Region 
 

Kathmandu

Turning Point

At a time when Sino-US and China-India relations have nosedived, Washington’s interest in courting Kathmandu away from Beijing has also peaked.

By Ambassador Naghmana A. Hashmi | July 2023

Just because Nepal’s social and political conflicts have subsided in recent years does not mean the underlying problems of the Himalayan nation have been addressed to a large degree. This was amply demonstrated in the Elections of November 2022 in Nepal which once again resulted in a hung parliament with no single political party gaining absolute majority. As a rule, the lack of a clear victor in the election add to political instability and result in a period of political readjustments and alliances.

The November 2022 election in Nepal represented a break from the past; it displayed some new facets. First, voters unambiguously expressed frustration at the establishment. About six current ministers and 60 former parliamentarians lost their bids to return to parliament. Though the three major parties avoided the worst outcome, many of their senior leaders failed to win their seats and independent candidates made significant gains, most of whom appear to be in favour of resurgent monarchist forces and a consolidation of upper-caste rule.

The election marked a comeback of social and political conservatism in Nepali politics. The Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), a monarchist and Hindu-nationalist party, won seven seats and almost 6 percent of the votes (in the 2017 election, it won one seat and 2 percent of the votes). Overall, the representation of Dalits and other marginalized groups in the current parliament is lower than in previous elections. People’s frustration was also manifested at the regional level. A new regional party, led by C.K. Raut, disrupted the established order in Madhes province in southern Nepal in national and provincial elections.

This was the second elections held in Nepal after the adoption of the country’s new constitution in 2015 and confirmed the trend towards re-consolidation of political power on the part of historically privileged upper-caste minority groups. The 2015 constitution did not address Nepal’s deep-seated structural problems, particularly those of gender and social exclusion, various forms of inequalities, and governance, which fuelled the Maoist insurgency and the 2006 revolution. Instead, the constitution further consolidated the power of the dominant group, upper-caste Brahmins and Chhetris.

Political instability is not a new phenomenon in Nepal. The country has had a number of unstable governments, even when a single party obtained a comfortable majority in the parliament. The latest election has significantly increased short- and long-term uncertainty, affecting the everyday lives of most people in Nepal, as well as cast a shadow over the future of inclusive democracy in the country as a whole. Nepal’s constitution is the only modern-day constitution in which secularism is defined as state protection of Sanatan traditions, meaning Hinduism and the caste system. The outcomes of the current elections are proof of the dominant caste groups’ enduring power. It is noteworthy that the Nepali Congress Party, the largest party in Nepal with deep ties to India’s National Congress party, chose to ignore “secularism” in its recent election manifesto, a step that should be concerning to secularists in and beyond Nepal.


Many international analysts agree that on a deeper level the election results confirmed and even emboldened Nepal’s shift towards a more regressive, right-wing, and exclusionary politics and the decline of the left in Nepal. The elections themselves were more exclusionary than the past elections. The parties fielded a lower number of women, Dalits, and other candidates from marginalized groups in the first-past-the-post system. Out of the 165 FPTP seats in the Parliament, only one candidate from the Dalit community, from the Unified Marxist–Leninists, got elected. No candidate from the Muslim community, who constitute almost four percent of the population, was elected through the FPTP, along with only nine women. Because the constitution reserves 33 percent of parliamentary seats for women, parties compensated for this low number by nominating a higher number of women for the PR election.

Although fragmentation seems to be a factor behind the losses of left wing parties, it is not the real cause. Nepal’s Communist parties are notorious for splitting. The Maoists alone have split into at least six parties since they entered the peace process in 2006. The Unified Marxist–Leninists have undergone a similar fate since the 1990s. As of now, there are at least a dozen parties in Nepal that claim to be “Communist” or, at least, left-wing. However, the main factor behind their decline could be their noticeable shift to right wing ideology and drift from their hard core leftist orientation.

The election results have raised eyebrows in Washington, Beijing and Delhi alike, with all three having different priorities when it comes to Nepal.

Despite the Nepali left’s increasingly right-wing ideology and practice, it still manages to win a significant amount of the vote — roughly 43 percent. There are many reasons for this, but one thing is clear: it is not the left-wing parties’ socialist ideology and practice that attracted these votes, but their accommodation to nationalism and Hindutva.

Another noteworthy outcome is the significant number of contractors, businesspersons, and industrialists elected to parliament from different parties, including those that call themselves “Communist”. More than 20 industrialists and businesspersons and many contractors from Nepal’s prominent construction companies made it to the parliament in the November elections. Nepal’s elections were already heavily influenced by the wealthy, but now the economic elite will have even more direct influence on policy.

Internal political factors aside, much of Nepal’s internal political stability has to do with location. Nepal shares a border with China’s Tibet region and is strategically important for Beijing, which analysts say regards the country as a bridge to the South Asian region. Delhi, for its part, has traditionally enjoyed close ties with neighbouring Hindu-majority Nepal, which it sees as a “buffer” between India and China. India and Nepal share an open border policy, and the Indian army also recruits Nepalese citizens as soldiers in its Gorkha regiments.

The election results have raised eyebrows in Washington, Beijing and Delhi alike, with all three having different priorities when it comes to Nepal. At a time when Sino-US and China-India relations have nosedived, analysts say Washington’s interest in courting Kathmandu away from Beijing has also peaked. Nepal election could be ‘turning point’ in this delicate balance of US, China, India geopolitical interests in the region. Washington has stepped up efforts to expand presence in Nepal amid worsening Sino-US, China-India ties. It now remains to be seen how the three powers will develop strategic interests in Nepal, with India and US keen to counter Chinese influence in the region.

Analysts predict Beijing will continue to deepen its presence in the region, with Chinese strategy driven by multiple interests, economic ones not least among them. Nepal is China’s bridge to South Asia. If it can create the right conditions, China could easily trade with and through other South Asian countries like Bangladesh via Nepal. Hence, Nepal’s challenge will be to continue maintaining good ties with all the three amid this churn. Countering rising Chinese influence in both Nepal and the region will be key for the US and India as they seek to boost ties with Kathmandu and expand their presence.

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