It isn’t easy to pick a person to understand a phenomenon. The sunset of the Khas-Arya ethnonational chieftain Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, and the aurora of the political shaman, Balendra Shah, have been so dramatic that they have perplexed most analysts of the electoral shift. A narrative built around their political platforms—the CPN (UML) and the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP)—can perhaps be helpful.

The founder and chair of the RSP, Rabi Lamichhane, remains mired in controversies. Swarnim Wagle appears more like a soldier than a general. Balendra—declared a senior leader soon after joining the party—remains, to use a Churchillian quote, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” despite his spectacular electoral feat. I choose Sumana Shrestha to make sense of the nature of the RSP and its incredible rise, even though she left the party well before the ballroom opened for dancing.

I first encountered Shrestha at the premiere of the documentary Dimag Ghochne Manche in January 2026 at the QFX Labim Mall in Lalitpur, a glass-and-steel cathedral of consumerism that serves as the spiritual home for Kathmandu’s aspiring globalists. The film chronicles the life of the late Ujwal Thapa, whose legacy of alternative politics continues to haunt the imagination of those who find the existing parliamentary circus intolerable.

The lobby was a microcosm of the Chartreuse Nepal power structure. Prime Minister Sushila Karki cut a cake while former prime minister Baburam Bhattarai—ever the architect of unbuilt utopias—looked on with a scholar’s detached curiosity. In the small talk that followed the screening, I happened to mention to a cluster of attendees that Nepal’s extreme poverty had plummeted from nearly 55 percent in 1995 to a mere 0.37 percent. It was a success ‘unparalleled among its peers,’ according to the World Bank.

The post-1980 generation of urbanites has little patience for the messy genealogies of the ‘Mandale-Male-Mashale’ nationalists. For them, history began with high-speed internet. Shrestha, the quintessential practitioner of digital meritocracy, turned towards me with a glare that mixed hatred with pity, hidden behind a sardonic smile. In a tone where acid dripped from every syllable, she hissed: “Should we then all be grateful to KP Oli?” For me, it was a revealing moment.

Having grown up in the sanitised bubble of the capital’s elite, Shrestha was probably unaware that I have been one of the most consistent and harshest critics of Sharma Oli. Perhaps she also didn’t realise that the reduction in poverty she so casually dismissed was not the fruit of the Singha Durbar establishment, but the sweat and blood of a largely unskilled labour force that toils in the inhospitable environs of West Asia and Malaysia.

For the post-1980 urban middle class, politics is not a struggle for justice; it is a ‘management problem’ that only meritocratic politicians can solve. The country of ‘Never Ending Peace and Love’ (NEPAL) to them is a postcard that has been defaced by the ossified apparatchiks of Sharma Oli’s ilk.

Dismantled lattice

Shrestha’s disdain for the subterranean lattice of loyalty of the UML is shared by her former buddies in the RSP. In the UML, party workers were cultivated through ideological training, shared hardship and a dense web of reciprocity. The cadre was a node—a link between the state and the citizen. In times of crisis, this network delivered relief; in times of elections, it ensured turnout.

But lattices age and ossify. Over time, what was once an ideological commitment degenerated into a client-patron relationship—the Afno Manchhe and Chakari tradition of anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista’s formulation. The cadre, instead of being a bridge, became a gatekeeper. Access to the state was mediated through partisan affiliation; public goods acquired private intermediaries—the Bichauliyas.

Sharma Oli, the ‘Great Helmsman’ of a ship on the Narayani that never left the harbour, mastered this system. He preferred to paint the hull in bright colours and describe the voyage to those still standing on the dock. He was a xenophobic demagogue, an ethnonational extremist with no respect for laws that came in the way of his mood swings. But he was a known entity—loved and hated in equal measures. He was ‘Ba’ to some and a ‘Boor’ to many others.

The rise of the RSP must be situated in the decay of the old order. Its appeal is unmistakably urban; its idiom is unambiguously middle-class. Where the old parties rely on face-to-face interaction, the RSP relies on screen-to-mind transmission.

Shrestha’s trajectory—a gilded path through Bryn Mawr, MIT, Boston Consulting Group and Citigroup—is symptomatic of the ideology of ideology-free politics. This ‘Wall Street to Singha Durbar’ narrative presupposes that the state is merely a dysfunctional subsidiary of the Washington Consensus in need of a more enlightened CEO. It is a discourse of impatient efficiency and digital transparency, fundamentally allergic to the procedural labyrinths and the messy, slow-moving deliberative democracy of a state in a ‘suspended-conflict’ state.

However, to dismiss this phenomenon as mere algorithmic propaganda would be analytically lazy. What distinguishes the RSP is the nature of its connection to the masses—its messages livestreamed rather than endlessly debated in television talkathons. Ironically, the seeds of this post-truth politics were sown in a record-breaking broadcast by its founder, anchored in ‘Buddha was born in Nepal’ jingoism. While legacy media struggles to build depth and understanding, social media achieves breadth and belief at the speed of impression, bypassing the filters of reason.

Hybrid moment

For the UML, and for Sharma Oli in particular, the lesson of the electoral debacle is disorienting. It is tempting for the old guard to attribute their losses to the allure of novelty, the manipulations of TikTok, or the all-weather excuse of every extremist of the right and left in the country: The Raisina Hill conspirators. Such explanations offer solace without demanding introspection.

The more disquieting possibility is that the party’s organisational sinews remain intact, but their moral authority has frayed beyond repair. Cadres can mobilise voters, but they cannot indefinitely persuade a disenchanted electorate. The fragmentation of the Jhapali Naxalites, exemplified by the emergence of splinter formations, has further diluted the coherence of the old order. Internal dissent, once managed within party structures, now spills into the public domain, eroding the image of unity.

An organisation without credibility is choreography without conviction. The ethnonational chieftain’s brand of vainglorious nationalism, while a potent narcotic in the short term, failed to construct the dependable delivery mechanisms that a modernising populace desperately required and vociferously demanded. Perhaps Sharma Oli’s most enduring folly was his tendency to dismiss all critics as insignificant malcontents unworthy of his attention.

The victors who drowned the ship of Oli-garchy promise to take an aeroplane to the sky without checking its engines. Hope is eternal, but it helps to ‘trust but verify’ with palms together in prayers to Lord Ram—a divinity Sharma Oli famously argued was born not in Faizabad but in Thori. It must be a coincidence, but the strongman of the RSP is all set to step into the shoes of Sharma Oli on Ram Navami. May the blessings of Bhadrakali, the deity and the military, be upon him.