Prime Minister and CPN-UML chair KP Sharma Oli is not a patient person. If the ruling alliance had a majority in the upper house, he would perhaps have already pushed through an amended version of the Political Parties Act. The law defines criteria under which dissidents of a political party can split and form a new outfit if they can prove the support of a certain number of central committee members and/or lawmakers of the mother party. In August 2021, the then Sher Bahadur Deuba government had issued an ordinance to ease the split of political parties. According to the 2021 provision, 20 percent of a party’s central committee members ‘or’ 20 percent lawmakers could break away to form a new party. Before that, a dissident group had to show the support of 40 percent central committee members and 40 percent lawmakers to register a new party. The Deuba government had changed the law in order to help CPN-UML leader Madhav Kumar Nepal and Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal’s Mahantha Thakur launch their own parties. Deuba was repaying these leaders for helping him defang Oli, who as prime minister in early 2021 had twice dissolved the federal lower house.

The problem for Oli, in his current stint as prime minister, is that he has been unable to table in the federal Parliament the six ordinances the government had promulgated a month and half ago. If the ordinances cannot be tabled within 60 days of their promulgation, they are rendered null and void. Even some of Oli’s coalition partners are against one of the six ordinances: The one related to land. So Oli will struggle to get the ordinance approved in the federal upper house. This is why he wants to push through an amendment in the Political Parties Act such that a dissident faction can break away with the support of 40 percent of the party’s central committee ‘or’ 40 percent of its lawmakers. Changing the earlier provision of ‘and’ to ‘or’ would make it easy for the dissidents in the CPN (Unified Socialist), Madhav Kumar Nepal’s new party, to break away. In this case, the ruling coalition could lure away the dissidents and garner a majority in the federal upper house.

This dastardly business of engineering a split in smaller parties in order to meet the vested interest of big ruling outfits must stop. The threshold for legally breaking political parties should be based on principled debates rather than on whims and fancies of some leaders. Such a practice corrupts the parliamentary system and adds to the public's skepticism of the democratic process. The land-related ordinance, in its current form, is being opposed not just by smaller Madhesh-based parties supporting the government but even by civil society and media. Instead of trying to change controversial provisions of the ordinance through broad consultations, the government appears keen to take a backdoor for its passage. The choice of the two big ruling parties, the Congress and the UML, to take an easy way out will further undermine their democratic credentials.