Only seven weeks have passed since the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) formed the Balendra Shah-led government. Whether it was the first democratic government of the Nepali Congress after overthrowing 30 years of the Panchayat system, the Maoists who came to power in 2008 after leading a ‘revolution’ or the KP Oli government of 2018 that made many misguided souls think the leftist dream was finally being realised—I cannot recall any government since 1991 that began working at the pace of the current one. Amid such a beginning—whether the matter of bringing numerous ordinances at once, or not following ‘tradition’ in the appointment of the Chief Justice, or debates ranging from why the Prime Minister wore white shoes to Parliament to why he arrived late—the established ‘old’ intellectual society in Nepal's public sphere is scrambling, barely keeping up with its rush to criticise Shah. The possible reasons behind this ‘overreaction’ and why certain decisions and the style of this government deserve to be seen from a different perspective will be the central theme of this article.

Before getting there, it may be easier to begin with an experience this scribe recently had. As it happened, I had left Nepal right after the elections and was arriving in Paris, the capital of France, the very week Balen took his oath as Prime Minister. At the hotel check-in counter, a young French woman suddenly lit up with excitement the moment my partner handed our passports to her. In Europe, where you often meet people who have no idea where Nepal even is, she was delighted to discover we were Nepali. She said, "Congratulations to you. I've been reading about your country lately." Then she told her colleagues, "Their country just had a Gen Z movement, and a 35-year-old rapper has just become Prime Minister." I had occasionally encountered such warmth before from those who knew of Everest or had come to trek in the Himalayas, but this was the first time my passport earned even a little respect in Europe because of our Prime Minister. A French university student, the reason for her excitement was that while Gen Z and youth uprisings have occurred in other countries in recent years, nowhere else has such a transformation taken place at the scale of reshaping an entire political era as it did in Nepal. Nepal set a fine example for the world that if young people wake up and intervene in politics, it is possible, through elections, to legitimately break the decades-long grip of the corrupt and incompetent on the state.

A few days before that, we had stepped into an Indian restaurant in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, for an evening meal. The owner, an Indian-origin man now a Dutch citizen, was sitting at the counter himself. A Nepali student was working there as a waitress. She hailed from Jhapa, the most talked-about district during the elections, and had apparently been briefing everyone in the restaurant about Nepal every day, on account of their newfound enthusiasm. After learning through her that we, too, were Nepali, that former Indian came to our table about three times, each time remarking, "What you have accomplished is remarkable." A few days before that, whether at an international event in The Hague, Netherlands, attended by representatives from sixteen countries, or later during a meeting with the Head of Asia Pacific and his team at the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, curiosity and hope about the changes unfolding in Nepal were everywhere. Yet when I returned to Kathmandu last week and observed the days that followed, the level of public discourse and criticism within Nepal's traditional intellectual circles was such that I felt compelled to write this column.

However one interprets the Gen Z uprising of September, it was a ‘rupture’ in Nepali society. It was an eruption that brought to the surface everything that had festered because the democratic framework had failed to cleanse itself in a gentlemanly fashion over time. Some did not want to understand what this was, and others simply could not. Even up to the elections, those who refused to understand it kept insisting the whole thing was part of some conspiracy. This is a community that, whenever something happens that it either doesn't want to or cannot analyse, defaults to interpreting it as an outside orchestration. They may never have even a sentence to write about who might have done it, how or why. Yet, conspiracy has become the very default mode of their thinking. The 48 percent popular vote that RSP, which had staked its campaign on making Balendra Shah the Prime Minister, received was the most legitimate expression possible of just how deeply angry people were with traditional politics and governance, and how great a ‘departure’ they were seeking from it. Looking back, roughly two and a half months after March 5, it appears that not only the old political parties got displaced through elections but also the traditional civic circles of Kathmandu—writers and thinkers who had criticised those parties over the decades yet developed their intellectual consciousness in the same company—failed to internalise the meaning of that mandate.

It seems many have not understood why the people, setting aside traditional leanings of ethnicity, ideology and class, had so enthusiastically endorsed Balendra Shah through RSP. The first mistake was this: in evaluating Balendra, they are still using the partisan and parliamentary conduct of KP Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba and Pushpa Kamal Dahal as the standard. Beyond the need to preserve foundational democratic processes and institutions, I find it excessive to criticise him over everything else in the name of ‘tradition’.

‘Tradition’ demands that the Prime Minister himself come and answer questions on policy and programs. Really? First, recall the full package of Balen's personality, reflect on which style and temperament led people to place such enormous trust in him and then think about the hours-long, tedious, taking-turns speeches that fill our Parliament. Then picture Balendra sitting there all day listening to ‘communist’ MPs asking why he wore white shoes, why he wore something other than daura-suruwal. Put yourself in those white shoes for a moment; could you have done that all day? What difference has it actually made to the quality of policy and programme responses that Finance Minister Sworneem Wagle answered in his place? I am not advocating that coming to the Parliament and speaking is wrong. But to say that democracy is weakened because he has not yet come and spoken is a weak argument. Because the people who sent Balen, having watched him speak a total of 26 minutes across the entire election campaign, did so precisely because they liked that style: speak less, do more.

Now, let us briefly discuss the ordinances. In fact, three weeks ago, the very day Kantipur reported that the government was simultaneously preparing 45 bills to be tabled in that very session, I felt a sense of admiration at the Balen government's pace of work. Because this is the same country whose previous parliaments went entire sessions without passing a single bill, treating that inertia as tradition and accepting it as normal. Even with bills prepared at this speed, passing them through procedural channels and turning them into law will still take another two or three months. In that light, there is a mismatch between the pace at which this government is moving and the sluggish tempo at which our law-making processes operate. In such a situation, I assess that many of those who voted for RSP are pleased to see the push to bring bills forward and get things done quickly. Yes, alongside the pace of the ordinances, their content must of course be examined. Aside from the ordinance related to the Constitutional Council, there has been no major visible disagreement with any of the others.

Sapana Malla may well have been the most qualified for Chief Justice, among the six candidates recommended based on public evaluation. But the other simultaneous reality is that she was part of a ‘settlement’ already made between UML and Congress regarding who would become Chief Justice after whom, all the way up to 2036. Unfortunately, she also became caught in the grinding wheel that broke that very cycle of ‘settlements’. In the end, this too is merely the breaking of a ‘tradition’, not a breach of law or the constitution. Some might ask here: isn't democracy ultimately also about tradition? That doesn’t always have to be the case. In the name of democratic tradition, certain practices also become entrenched that render the system hollow and ritualistic. If you place the matter in the light of the change the Gen Z uprising sought, you may be able to see other traditions that need to be broken. Take, for instance, the structure called the National Assembly. Had it been dissolved along with the House of Representatives when that was dissolved in September, the situation would have been different. Constitutionally, that was not possible now, but if it stands as an obstacle to such a sweeping, fresh mandate, this institution will, in political terms, become one fit for abolition.

It is easy to understand why Congress might be rattled, for the title of ‘principal democratic force’ it has held since its founding has, for the first time, shifted to another party: RSP. As for the communists around UML and the NCP, they are not merely rattled; they appear to have entered a state of collective depression, wondering whether the people have permanently repudiated the only doctrine they knew all their lives. These parties, which once considered themselves synonymous with the state, now arrive in the new Parliament so diminished that they seem unsure of what to say and what not to say. Under these circumstances, the Prime Minister's absence from Parliament—his not coming to speak—actually made things easier for them. In a situation where they could not even articulate what questions required the Prime Minister's personal response on policy and programs, at least Balendra's absence gave them something to say—some agenda for criticism.

Those who occupy the largest space in Nepal's public discourse are still of leftist leanings. Many of them criticised Oli in the past years, and criticised Prachanda too. They may have criticised various aspects of communist leaders and parties, but the lens through which they understand the world remains classical Marxism. It is this very stratum of outside formal political organisation that has been most wounded by the electoral tsunami in favour of Balendra Shah and RSP. What they had sought was an alternative to Oli; what the country sought was an alternative to the left itself. Therefore, unable to simply refuse to accept the election results, they have not yet been able to ‘process’ the popular mandate for RSP. It is psychologically difficult for the democratic and leftist intellectuals to accept Shah and the RSP leaders as leaders of Parliament and the nation.

For the first time since 1991, someone many may have never met personally, nor are likely to meet now, has come. The Prime Minister, who has just turned 36, is one who neither utters the word ‘socialism’ nor ‘Marxism’, and whose identity is not that of a conventional political worker. A large old stratum of our society has simply not been able to acclimatise to such an unconventional Prime Minister. On top of that, in Nepal's feudal-minded society, there is the persistent problem of being unable to accept someone considerably younger than oneself as a leader, and of belittling them with the attitude of ‘what could they possibly know’. Comb through the words of some senior writers and commentators who have been writing for a long time, and that sentiment can be read quite plainly.

There are so many areas in Nepal's democratic institutions, public enterprises and service-delivery departments that need to be cleaned up that the principal concern right now should simply be to maintain the current government’s momentum. Being a democratic system, transparency is an utter necessity. Accountability is its central dimension. Some among RSP's supporters may be patient, others may be of the mindset that everything should happen at once. All of the concerns surrounding the coordination between the RSP party and the government, its challenges and risks are legitimate. There are matters on which Prime Minister Balendra Shah and party president Rabi Lamichhane must maintain balance. But what must be accepted for now is this: the people sought liberation from hollow ‘ideology’. They want institutions made hollow by ‘tradition’ to be cleansed.

They want ministries freed from partisan interest groups and service-delivery offices freed from brokers. For the very reason that it cannot happen through traditional thinking, styles, and political parties, the people gave a new mandate. As the renowned American Marxist philosopher Fredric Jameson wrote in The Political Unconscious, perhaps the traditional intellectuals of the democratic and left circles may not even be aware of why they are thinking the way they are. If they were to engage with their own political subconscious and critique their own prejudices, it would become a little easier for them to understand what the people sought from the Gen Z uprising and the elections.