A new political guard arrives to confront Nepal’s old problems

This story has been co-published with Kalam Weekly.

BEFORE MIDDAY on 6 March, the first winner in Nepal’s general election the previous day had already been declared. Ranju Darshana (Neupane) of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) clinched the Kathmandu-1 constituency with 15,455 votes – over 9000 more than her closest competitor, Prabal Thapa of the Nepali Congress. The other heavyweight candidate from the constituency, Rabindra Mishra of the royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), came in a distant third.

Darshana’s early win seemed to portend the rest of the election results. As of the time of writing, the RSP is leading in the contests for over 100 out of 165 directly-elected seats in the lower house of the country’s federal parliament, and looks poised to dominate it. Even on the ongoing count of votes for proportional-representation seats, which make up the rest of the 275-seat chamber, the RSP has a wide advantage. 

An RSP majority seems imminent; given the way things are going, the party could even achieve a two-thirds supermajority, something that has only happened once before in Nepali politics. In 1959, the Nepali Congress won 74 out of 109 seats in the country’s first-ever democratic election after leading an insurrection against the Rana autocracy. Now, more than half a century later, the RSP looks like it could claim near-total control of the lower house and, subsequently, the executive government.