounced visitors’ that had been ushered in by photojournalist Min Bajracharya: It’s difficult to save the country and impossible to bring back the Nepali Congress to its founding principles. It was sad to see an eternal optimist with a permanent smile turn into a despondent warrior.

The challenges of “saving the country” are either so complex that only some great minds can engage with them or so pedestrian that any rabblerouser can misuse them to fulfil his dictatorial ambitions, just as in 1960 or 2005. The NC’s founding principles are an altogether different matter. Its response must begin with a question: Did it have any to begin with?

The Praja Parishad—literally a Subjects’ Council and clearly a contradiction in terms—was the oldest political party. It was formed to negotiate for more rights for the emergent social elites. Some embryonic communist groups primarily centred around towns in Madhesh drew their inspiration from Moscow. The NC came into being to oust the Ranarchy and establish a parliamentary democracy. These were fine political goals, but it would be vain to call them “founding principles”.

The Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) had declared the Three Principles of the People—nationalism, democracy and socialism—as the fundamental doctrine of the Kuomintang party. The NC adopted them when transforming itself from a revolutionary party into a reformist outfit after the Shah Restoration in 1951. Driven underground after the Royal-Military coup in 1960, the only goal of the NC thereafter became the restoration of parliamentary democracy and there it remained till the 1990s. An outline of post-1990 ideology and its subsequent erosion must be derived from messages that emanated from the lifestyle of its leading lights. Mahatma Gandhi’s dictum that his life was his message is applicable to the praxis of most longstanding politicos.

Political drift

When BP Koirala passed away in 1982, NC cadres were left without a rahbar—an Urdu term for a coach, a counsellor, a friend, a philosopher and a guide rolled into one—who was also a leader, described as someone “who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way”. There were no feet in the party big enough to fit those humongous shoes. It fell upon the troika—Ganeshman Singh, KP Bhattarai and GP Koirala—to first save, and then reenergise, reorganise and revive the NC that was almost on its deathbed.

Till the late-1980s, the Nepali Congress had been a quintessential ‘umbrella party’ that had provided shelter to all kinds of opinions opposed to the authoritarian Shah regime. Forged in the fire of relentless struggle against successive Rana and Shah regimes, Ganeshman had a will of steel that couldn’t be bent, let alone be broken. As the only surviving ‘four stars’ of the NC—BP Koirala, Subarna Shamsher and Surya Prasad Upadhayay were contestably considered as three others—it fell upon him to keep the flame of revolution burning. Towards the end of his life, when he was forced to choose between his liberal principles and the party that he had helped create, he picked the former. He lived to the promise of Robert Browning’s lines from Prospice that he so liked: “I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more, / The best and the last!”

Krishna Prasad Bhattarai was an atypical democrat of the British tradition: Loyalty to the crown and commitment to the subjects. Tracing his ancestry to a pujari that had accompanied the victorious King Prithivi Narayan Shah from Gorkha to Kathmandu, he was fully convinced that his ascetic lifestyle and daily recital of Bhagavad Gita had helped him endure long internments at the Sundarijal Military Detention Camp and the Nakhu Jail. The resilience and positivity that he displayed through repeated electoral defeats strengthened his image of a Nishkam Karmayogi. To quote Will Cuppy, he was a hermit and hence “simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”

Despite his obdurate demeanour, GP Koirala was a pragmatic dealmaker who could negotiate with anyone without compromising his core convictions. If it entailed making a deal with the devil to save his cadres, he was ready to do it, as he unsuccessfully tried by submitting a petition to the palace in 1985 for gradual reforms to the chagrin of Ganeshman. When pushed into a corner through the creeping coup of King Gyanendra between 2002 and 2005, he brought Maoists from their undisclosed hideouts in and outside the country to fight together for “full democracy”.

Power shift

Perhaps it was GP Koirala’s Faustian bargain with the CPN-UML after 2006 to keep the Maoists in check that pushed the NC towards a slow but sustained decline. The UML had emerged as an ethnonational outfit of the Permanent Establishment of Nepal (PEON) after the 1990s and had managed to penetrate almost all organs of the state. The party controlled a significant section of the media and held almost a total sway over the powerful NGO industry. Finally, it was Sushil Koirala, the dotard at Baluwatar in 2015, that fell into the ethnonational trap of ‘Oli-garchy’ by signing on the dotted lines of a 16-point conspiracy of fast-tracking a majoritarian statute.