In Nepali politics, principles have often been traded as cheap currency. Still, the recent spectacle of Sher Bahadur Deuba, former prime minister and immediate past president of the Nepali Congress, executing a theological about-face is particularly disquieting. Having spent his years at the helm of the grand old party actively suppressing the Mahasamiti’s fervour for a return to a Hindu state, Deuba has abruptly emerged as its champion. Upon his return from East Asia amidst money-laundering investigations and Congress’s leadership change, he unceremoniously ordered his faction’s national gathering to endorse the very agenda he previously blocked repeatedly.

This is a political manoeuvre of a displaced leader attempting to establish relevance.

To understand the utter hypocrisy of this pivot, examine Deuba’s own record. During the constitutional debates of 2015, and as recently as the Mahasamiti meetings of 2018 and 2024, Deuba rejected petitions to depart from constitutional secularism signed by hundreds of party members. In his years of power, Deuba repeatedly warned that such reversal of secularism would invite division in society. Now, unseated by a special general convention and pursued by legal scrutiny, he weaponises religion as a shield. He is neither alone nor the first to indulge in this brand of opportunism. Senior politicians have historically used religious cards to keep their business afloat at the expense of festering divisions in society.

The Congress’s deposed leader is better off accepting that the separation of religion from governance is the very bedrock of civic peace. If he is looking for reasoning to change his current stance, he could turn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that religions inevitably divide a citizen’s loyalty, as one cannot fully commit to the laws of the state whilst caught between secular duties and the decrees of a religion. If Deuba needs further logic, he could dig up Immanuel Kant’s argument that when a government uses religious doctrines to enforce laws, it treats its citizens like children, demanding obedience through divine fear rather than respecting them as rational, autonomous adults capable of moral choices. By mixing the spiritual with the political, Deuba has infantilised the Nepali populace, reducing a complex, pluralistic republic to a congregation.

The real-world consequences of this ideological regression are already visible in regional friction. Pushing a pro-Hindu political agenda systematically alienates Nepal’s significant religious and ethnic minorities—Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Kirat communities—relegating them to second-class status. We need only recall the recent communal clashes in the southern plains, where a trivial dispute over loudspeakers rapidly amplified, transforming neighbours into adversaries and prompting curfews.

Moreover, the religious shift cannot be separated from geopolitical shadows. Analysts point to the majoritarian influence of religion-based politics in neighbouring states, where the mainstreaming of religious nationalism has led to systemic polarisation. This model has bled across borders, emboldening Nepal’s own regressive groups. By copying this majoritarian pattern, Nepal risks inviting the structural decay seen elsewhere in the region—from the Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka’s civil war to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.

Politics is the art of compromise and pragmatism. Religion deals in the absolute. When the absolute is dragged into the mud of political factionalism, both are corrupted. In Nepal’s context, secularism was one of the hardest-won compromises of a decade-long civil war that dismantled a feudal Hindu monarchy to build an inclusive republic. It cannot be sacrificed on the altar of one man’s desperate quest for political survival. If Deuba’s faction succeeds in dragging the Congress down this sectarian path, they will set fire to Nepal’s constitutional foundations.

Nepal’s future lies in looking forward, not backwards. The gods do not belong in the realm of politics. Deuba might succeed in commanding the support of regressive religious groups with his ideological pivot, but his deliberate divine deception must be rejected by both the public and his faction’s cadres.