Nepal’s quest for political stability continues

On July 12, Nepal’s Supreme Court resurrected the country’s House of Representatives for the second time in six months. Given an earlier ruling that had underscored the need for all efforts to keep the House going for its full term, and interim verdicts interdicting PM KP Sharma Oli’s new inductions as ministers from discharging their duties, this verdict was not surprising. But the court also annulled Oli’s caretaker PM role and ordered the appointment of Opposition leader Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress as the next PM, something that some see as judicial overreach, as floor tests are the usual route in parliamentary democracies.

The present topsy-turvy in the politics of Nepal began on May 22 when President Bidya Devi Bhandari simply accepted PM Oli’s recommendation to dissolve the House and let him continue as PM till elections which would be held in six months. Oli had earlier lost a trust vote in the House after several members of his own party, UML (Unified Marxists Leninists Communist Party of Nepal), backed by former PM Madhav Nepal, refused to support him.

The President was unwilling to accept the prime ministerial claims of Deuba even though he presented a letter signed by 146 MPs from the Nepali Congress, the Maoists led by Prachanda, around a dozen MPs from the UML and the Upendra Yadav faction of the Madhesi party, the Janata Samajbadi Party (JSP). Deuba’s supporters crossed the half-way mark of 137, but party and personal partisanship, rather than good constitutional behaviour, appeared evident in the presidential action.

Nepal’s Constitution has an interesting Article — 76(5) — which, in the eventuality of a stalemate in the appointing of a prime minister through party processes, opens the way for the appointment of any MP, who can obtain the confidence of the House, as PM. It also frees MPs from party whips. The insertion of this Article was done to prevent frequent dissolutions, which had been the norm in Nepal till the adoption of the new Constitution in 2015. Deuba’s claim was under this Article and upheld by the court.

It bears noting that the appointment of a PM under this Article leads to dissolution in case the incumbent does not secure the House’s trust. For Deuba, whether he wins the trust vote or not, he is likely to remain in harness at least till the elections. It was for this reason that he insisted on the inclusion of this Article in his appointment notification. This had not been done by the President’s Secretariat in the initial notification, perhaps cleverly, and that led to an unseemly three hours delay before it was done, and he was sworn in on July 13.

In the 275-member House of Representatives, Oli’s party has 121 MPs, while Deuba and the Maoists between them have a total of 112 MPs. The key is, therefore, the JSP with 32 MPs. But this is a party divided with one faction, led by Mahant Thakur that supported Oli and had even mustered a Deputy Prime Ministership, and another, led by Upendra Yadav that strongly opposed him. The situation having changed, there is every reason for the Mahant Thakur faction to be willing to shift their allegiances — indeed, in Nepali politics there are no permanent friends or enemies and political partnerships of all kinds are par for the course — but this faction’s support for Deuba remains to be seen.

If he manages support from the Madhav Nepal faction of Oli’s UML and even half of the JSP, Deuba would be home and could remain PM for nearly 18 months — the balance of the five-year term of the House of Representatives. Having noted the above, political uncertainty is the name of the game in Nepal and there can be no assurances of how things play out on the floor of the House or later, no matter the need for stability and governance given that Covid-19 is raging in the country along with a severe attendant economic stress. Not surprisingly, there are some signs of even a patch up between Oli and Madhav Nepal.

Happenings in Nepal are of obvious interest to India, but the Foreign Ministry had been clear, and rightly so, that the political goings-on in Nepal were its internal matter. The general belief, though, is that Oli was given a prop which is best evidenced by the support extended to him by the India-friendly Mahant Thakur faction of the JSP. In May 2021, Oli wasn’t the only option and India had old ties with the Nepali Congress, so conjectures abound, including about promises by Oli on security and Madhesi issues and possibly secularism and role of monarchy.

Pivoting is necessitated, but so is a clearer understanding of the influence of western players in the polity of Nepal, which has certainly increased manifold, helped also by Nepal’s exposure to globalisation.

Interestingly, the Chinese, who were missing for some months after being most visible as political dealmakers in the first half of 2020, reappeared on the Nepalese scene, literally on the eve of the court verdict, announcing on July 8 the setting up of a China-South Asian Countries Poverty Alleviation and Cooperative Development Centre. They claimed that this was green-lighted by the Foreign Ministers of Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in April. While there may or may not have been behind the scene moves by them in evolving the new reality in Nepal, they have certainly indicated a willingness to deal with the outcome.

In 2017, during the elections and pollsters predicting a drubbing for him, the then fourth-time PM, Sher Bahadur Deuba, publicly stated that his astrologer had told him that he would serve as Nepal’s PM seven times. In the event, the Nepal Communist Party led by KP Sharma Oli won a decisive victory wining nearly two-third of the seats in the House of Representatives. But obviously, Deuba’s astrologer knew better!