While addressing party workers in Kathmandu on Saturday, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, chairman of the CPN (Maoist Centre), the main opposition, stuck to a familiar script. He again accused the Oli government of protecting the corrupt while selectively targeting opposition leaders for prosecution. Dahal re-emphasised how his government was toppled because it was preparing to take action against top Nepali Congress and CPN-UML leaders on corruption charges. Dahal and other top Maoist leaders who spoke before him lamented the ‘complete failure’ of the Oli government’s 100 days in office. Perhaps the most interesting part of Dahal’s statement was that the ruling parties need not fear that the Maoist Centre would try to topple the government. In fact, the party was now in a soul-searching phase and there was no question of the Maoists joining the government soon. That the Maoist supremo managed to say all this with a perfectly straight face speaks volumes about his chameleon-like ability to deceive folks—or at least about his belief that he can continue to do so indefinitely.

His harangue on Saturday made one thing clear though: He still feels deeply hurt by the ‘deceit’ of KP Sharma Oli who ditched him to join hands with the Congress in order to cobble together a new ruling coalition. Nevermind that there is perhaps no one better at the deceit game than Dahal, who only four months ago used to publicly boast of the ‘magic number’ he had to be a long-term prime minister, apparently by endlessly playing off the Congress and the UML against each other. As Dahal held forth on Saturday, the pain of unexpectedly being booted out of office was also pasted all over his face. If Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba or UML chair Oli offered him to be the prime minister again, he would accept the offer in a heartbeat. No one is fooled by his commitment to soul-searching. He has played that card before. Even when he became the prime minister for the third time back in December 2022, he had promised to learn from his past mistakes and this time train all his focus on good governance and service delivery. Yet when we look back at his year and half of premiership, there is little to show for it.

It is nothing but self-deception if Dahal believes people still heed his public utterances. Nothing he said on Saturday will change the public perception that Dahal is an ace manipulator whose sole goal is to connive his way back to power. Otherwise, it is hard to see how the Maoists can make a political comeback. Dahal continues to run the party like a personal fief. His successor as party chair is nowhere in sight. The party’s popular base continues to shrink and on current course, the outfit might be obliterated in the next election cycle. When the Maoist leader thundered from Tundikhel in the past, a sizable section of farmers, labourers, daily wage earners and all those who yearned for a break with the past paid some attention. Unlike the ‘bourgeois’ Congress and UML, the Maoists, with some justification, claimed to have championed the cause of the downtrodden. Now the very proposition sounds laughable. The Maoist Centre these days is a party without a core ideology or stable support base. With Dahal uninterested in putting in the hard work to gradually rebuild the organisation while champing at the bit to get back into Singhadurbar, the Maoists’ downslide will be hard to halt.