Situating Nepal’s current political moment in the long history of feudalism to republican democracy

The Rastriya Swatantra Party’s stunning sweep in the March  2026 elections, securing an absolute majority in the House of  Representatives and a majority of votes in the proportional  representation system as well, marks a new rupture in Nepali politics.  Rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah, who resigned as Kathmandu’s  mayor to lead the RSP’s campaign since January 2026, defeated former  Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified  Marxist Leninist in the latter’s own constituency of Jhapa-5, a result  symbolising the defeat and rejection of the political old guard in the  country. 

The RSP, founded only in 2022 by television personality Rabi Lamichhane, had ridden a wave of anti-establishment sentiment,  fuelled by the Gen Z uprising of September 2025, to deliver Nepal’s first  parliamentary majority in 27 years. The three parties that had dominated  Nepali politics since the 1990s — the Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, and CPN  (Maoist Centre) — were reduced to 38, 25, and 17 seats respectively, their  worst-ever collective performance. At just 35, Shah is poised to become  Nepal’s youngest Prime Minister, set to govern a country that is still  counted among the world’s least developed. 

This article is a part of The Hindu’s e-book: Nepal’s new political moment

The scale of the RSP’s victory, in a way, matched the depth of the anger  that produced it. Six months before the election, Nepal had witnessed its  most violent popular upheaval since the civil war of the 1990s/2000s – an  uprising that lasted barely a couple of days but destroyed government  buildings, toppled the Oli government, and left dozens dead. 

The Run-Up: The Gen Z protests 

What began on September 8, 2025 as a youth-led protest against the Oli  government’s ban on 26 social media platforms rapidly metamorphosed  into a nationwide uprising. The government’s argument that the platforms  failed to comply with registration requirements following a Supreme  Court ruling on content monitoring was not accepted by young internet connected Nepalis who saw it as an attempt to suppress dissent against a  political class of the elite.  

But the anger went well beyond the social media ban. It extended to  opposing corruption, political instability, and economic mismanagement.  This is borne out by Nepal’s numbers that tell a stark story. It has had 30  changes of government since 1990 with no Prime Minister completing a  full term, unemployment among 15-24 year-olds reached 22.7% in 2022-23,  personal remittances account for over 33% of GDP, and roughly one in four  males is a migrant working in another country.  

The security forces’ killing of at least 19 demonstrators on the very  first day transformed what was initially Kathmandu-based dissent into  a nationwide outrage. On September 9, demonstrators defied an army imposed curfew and attacked multiple government buildings such as the  Federal Parliament, the Supreme Court, and the Prime Minister’s office complex. Politicians’ homes were targeted: five-time former PM Sher  Bahadur Deuba and his wife were assaulted, former PM Jhala Nath Khanal’s  home was set ablaze, with his wife suffering severe burns. Prisons were  raided, freeing among others, the RSP’s Rabi Lamichhane. By the time the  dust settled, close to 76 people were dead and over 2,000 had been injured. 

Following Oli’s resignation and a three-day power vacuum, former  Chief Justice Sushila Karki was appointed interim PM on September 12. She  dissolved Parliament and announced elections for March 5, 2026. The major  parties condemned this as unconstitutional, but their protests carried no  weight. The momentum of the uprising and the thorough discrediting of  the established political class had seen to that. 

Other upheavals in Nepal’s history 

A student of Nepal’s modern political history would recognise the  September 2025 uprising and what followed in March 2026 as the latest  in a series of decisive moments that have reshaped the country’s political  order. Three earlier pivotal periods, 1950, 1990, and 2005-07, each brought  about fundamental breaks from the governing order that preceded them.  The question that needs asking is whether 2025-26 represents a similar  structural transformation or is merely a generational changing of the guard  within an unreformed system. 

The End of Ranacracy, 1950-51 

The Rana oligarchy, which had reduced the monarchy to a titular role  since 1846, was among South Asia’s most long-lasting feudal regimes. As  the historian M.C. Regmi noted in his many works on the country, the  Rana political system was essentially a military despotism in which the  government functioned as an instrument for the enrichment of the prime  minister and his family. The regime survived through a system of patrilineal  succession and an elaborate hierarchy – the A, B, and C class system based  on birth and marital status – designed to manage internal power struggles.  But it ultimately bred resentment and constant intrigue within the ruling  elite itself. 

The Ranas presided over what was a stagnant, extractive political  economy. Land grants under various tenurial systems created layers of rent-receiving intermediaries between the actual cultivator and the state,  consolidating what Baburam Bhattarai, writing as a PhD scholar and who  later went on to become the country’s Prime Minister, characterised  as incipient feudalism. While cultivable land did expand, particularly  through the massive clearance of Terai forests for commercial farming  from the late 19th century onward, there was virtually no investment in  improving agricultural productivity or in industrial development. The  Ranas were ideologically opposed to modernisation and their deliberate  isolationism, permitting trade and outside linkages only to the extent they  benefitted the ruling elite, kept the economy overwhelmingly agrarian and  underdeveloped. 

Central to the perpetuation of this order was the Muluki Ain, the civil  code promulgated by Jang Bahadur Rana in 1854, which codified a caste hierarchical structure across all of Nepali society. The Ain accorded  primacy to the hill castes and especially to the Bahun (Brahmin)-Chhetri  elite, to whom the hill tribes and the Madhesis of the plains were rendered  formally subservient. It is important to note that this was not merely a social  code but also an economic instrument: the combination of caste-based  privileges with a system of agrarian dues and land grants provided the  legal architecture for the feudal order. The otherwise powerless monarchy  served to sanctify this structure through religious legitimacy, lending the  weight of Hindu tradition to what was, at bottom, an extractive oligarchic  regime. 

The contradictions that undermined this system were both internal and  external. The exposure of educated Nepalis, particularly those involved in  trade and those who studied abroad, to the Indian nationalist movement  created a class of discontents who sought to organise against feudal rule.  The Nepali National Congress, formed in 1947 in Benares, merged with the  Nepal Democratic Congress (itself an organisation of discontented C-Class  Ranas) in 1950 to form the Nepali Congress, led by the socialist B.P. Koirala. 

The Nepali Congress represented a qualitatively different kind of  threat to the Ranas: it sought not just to end Ranacracy but to change the  political system along modern parliamentary lines. This was enabled by the  weakening of the Ranas’ chief external patron, the British colonial state,  and the tacit support of the newly independent Indian government for the  Nepali Congress’s armed volunteers. 

Yet as author Martin Whelpton noted, the final collapse of the Rana  regime resulted not from a broadly based popular movement but from  divisions within the political elite and the policy adopted by newly  independent India. The lack of substantive mass mobilisation meant that  the deposing of the Ranas did not bring about definitive changes in the  political economy. 

The Brahmin-Chhetri elite remained dominant and the Muluki Ain’s  caste structure persisted in practice even after it was formally replaced only  in 1963. Nepal moved from Ranacracy back to absolute monarchy, and the  constituent assembly that the democracy movement had promised never  materialised. It would take nearly six decades and two more upheavals  before that promise was fulfilled.

The Panchayat Era and the First Jan Andolan 

King Mahendra’s usurpation of full powers in 1960, which ended the  brief Nepali Congress government, inaugurated nearly three decades of  absolute monarchy disguised as “Panchayat democracy.” The Rashtriya  Panchayat, a quasi-legislative body with nominated members and no  real power, was dominated by elites from the earlier regimes, including  various members of the Rana aristocracy. Political parties were banned.  The king, for his part, sought legitimacy through a combination of abstract  nationalism (counterbalancing India with China, diversifying foreign aid  relationships), symbolic appeals to Hindu divine kingship, and minimal  reforms that changed land tenure forms without altering underlying  patterns of ownership. 

The slow unravelling of this system was driven by structural changes that  the monarchy simply could not contain. By the late 1960s, roads, radio, and  cinema were penetrating Nepal. More significantly, the steady expansion  of secondary and higher education was creating a population that began  to question the existing order and that had expectations the economy  could not fulfill. As Hoftun, Raeper, and Whelpton (1999) observed, the  monarchy’s traditional legitimacy and powers of patronage provided some protection but could not sustain a “Panchayat ideology which few even  amongst its own nominal adherents really believed in.”  

The decisive catalyst for the 1990 Jan Andolan, however, was external:  the Indian trade embargo imposed in March 1989 following the expiry of  trade and transit treaties. The blockade choked the movement of goods into  landlocked Nepal, triggering a crisis of availability in essential commodities  that turned public anger, initially directed at the Indian establishment,  toward the Panchayat regime itself. 

What followed was unprecedented. The Nepali Congress and various  communist factions forged an alliance, and mass rallies beginning in  January 1990 escalated in February and March into violent confrontations  across the Kathmandu valley and the Terai. By April, the monarch, King  Birendra (Mahendra’s son), relented, lifting the ban on political parties and  dismantling the entire Panchayat system by the 16th. An interim coalition  government of the Nepali Congress and the United Left Front was formed,  with the NC’s Krishna Prasad Bhattarai at the helm. 

The Maoist Insurgency, the Second Jan Andolan 

The post-1990 democratic order, however, failed to resolve the  fundamental contradictions that had sustained monarchic rule. Property  relations in the largely agrarian country remained essentially intact. Land  reform went unfulfilled. The constitutional monarchy’s parliamentary  system produced the same instability that would later characterise the  republic: governments formed and fell with swift frequency, driven by the  same pattern of opportunistic coalition-making and falling that the Gen Z  protesters would later decry. 

More critically, the 1990 Constitution, while guaranteeing fundamental  rights and expanding political freedoms, made no provision whatsoever for  affirmative action or meaningful representation of the many marginalised  sections of Nepali society. The Bahun-Chhetri hill elite, accounting for  roughly 31% of the population but dominating virtually all state organs,  continued to set the terms of political and cultural life. They promoted the  Hindu religion, the Nepali language, and hill-caste norms as the default  national identity.

Indigenous nationalities (janajatis), who comprised around 36% of  the population, faced pervasive linguistic, religious and socio-cultural  discrimination along with unequal access to resources. The Madhesis of  the Terai plains, sharing cultural and linguistic ties with North India and  comprising over 30% of the population when all sub-groups are included,  were similarly marginalised. Now, ethnic organisations had existed since  the 1950s, but it was only after 1990 that ethnic mobilisation became  institutionalised, even as the democratic parties remained apathetic to  these aspirations. The constitution did not allow parties to be formed on  ethnic or caste lines. Languages such as Maithili and Newari were barred  from use in municipalities.  

It was in this context of unreformed social structures and unmet  aspirations that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched its  “People’s War” in 1996. The Maoists’ 40-point demand charter combined  calls to end stark economic inequality with demands for ethnic and linguistic  self-determination, framed as a “nationality question.” Their guerrilla  campaign, focused on building base areas in the janajati-dominated hilly  districts of western and mid-western Nepal, drew its social base precisely  from the communities that the post-1990 democratic order had failed. The  Maoists made the demands of these marginalised groups their own, calling  for the right of self-determination, ethnic autonomy, and even forming  ethnic fronts and declaring autonomous regions during the course of the  insurgency. The People’s War lasted a decade, claimed over 13,000 lives,  and created a three-way conflict between the Maoists, the parliamentary  parties, and the monarchy. 

The royal massacre at Narayanhiti palace in 2001, where Crown Prince  Dipendra shot dead his father, King Birendra, mother, Queen Aishwarya,  and several other members of the royal family before turning the gun  on himself, led to King Birendra’s brother Gyanendra ascending to the  throne. The massacre and its aftermath saw a major drop in support for the  monarchy among the Nepali people, a decline that was only exacerbated  when King Gyanendra seized absolute power in 2005, justifying his actions  as necessitated by the failure of democratic parties to contain the Maoist  insurgency. But this proved to be the catalyst for the second Jan Andolan in  2006. The Maoists and the mainstream democratic parties, later backed by the Indian establishment, forged a comprehensive peace agreement that  ended the insurgency and ultimately led to the fall of monarchy. 

Following this were massive protests in and around Kathmandu valley  and in other parts of the country against the monarchy resulting in the  demand for a constituent assembly (CA) and a republican constitution.  The king was forced to restore the Parliament he had dismissed. The  Maoists gave up armed struggle and a popularly elected CA, with the  Maoists emerging as the single largest party in elections held in 2008, was  constituted. The CA declared Nepal a republic in its very first sitting, and  did so with near-consensus across all political parties. 

Yet even as the peace process brought the Maoists into the mainstream,  the Madhesis led fresh protests in the Terai demanding regional autonomy  and non-discrimination, angered that the seven-party-Maoist alliance had inadequately addressed their aspirations. Meanwhile, the forces of the  status quo across parties – the UML, the Nepali Congress, and even factions  within the Maoists – were powerful enough to prevent the comprehensive  state restructuring that was promised. The first CA broke down in 2012,  unable to reach consensus on federalism.  

In the elections to a second CA, the “status quoists” led by the  CPN(UML)’s K.P. Oli and the Nepali Congress’s Sher Bahadur Deuba fared  much better than the Maoists. This new CA promulgated a Constitution  in 2015 that had watered-down provisions for federalism, to the strong displeasure of the Madhesis and janajatis, who launched fresh agitations in  which over 50 people died. But the new Constitution retained substantial  features such as secularism and proportional representation. 

So while a popularly written constitution was finally realised in Nepal,  something that had been denied since the 1950s, the structure of political  power, dominated as it was by status quoists, resulted in no significant  socio-economic change of the kind that the agitations leading up to the  CAs had promised. What followed was a three-way rotation of power  between Oli, Deuba, and the Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal. It was this  dysfunctional carousel that set the stage for the Gen Z uprising a decade  later. 

Continuities and Differences 

Each of Nepal’s previous upheavals produced a clear institutional break.  The tumult in 1950 ended feudal aristocratic rule. Jan Andolan 1 in 1990  ended absolute monarchy and Jan Andolan II 2006-08 ended the monarchy  altogether and established a republic through a constituent assembly. 

In a way, the Gen Z protests and the RSP’s 2026 landslide represent  a decisive popular verdict against the post-2015 political leadership— the  Oli, Deuba, and Dahal triumvirate who rotated power among themselves  through changing alliances while presiding over economic stagnation and  mass out-migration. In this sense, the 2026 verdict is a more democratically  expressed one than the transition of 1950 (which was largely elite-driven),  and carries a clearer popular mandate than the Jan Andolans (which, being  agitations, did not end up favouring any one political formation once the old  order was removed). Nepal has, for the first time in its history, produced a  parliamentary majority through a genuine multi-party election held in the  wake of a popular uprising, something that none of its earlier transitions  achieved so cleanly. 

Yet the limitations of this moment are also apparent, and they need to  be acknowledged. The Gen Z movement that catalysed it was largely an  urban phenomenon concentrated in Kathmandu, led by a cohort that has  remained largely silent on or was actively hostile to the federalism agenda  that was central to the 2006 movement and the peace process. Some Gen Z activists and RSP-aligned leaders had spoken openly about rolling back  federal provisions, threatening to negate hard-earned gains for Madhesi  and Janajati communities. In the run-up to the elections, they appeared to  realise the irreversibility of the federalism process in the country and toned  down their rhetoric. 

The deeper structural question is whether the RSP government,  inheriting as it does a poor country where productive forces remain  unreleased for want of investment, an economy dependent on remittances,  and economic losses from the September destruction running into billions  of dollars, can break from the pattern of reform falling short of promises  that has characterised every previous transition in Nepal’s modern history. 

From the Rana era through the Panchayat period to the post-1990  democratic dispensation, each new political order left the fundamental  constraints relatively untouched. An agrarian economy with negligible  industrialisation. This, despite the country possessing enormous  hydropower potential that has been discussed for decades but remains  largely undeveloped. A domestic market that is limited and has lacked  sustained private investment. A state apparatus whose key economic  function has been the distribution of foreign aid and development contracts  rather than promoting productive enterprise. These constraints have  remained even as education has expanded and exposure to the outside  world has raised Nepali aspirations, producing mass out-migration as the  primary economic strategy of the young, with remittance dependence  deepening in the absence of domestic opportunity. 

Whether Balendra Shah and the RSP can deliver on what the democratic  polity since 1990 could not is the central question. There are reasons for  caution about the kind of change the RSP represents. Shah’s record as  Kathmandu mayor was problematic. During his tenure, there was a distinctly  anti-poor posturing with forcible evictions of landless people from the  Bagmati riverbank without providing alternative housing and a crackdown  on street vendors. These drew criticism from human rights activists. His  tenure and working style also featured a confrontational, social-media driven approach that prioritised dramatic gestures over structural solutions. 

His appeal rests on charisma, on grievance, and on a non-ideological  anti-establishment posture, rather than on any programme for addressing  the inequalities in Nepali society. The parallels with the Aam Aadmi Party in  Delhi are worth noting here. It was also a movement born of anti-corruption  anger that rode popular frustration and a leader’s charisma to power but  was unable to offer structural change.  

The RSP’s record between 2022 and 2024 only adds weight to scepticism.  Despite positioning itself as an alternative to Nepal’s corrupt political class,  the party twice joined coalition governments, first under the Maoists, then  briefly under the CPN-UML. This tendency to seek power even without full  mandate is a structural problem in Nepali politics. In an underdeveloped  economy with an overdeveloped state apparatus, political power becomes  the primary way to access foreign aid and contracts that help sustain  the elite. Controlling ministries is necessary for controlling the flow of development funds, construction tenders, and foreign aid disbursements,  which, in an economy with little private sector activity, constitute the most  reliable source of accumulation.  

This is precisely the reason why Nepal saw 30 changes of government  since 1990. The stakes of holding office are extraordinarily high because  the state is, in effect, the economy’s principal allocator of resources. Unless  reforms generate economic activity beyond this governmentalism by freeing  productive forces, by attracting investment, by creating employment that  reduces the crushing dependence on remittances, the incentive structure  that drives patronage politics will remain regardless of which party holds  office. 

The RSP does, however, hold one decisive advantage that no government  since the 1990s has enjoyed, and it is one worth noting. It has a strong  majority that guarantees stability without the need for coalition partners,  freeing it from the dynamic of opportunistic alliances that has been  Nepal’s bane. It must use this advantage for the structural reforms that  every previous dispensation has promised but could not deliver. If the RSP  ends up governing in the same manner it did as a junior coalition partner  between 2022 and 2024, the result will not be transformation but a fresh  cycle of disenchantment. And Nepal’s long struggle between democratic  aspiration and structural change will continue unresolved. 

Srinivasan Ramani is deputy national editor/ senior associate editor with The Hindu