When forced to resign on September 9, 2025, with a metaphorical gun to his temple, the Khas-Arya chieftain Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli should have realised that his time was up and taken a graceful exit from mainstream politics. But Sharma Oli perhaps realised that dignity after retirement in the political life of Nepal is a rarity accorded only to a towering figure such as BP Koirala.

The father figure of communism, Pushpa Lal, died in self-exile. Ganeshman Singh and Krishna Prasad Bhattarai were forced to abandon the Nepali Congress. Manmohan Adhikari had to resign from a hospital bed. Sharma Oli managed to cling to his political perch—the chair of CPN-UML—even while his close collaborator and NC chair, Sher Bahadur Deuba, was ousted from the party leadership in a disgraceful manner.

An adroit operator of ethnonational, xenophobic and jingoistic populism that came to be termed ‘Oli-garchy’, Sharma Oli knows that the doctrine of majoritarian morality is becoming the dominant norm of post-ideological politics everywhere. For US President Donald Trump, he is the embodiment of ‘the people’ of the Lincolnian phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The full-spectrum dominance of Hindutva in India has evolved into ‘Moditva,’ a synthesis named for its primary architect and practitioner, Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In majoritarian morality, what begins as sentiment demands legitimacy; what gains legitimacy demands enforcement. Morality supplies the normative claim. Media shapes visibility. Public opinion supplies validity. Finally, the Overton Window—the range of policies and ideas acceptable to the mainstream population at any given time—sets the boundaries of the sayable. Majoritarian morality emerges when these four collapse into one another—when what is visible becomes what is popular, what is popular becomes what is moral, and what is moral becomes what is enforced.

In the crucible of Nepali politics, Sharma Oli has functioned as the primary architect of such an outcome. By tethering the Khas-Arya identity to the very definition of national sovereignty, he successfully moved the Overton Window to a position where dissent was no longer a political disagreement but a moral failing. During his decade-long dominance after 2015, the ‘Oli-garchy’ relied on a feedback loop where the palanquin press amplified its jingoistic sentiment until it gained the weight of a popular mandate in 2017.

The mandate was then used to justify the enforcement of majoritarian values, effectively shrinking the sayable to include only that which served the ethnonationalist narrative of three dominant parties—the NC, the UML and the Maoist—functioning as the ‘cartel of the establishment’. The Fall Protest of 2025 signalled a rupture in the machinery of such a manufactured morality. A new norm is yet to take shape, but the virus of majoritarian morality appears to have infected the entire polity.

Paradigm shift

Morality, in essence, is about right and wrong, but the complexity of the concept makes it amenable to different interpretations. It includes purity of intention, acceptability of behaviour, conformity to rules and the willingness to advance the idea of justice. The ability to judge limits to harm, fairness and responsibility in conduct connecting actions, motives and consequences becomes supremely important. It is this ambiguity that has allowed the powerful, across ages, to bend morality to the service of their interests. Morality has always travelled with power, sometimes as its conscience, more often as its alibi.

In the earliest human communities—long before states, scriptures, or constitutions—the moral code was brutally simple: Might is right. From prehistoric clans to early agrarian empires, supremacy depended on dominance. What prevailed endured; what endured was justified. Morality for the feudal lord was little more than the etiquette of force. King Prithvi Narayan extended the territorial boundary of the Gorkha principality with his bayonet. Jung Bahadur Kunwar captured the Gorkhali court with his sword. And on and off it went until the intrigues of the Shah-Rana court ended in 2001 with the Narayanhiti massacre.

Religion sometimes softened the crudity of brute power without dismantling it. God’s will was to replace brute strength as the supreme moral authority. Divine law promised transcendence, but it also sanctified hierarchy. Kings ruled by heavenly mandate, as caste and class were moralised into destiny, and submission became virtue. Moral disputes were settled not by reasoning citizens but by interpreters of revelation—priests, preceptors and pundits closest to power—till the fall of Ranarchy in 1951.

The nation-state introduced responsibility as a moral category. Power could no longer rely on sanctity alone; it had to justify itself. The strong were expected to protect the weak—not merely out of benevolence, but as a duty. Yet this moral advance retained a paternal tone: The weak were to be protected, not empowered. In 1960, King Mahendra used this logic to become an absolute ruler through a royal-military coup.

Moral decay

Despite the retention of the ethnonational character of the state in the constitution of 1990, morality came to be somewhat proceduralised through the social contract with the restoration of parliamentary democracy. Constitutional morality emerged as its most demanding form. Here, morality resided not in rulers, gods or crowds, but in principles—rights, limits and institutions designed to restrain both tyranny and passion. It asked societies to honour rules even when outcomes felt inconvenient.

A society accustomed to authoritarianism wasn’t ready for it. When challenged with the power of the gun by Maoists, the idea of constitutional morality began to burn from 1996 and turned into ashes with the royal-military coup of 2005 that reinvented the theory that authoritarianism was necessary to save the subjects from themselves.

Yet morality has never escaped the pull of numbers. Popular morality—the belief that what most people feel must be right—has always lurked beneath constitutional restraint. In the 21st century, it has returned with renewed confidence as majoritarian morality. In Turkey, Hungary, India and the United States, electoral victories are increasingly treated as moral blank cheques. Leaders claim that representing the majority absolves them of institutional restraint, minority protection or constitutional fidelity. Courts are delegitimised, dissent is branded disloyal, and complexity is dismissed as elitism. Sharma Oli epitomised majoritarian morality as Deuba and Dahal massaged his ego for their own benefit.

This resurgence is not a regression to brute force or divine command, but something more insidious: Morality reduced to arithmetic, norms replaced by numbers, and principles substituted by popularity. When the majority does not merely govern but begins to define virtue, populism in the name of democracy becomes normal. Rabi Lamichhane and Balendra Shah appear to be more in tune with the public mood than their competitors in judging the allure of transactional morality.

Morality, however, is not tested when it echoes the crowd. It is tested when it restrains it. A society’s moral depth is revealed not by how loudly it celebrates itself, but by what it refuses to legitimise—even when the majority demands it. That refusal remains the thin, embattled line between constitutional civilisation and its democratic undoing. Planned to be staged in a moral vacuum with four layers of security to save the people from themselves, the impending elections are underwhelming because they don’t promise anything virtuous to replace the hegemonic political order.