Six months ago, Nepal was in the midst of a revolutionary uprising, led primarily by the youth. The hated government, which murdered 77 protesters, was ousted, and the parliament set on fire. The potential was there for Nepali workers and youth to take power into their own hands, but the absence of a genuinely revolutionary leadership meant that the movement was directionless. Power passed into the hands of an interim government, and the people were told to sit tight until elections in March.
Six months later, and the elections have come around. Nepal’s main three parties that have been in power for the last two decades – the Nepali Congress Party, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), and the Nepali Communist Party – have been routed. Between the three of them, they received just 37 percent of the vote.
On the other hand, the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which was founded just four years ago by a TV presenter, swept to power with almost 50 percent of the vote. Nepal’s electoral system is fine-tuned to ensure that elections produce minority governments and coalitions; the RSP’s landslide victory, giving it a majority of almost two thirds in parliament, is the first time that a single party has won a majority since 1999.
In the Jhapa-5 constituency – traditionally a stronghold for the Communist Party (Unified Marxist-Leninist) – K.P. Sharma Oli, the prime minister ousted by the revolution, lost his seat by almost 50,000 votes to Balendra Shah, presidential candidate for the RSP. Shah and the RSP are viewed as political outsiders, their reputations untarnished by the corruption and nepotism that has stirred up such hatred for the establishment parties, leading to last year’s uprising.
Embarrassingly, Oli’s Communist Party (UML) was caught using ChatGPT-generated images to inflate attendance at one of its campaign rallies to 500,000 people, whereas police reported that fewer than 5,000 people turned up.
Balen the outsider
Shah, referred to as ‘Balen’, is a rapper-turned-Mayor of Kathmandu who rose to prominence during the Gen Z revolution. In fact, Balen was the first choice of voters when, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, student activists organised a Discord poll to select the next interim prime minister.
Much of Balen’s support comes from the fact that he is not viewed as a politician. He is known for his almost Trump-like approach to the mainstream media, favouring social media channels like Twitter instead.
Even as Mayor of Kathmandu, Balen made a name for himself as somebody willing to bulldoze over red tape and give the finger to the decorum of the political establishment in order to ‘get the job done’. For example, to protest poor waste management in the country, he dumped piles of rubbish outside the homes of politicians and halted all waste collection from Singha Durbar, the administrative centre of the government. At another point, he threatened to burn the parliament building down when traffic patrols stopped his wife on her way to hospital.
In one Facebook post, that was later deleted, he wrote:
“F*** America, F*** India, F*** China, F*** UML, F*** Congress, F*** RSP [the same RSP that he joined just a month after posting this], F*** RPP, F*** Maobaadi. You Guys all Combined can do nothing.”
Such statements and actions have elicited shock and horror from the Nepali political elite; but to the workers and youth of the country, who were willing to fight and die to overthrow this elite, Balen is seen as a breath of fresh air. His sentiment of ‘fuck all the parties’ struck a chord with the mood in Nepal, transforming him into a celebrity.
Many of those who voted for the RSP reportedly did so without any knowledge of who the local candidate was, or what they stood for; their votes were cast for whichever party Balen had his name attached to.
Reports describe crowds ringing bells, assuming that this was a personal symbol of Balen, not realising that this is a symbol of the RSP. Black, rectangular sunglasses – Balen’s signature, which he even wears indoors – have apparently been in short supply, as his fans seek to emulate his look.
Rejection of the establishment
And who is surprised by this? For decades, the three main parties have been cycling in and out of government, overseeing worsening living conditions and blatant corruption. Even a decade ago, Nepal almost ranked bottom in the world in terms of public trust in politicians, according to a World Bank study. Of course this anger is being expressed in an outright rejection of the entire establishment!
Scandalously, Nepali capitalism over the years has been partially managed by not one, but two, ‘communist’ parties. Through a plethora of coalitions with different monarchist and bourgeois parties, both communist parties have managed to thoroughly discredit themselves in the eyes of workers and young people who are desperately looking for a way out of their miserable situation.
The anger at ‘communist nepo-babies’ last September highlights this. Images of the children of ‘communist’ politicians flaunting their luxury cars and designer brands online – whilst the average Nepali worker struggles to make ends meet – was akin to a red rag to a bull.
Youth unemployment in Nepal is at 20.6 percent, twice that of the general rate of unemployment. Around 1,500 young people leave the country every day looking for work, and around a quarter of Nepal’s GDP is made up of remittances. A 31-year-old Nepali worker, the sole breadwinner for his family, expressed the mood aptly when questioned by Reuters on why he was leaving Nepal:
“Will this election give me a job? No, right? Inflation is soaring, everything is expensive.
“I carry a family debt of over 2.5 million rupees ($17,200). What option do I really have except to migrate for work?”
With the ‘communist’ parties fully enmeshed with the hated system, and the absence of a genuine revolutionary alternative, it is no wonder that the masses have looked elsewhere for a way forward.
What next?
The revolution last year brought down the corrupt government and the prime minister. But while the spontaneous movement of workers and youth was able to burn down the parliament and clear out one set of gangsters, organisation and a clear programme would have been required to concentrate power in their own hands. Without that, power passed into the hands of a liberal party, the RSP. The same ruling class and state remain.
Balen has made grandiose (some may say outlandish) promises to create 1.2 million jobs, to double per capita income to $3,000, and to double the size of the economy to $100 billion in the next five years. But he hasn’t exactly made clear how he intends to do that on the basis of feeble and parasitic Nepali capitalism, which is constantly being sucked dry by foreign imperialism.
Furthermore, in the context of an increasingly tumultuous world situation, Nepal’s position is hardly set to improve.
With time, the inability of the RSP to offer a way forward will become apparent to the workers and young people of Nepal. As a party, it already has its own share of fraud and corruption allegations (although as a new party, not nearly as many as the others). And as their promises of an economic miracle fail to materialise, their programme will necessarily be one of further attacks against the working class.
Despite its supermajority in parliament, there is also no guarantee that this election marks a break with Nepal’s history of unstable governments that quickly collapse, as some bourgeois commentators hope. The RSP has surged to power, not on its own strengths, but on the weakness of everybody else. As it too becomes intertwined and associated with the rotten establishment, it can fall just as quickly as it has risen.
What has been made clear by this election is that, whilst the movement on the streets may have stopped for now, the same burning hatred of the establishment and everything associated with it remains. There are a lot of expectations placed on the new government, and as they are not met, this anger will only be stoked further.
Nepal is thus passing down a similar road to many of the other countries that have been rocked by revolutionary upheaval in recent years, such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The hatred and anger of the masses concentrated on the old rotten cliques with their dynasties and nepo babies.
The very fact that similar revolutions have rocked one country after another points to a profound fact: that the same conditions exist everywhere, that corruption flows intrinsically from capitalism. The Nepali masses will learn through experience that it is not enough to change the faces at the top. The next phase in the revolution will have to be a root and branch affair.
