There is a strange kind of failure that happens not because a thing has been proven wrong, but because those who claimed to represent it never quite lived up to it. A doctrine does not need to be refuted to become useless in the eyes of the people; it only needs to be betrayed often enough, and for long enough, by those who invoked it. This is roughly what has happened to ideology in Nepal over the last decade and a half.

Every major party that emerged from the 1990 movement, the People's War and the republican transition of 2006, carried a label. Some called themselves communists of one shade or another, some socialists, some democrats of a liberal bent. But in government, in opposition and in the long, undignified business of forming and breaking coalitions, the labels stopped meaning anything. A party of the left governed much like a party of the right. Corruption was ubiquitous, regardless of ideological boundaries. So was opportunism, and the habit of switching alliances overnight for the sake of a ministry. People who watched this for years drew the only reasonable conclusion available to them: ideology, in Nepal at least, was a costume rather than a conviction.

It was exhaustion, more than any coherent alternative vision, that gave rise to the appeal of centrism and of parties that claimed to stand above ideology altogether, offering competence and newness instead of doctrine. Their rise was evidence that the existing ideological actors had discredited themselves so thoroughly that even the absence of ideology began to look like a virtue.

But this is where the argument usually offered—that ideology is finished—misses something important. Ideology was never only the property of parties or of the slogans they shout during elections. It is, more fundamentally, something a nation carries, often independent of whichever party happens to be governing at a given moment.

Consider Europe. Regardless whether a Christian democrat or a social democrat holds office in Germany or in the Nordic countries, the underlying architecture does not change dramatically: a market economy paired with a substantial welfare state, a broadly shared commitment to public health care, public education, and a redistributive tax system. Governments in these countries compete over the margins, not over the foundation. That foundation is itself an ideology, sedimented so deeply into institutions and expectations that it no longer needs to be argued for every election cycle.

Nepal is no different in principle, even if the substance is still contested. Article 4 of our constitution describes the state as a “socialism oriented, federal democratic republic”. That single phrase is a declaration that whichever party forms the government, certain ideological commitments are meant to persist—a directive, however imperfectly honoured, toward equity, toward federalism, toward republican accountability. The fact that governments have failed to live up to this framing is a separate question from whether the framing exists. It does. The ideology has not disappeared; it has migrated from the manifestos of parties into the architecture of the state itself, waiting to be either fulfilled or abandoned by whoever next takes power.

A further dimension is easy to overlook. Politics is not something that begins when a citizen turns 18 and casts a vote. It begins at birth, and arguably before it. Where a child is born, the quality of maternal care available during pregnancy, whether the family has access to a functioning hospital or a rural outpost with no doctor, the kind of education the child will receive, the opportunities or the absence of them that will follow through adulthood, and even the dignity or indignity of how a person's remains are handled after death—all of this is shaped by political choices. And the character of those choices, whether the state leans toward collective provision or individual responsibility, whether it privileges the market or the community, is itself an ideological question, however much we have grown tired of naming it as such.

What has genuinely changed is the vocabulary and the terrain on which ideological argument now takes place. The classical debates—Marx against Smith, Weber against Hayek—have not vanished, but have been absorbed into something more reflexive. Social media has turned ideology into an instinct rather than a treatise. Someone criticises the excesses of capitalism on a smartphone manufactured by a multinational corporation, and within minutes a chorus arrives to point out the apparent contradiction of using the tools of the very system one criticises. Someone defends a welfare programme and is immediately sorted into a camp, labelled left or right, without much interest in the argument itself. Every opinion, however small, now gets filed instantly into a pre-existing ideological bin. In that sense, ideology has become more pervasive than ever, despite the thinning of its formal, party-based expression.

This is precisely why the search for ideology is likely to intensify rather than fade. A government can build roads, distribute subsidies and manage the ordinary business of administration without ever explaining why it is doing so in one way and not another. But legitimacy that outlasts a single budget cycle or a single election requires more than competent delivery. People need to understand what larger project their sacrifices and their patience are in service of. A government that solves problems without offering a coherent account of the world it is trying to build will eventually be asked, and rightly so, what all of it is ultimately for.

Nepal's political class spent a decade and a half teaching its citizens to distrust ideology because those who claimed it did not practice it. But the vacuum that distrust created cannot remain empty indefinitely. Somewhere between the fatigue with old slogans and the hunger for meaning that no purely technocratic government can satisfy, the search for ideology will return, not as nostalgia for Marx or Hayek, but as a renewed demand that power explain itself. That demand, once it gathers force again, may prove harder to dismiss than the ideologies it succeeded.