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

At his first formal meeting since joining the Rastriya Swatantra Party as its “senior leader” and the presumptive Prime Minister,  also ex-mayor of Kathmandu Metropolitan City Balendra Shah,  asked rhetorically, “Isn’t Janakpur the capital of the province? Why go  to Kathmandu if it is the capital? Why can’t all of the work be completed  here?’ He then delivered the punchline to clarify his party’s commitment  to federalism: “Therefore, the province should be strengthened so  that residents don’t have to go to Kathmandu.” However, federalism is  interpreted differently in different settings.

In the sanitised seminars of Kathmandu and the smoke-filled tea  shops of Janakpur, federalism means different things. In the capital, it is  often reduced to a question of fiscal transfers to “subordinate agencies”  and administrative efficiency—in essence, not even devolution but mere  decentralisation.  

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

In the plains and the hills beyond the Ring Road, it is about identity,  empowerment and dignity. The disjuncture between these two  imaginations explains why, even a decade after the promulgation of  the Constitution of 2015, federalism in Nepal remains a project under  contestation rather than a settled compact. 

Ex-mayor Shah’s commitment to stronger provinces is diametrically  opposite to his earlier position of federalism. In 2022, he had voted in  elections for the federal parliament but skipped casting his ballot for the  provincial assembly. The Rastriya Swatantra Party, of which he is now a  senior leader, hadn’t fielded its candidates in provincial elections. It seems  that the party has realised that the constituency for federalism in Nepal is  so strong that no political party with national ambition can afford to ignore  it despite their centralist convictions. 

Unitary Reflex 

The demand for federal restructuring did not emerge from a donor’s  toolkit, as some remnants of the monarchist order allege, nor solely from a  Maoist manifesto, as its later proponents sometimes imply. Its intellectual  genealogy reaches back to the 1950s, when Raghunath Thakur began  articulating the structural marginalisation of the Madhesh—the northern  extension of the Gangetic plains, stretching east to west along Nepal’s  border with West Bengal, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In the brief democratic  interlude following the fall of the Rana regime, Thakur argued that a highly  centralised Kathmandu could not authentically represent a country defined  by multiple languages, castes and regions. His call was not for secession, but  for accommodation within a more inclusive state and justice for Madhesh. 

Yet Thakur’s warnings were soon swept aside. The 1960 royal-military  coup by King Mahendra buried the fragile democratic experiment under  the weight of an authoritarian vision. The Panchayat regime’s catechism— “one language, one dress; one king, one nation,” reflecting the monoethnic  dominance of the hegemonic Khas-Arya group—did more than dissolve  parliament; it sacralised uniformity. The division of the country into 14  zones and 75 districts was an exercise in administrative cartography, not  political devolution. Federalism was recast as treason. For two decades,  even the very vocabulary of autonomy was erased from official discourse. 

Cultural geography 

The early 1980s cracked open this enforced silence. The Harka Gurung  report on internal migration, though technocratic in intent, exposed the  asymmetries between hills and plains. It offered empirical legitimacy to  what the peripheries had long intuited: The state’s development model was  structurally skewed. 

Gajendra Narayan Singh, a committed cadre of the Nepali Congress,  seized the moment. Through the Nepal Sadbhavana Parishad, he proposed  a three-province model—Mountain, Hill, and Terai—breaking with his former  party affiliation to pursue what he called a politics of dignity. His vision  was modest in scale but radical in implication: a geographically grounded  federalism that reflected the contours of culture across Nepal. From east  to west, the lifestyles of the Himalayan region aligned closely with Tibetan practices; the peoples of the mountains and valleys of the Mahabharata  ranges adhered to the Sanatan faith, which stretches from Himachal  Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the west to Sikkim and Assam in the east. In  the Ganga plains, the international border cuts through communities that  share language, culture, and history. For the first time since Thakur, federal  restructuring was placed firmly on the national agenda. 

Yet the 1990 Constitution, born of the People’s Movement, opted  for continuity over rupture. The restored multiparty system retained  the unitary architecture. Even Singh, constrained by the demands of  parliamentary arithmetic, tempered his federal insistence in favour of  incremental inclusion. Liberalism arrived and sovereignty shifted from the  king to the people, but the state’s structure remained Panchayat in all but  name. Majoritarianism reduced parliament to an instrument of the Khas Arya elite—a group of Brahman-Kshetriyas from Gorkhali Court that had  retained its hold over the polity and society of the country for 250 years  and evolved into the Permanent Establishment of Nepal (PEON). 

Renewed aspirations 

The Maoist insurgency (1996–2006) detonated the debate. By  linking federalism to self-determination, the rebels reframed it from an  administrative reform to a question of historical justice. Their proposal of  autonomous ethnic and regional units—modelled loosely on the Chinese  system—was less about comparative constitutionalism and more about  mobilisation. Janajatis and Madhesis heard, perhaps for the first time, a  promise that the map of Nepal could reflect their names. 

Ironically, the 2007 Interim Constitution, drafted in the euphoria of  peace, initially omitted the word “federalism.” It was an extraordinary act  of structural amnesia. The Madhesh uprising that followed, led by figures  such as Upendra Yadav, forced a constitutional amendment committing  Nepal to a federal democratic republic. Federalism was not gifted; it was  extracted. 

The first Constituent Assembly (2008–2012) became a theatre of  irreconcilable visions. On one side stood proponents of identity-based  federalism—Maoists and Madhesh-based parties—advocating provinces like Limbuwan, Tamsaling and Madhesh. On the other were the Nepali Congress  and Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist)—better known  simply as UML—insisting on “capability-based” demarcation grounded in  economic viability and resource distribution. 

This was not a technical disagreement over boundaries. It was a  battle over narrative ownership. Naming a province after an indigenous  community signified historical recognition; basing it along artificially  drawn boundaries to maintain the dominance of Khas-Arya signified a  continuity of the state’s civilisational grammar. The deadlock proved fatal.  The Assembly dissolved without delivering a constitution. 

The second Constituent Assembly inherited the same fault lines. It took  the 2015 earthquake and a decisive intervention by the Supreme Court of  Nepal to compel the political class into compromise. The 16-point pact among  the major parties had fast-tracked a seven-province model, postponing contentious issues of naming and boundary delineation. Federalism was  institutionalised, but its ideological core was diluted. It took another order  of the Supreme Court for the signatories of the 16-point pact to incorporate  federalism with numbers instead of names in the constitution. 

The provinces were born as numbered orphans—Province 1, Province  2, and so forth. The subsequent struggle over naming revealed that the  identity-capability schism had merely been deferred. 

River-based names such as Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali were celebrated  by the establishment as neutral and pragmatic. For identity movements,  they echoed the Panchayat-era preference for sacral geography over lived  history. In Province 2, however, the adoption of “Madhesh” marked a rare  triumph of political assertion over cartographic caution. Lumbini, invoking  the Buddha’s birthplace, offered a civilisational compromise that avoided  ethnic specificity while satisfying symbolic appetite. 

These naming battles were not semantic indulgences. In a post-conflict  society, onomastics is politics. To name is to claim. 

The present unease with Nepal’s federal structure is palpable. A decade  into implementation, the system exhibits a peculiar asymmetry: hyper active local governments, an assertive centre, and provinces suspended in  jurisdictional limbo. The federal bureaucracy maintains a direct line from  Singha Durbar to the 753 local units, often bypassing provincial authorities.  Fiscal federalism remains centralised, while policing and civil service  management are contested domains that continue under federal control  despite constitutional provisions for provincial transfer. 

This “middle-layer uncertainty”—a wineglass rather than even  hourglass model of federalism where nominal provincial level have been  given responsibility without corresponding authority—fuels contemporary  populism. In the run-up to the March 2026 elections, leaders such as  Balendra Shah spoke of empowered provinces while implying that the  centre will remain the ultimate arbiter of identity and prestige. The rhetoric  of efficiency—provinces are too expensive, too cumbersome—reframes a  constitutional question as a budgetary inconvenience.

The clamour for a directly elected chief executive continues to  reverberate, now fuelled by a new generation of political actors. Parallel  to this, the demand for directly elected Chief Ministers is gaining traction  in the provinces. While proponents promise this will cure the ‘coalition  sickness’ and bring stability, critics fear the creation of seven mini monarchs—leaders who might replicate Kathmandu’s centralising impulse  at a local scale. Without robust provincial legislatures and a culture of  oversight, this shift toward executive personalisation risks hollowing out  deliberative federalism, turning provinces into personal fiefdoms rather  than democratic laboratories. 

Putting Together 

Comparative federalism distinguishes between “coming together,”  “holding together,” and “putting together” models. Nepal’s experiment  appears closest to the last: a structure assembled under pressure to pacify  the street rather than the culmination of a consensual compact. The danger  of such an origin is persistent fragility. 

Three spectres haunt the current landscape. The efficiency trap  reduces rights to accounting. The executive fetish privileges personalities  over institutions. The identity deficit leaves the grievances that  birthed federalism only partially addressed. If provinces become mere  administrative outposts—responsible for service delivery but devoid of  substantive autonomy—the system risks regression to a digitalised unitary  state. 

Yet federalism is not without resilience. Provincial assemblies have  begun to cultivate distinct political cultures. Karnali asserts a narrative of  organic marginality; Madhesh sustains a vigilant regional consciousness.  Institutional habits, once formed, are not easily erased. 

The future hinges on whether the outcome of the 2026 electoral  cycle, which resulted in a decisive win for the RSP, will deepen provincial  legitimacy or will reinforce central tutelage. Federalism’s promise was dual:  self-rule for diversity, shared rule for unity. In practice, Nepal has achieved  partial decentralisation without full partnership.

The question before the republic is therefore not whether federalism has  failed, but whether it has been allowed to mature. If the centre continues  to treat provinces as contractual employees rather than constitutional  equals, the experiment will stagnate. If political actors embrace the friction  of genuine power-sharing, federalism may yet evolve from a contested  compromise into a lived reality. Nepal has moved from a unitary state to a  state of provinces. The unfinished task is to become a federal nation—where  Janakpur does not require Kathmandu’s permission to imagine itself, and  where shared rule is not a ceremonial visit to the capital, but an institutional  right embedded in everyday governance. 

Opposition to federalism has acquired a distinct ideological spine. The  most vocal critics emerge from three overlapping constituencies. First are  monarchist nostalgics, who look back to the pre-1990 order as an era of  certainties—one king, one command, one canon of belonging. For them,  federalism represents not merely administrative fragmentation but the  symbolic dethronement of a civilisational hierarchy in which the palace  served as both fountainhead and firewall. 

The second bloc is the Hindutva lobby, transnational in sentiment if  not structure, which views Nepal’s federal and secular republicanism as  a historical aberration from a putative Hindu Rashtra. In their narrative,  provincial autonomy dilutes sacred geography and opens space for plural  identities that compete with homogenised religious nationalism. 

The third strand comprises cultural conservatives within the traditional  elite who may publicly accept republicanism but remain instinctively  wedded to a centralised state. Their discomfort with identity-assertive  provinces—whether Madhesh, Limbuwan, or Tharuhat—stems from a  deeper anxiety: political recognition of subnational identities permanently  recalibrates social power. 

These strands converge in a common refrain: federalism is expensive,  divisive, and externally imposed. Provinces are portrayed as redundant  intermediaries between a capable centre and dynamic local governments.  The implicit proposition is clear: strengthen Singha Durbar, empower  municipalities, and let the provincial tier wither into ceremonial existence. 

This is not a frontal assault on the constitution; it is a strategy of attrition.  Starve the provinces of fiscal autonomy, delay the operationalisation of  provincial police, centralise the civil service, and federalism survives in text  but expires in practice. Such “nominal federalism” offers the aesthetic of  decentralisation without the substance of shared sovereignty. 

Set against this scepticism stands a more grounded, if regionally  concentrated, support base. Nowhere is the emotive investment in  federalism stronger than in Madhesh. For many in the plains, the creation  of a province named Madhesh was not a technocratic adjustment but  a psychological rupture with centuries of condescension. Even where  material transformation has been modest—industrial stagnation persists,  youth outmigration continues—the symbolic capital of recognition matters.  Seeing one’s linguistic and cultural idiom reflected in provincial institutions  generates a sense of presence in the republic. Federalism, in this reading,  is less about immediate distributive gains and more about constitutional  dignity. It signals that the Madheshi citizen is not a peripheral subject  petitioning the centre, but a co-owner of the state. Chief Ministers have  begun not only to lament their powerlessness but to stake claims upon  the constitutional order. The Kantipur Conclave in February, 2026 saw all  seven Chief Ministers lamenting that they remain “orphans of the statute,”  lacking control over their own police and civil servants while the centre  remains obsessed with “administrative cartography.” 

This asymmetry has profound electoral implications. While federalism  remained on the ballot, the parliamentary elections were not a referendum  on the abstract desirability of provincial structure but on the trajectory  of federalism. A mandate shaped by monarchist nostalgia, Hindutva  consolidation, and cultural conservatism would have likely accelerated  the drift toward a strong centre flanked by competent local governments— 

efficient municipalities delivering services while provinces remain fiscally  dependent and administratively constrained. Conversely, a verdict  rewarding parties committed to clarifying provincial competencies,  completing fiscal devolution, and institutionalising provincial policing and  civil service structures could have initiated a second-generation reform.  But now with the RSP winning the elections, the outcome is unclear.

Ultimately, the choice before the electorate in the run-up to the  elections was structural rather than sentimental. It was a decision about  where sovereignty should reside in a multinational society: concentrated  in a revitalised centre promising order or dispersed across constitutionally  empowered provinces demanding negotiation.  

Federalism in Nepal was born of struggle, compromise, and urgency.  Whether it matures into a stable architecture of shared rule or regresses  into a decorative appendix will depend less on rhetorical flourish and more  on the arithmetic of the ballot. 

The Fall Protests of September 2025—triggered by the social media ban— which toppled the previous government, introduced a new and impatient  electorate. The digital rage of the TikTok generation lacks the tenacity of the  slow, restrained, and historically grounded dignity sought by the Madhesh  and Janajati movements. Nepal’s Gramscian interregnum has a twist: the  new cannot be born, and the old is fighting to retain primacy. The outcome  of the 2026 elections may not settle the argument definitively, but the RSP’s  policies will determine whether the republic advances toward substantive  federalism or retreats into a familiar, centralised comfort zone dressed in  federal attire—participatory in form, but unitary in substance. 

C.K. Lal is a senior journalist and political columnist in Nepal