Journalists love interacting with Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the country’s three-time prime minister. He can be uncannily honest, often revealing the inner workings of the government and his party as he gets into the conversation. In a recent meeting with a group of editors, Dahal was fielding questions about his government’s performance, which has now survived a whole year. “As you know, I am a prime minister with just 32 seats. Even if I want, I can only do so much,” he said. He has a point. At the start of his third term as prime minister last December, Dahal had promised to leave his mark as the country’s executive head this time. He started on a positive note, undertaking sweeping investigations into the fake Bhutanese refugee scam, the Lalita Niwas Land grab case, and even large-scale smuggling of gold through the Tribhuvan International Airport. Perhaps were it not for the sort of coalition compulsions he was hinting at with the editors, at least a few of the big political fish associated with these scams would now be in jail.

His major coalition partner, Nepali Congress, has repeatedly hindered his initiatives, as the rival Congress faction has often acted as an opposition within the ruling coalition. Then there is KP Oli, the leader of the CPN-UML, the main opposition in Parliament, who is always scheming to undo the government. So, yes, Dahal did not have the perfect environment to work in. But that in no way excuses some glaring shortcomings of his administration. The government failed to solve any of the big corruption cases it pursued, perhaps because doing so would have upset the delicate ruling coalition. But he surely knows that people judge a government not by the length of its tenure, but by what it does while in office. So even the relatively short terms of BP Koirala and Manmohan Adhikari, both of whom assiduously worked in public interest, are seen as successful, even as they view the repeated tenures of Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba and Dahal himself, as failures.

Another of Dahal’s inexcusable failures is his inability to lend any momentum to a flagging economy. Or to make people believe that the ‘good’ economic numbers his government keeps bandying about are good for them too. Unemployed, stuck in poor jobs or looking to escape the country the first chance they get, people are getting rather despondent. Nor has Dahal been able to give a clear direction to the ministries or to make them work for public good, as their dismal work performance reports the prime minister’s office has prepared show. No less glaring has been the government’s reluctance to empower provinces. So even though his year in office has not been a total failure, it is also not something worth celebrating either. We can only hope that in whatever remaining time he has in Singhadurbar, Dahal has the guts to make some tough decisions. For someone who wants to leave behind a strong legacy as prime minister, keeping coalition partners happy at all costs should not be his top priority.