The public image of Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal never quite recovered following the leakage of a 2008 video tape. In the tape, he can be heard boasting about how he had hoodwinked the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) into registering many fake Maoist combatants at the end of the decade-long conflict. A year later, another audio file was leaked, wherein senior Maoist leader Krishna Bahadur Mahara is asking for money from a Chinese national in order to buy some lawmakers. Then, in 2020, a sitting minister, Gokul Baskota, was recorded asking for a hefty commission from an agent of a Swiss company being considered for the printing of Nepali passports. Now, it is the turn of the Rastriya Swatantra Party lawmaker Dhaka Kumar Shrestha. In a WhatsApp conversation dated January 15, he can be heard asking for Rs10 million from Durga Prasai, a controversial businessman. The money, says Shrestha, would be used to buy for himself the post of health minister from the party high command. By that time, the RSP had supposedly locked in the ministry for itself in its negotiations with other ruling coalition partners.

Although Shrestha’s secretariat has denounced the “tampered tape” as fake, there are enough details in it to suggest it is genuine. If so, it would represent another grievous breach of public trust. In the last parliamentary elections, dejected by lack of delivery from the more established parties, people had voted for RSP candidates with great expectations. Yet even in its short life the RSP is already proving to be no different to the older parties it supposedly wanted to replace. It is an open secret that billions of rupees are spent every election, most of it illegally. As elections become pure monetary contests, there is a mad rush to put together as big a war-chest as possible to have a decent shot at winning parliamentary seats. Leaders of established parties are masters at this game. New outfits like the Rastriya Swatantra Party entered the fray with a promise to do away with this corrupt way of doing politics, and show that elections in Nepal can be won fair and square, on the strength of a party’s ideology and honesty of its candidates.

There is little hope that “Rabi Lamichhane’s core team members” who, according to the leaked tape, accept bribes to sell ministerial portfolios to the highest bidders, will be punished. Lamichhane has already tried to dismiss the tape as an attempt to spoil the party’s chances in the upcoming bypolls. If so, where is there hope for the Nepali people? If they cannot rely on the established parties and if the new ones are no different, who do they turn to? Perhaps the same-old authoritarian figures they booted out of power not so long ago. All the proponents of democracy, old and new, must be mindful of this. Again, it is not a question of a single audio tape making or breaking the fortunes of a political party, or setting the course of national politics. Yet it is certainly a strong indication of where the country is headed.