Divided we fall

The breakdown of alternate political forces damages the health of Nepali democracy.

And so the major parties in the ruling coalition have again connived to engineer a vertical split in one of their junior partners. Making and breaking of political parties, coalitions and governments has become a routine affair. So much so that leaders who are out of power seem impatient to wait even for a few months to get back into the government. Just two months after Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal changed his coalition partners, breaking ties with the Nepali Congress and forging a new alliance with the CPN-UML, yet another episode of party split has materialised, allegedly to thwart an attempt to topple this new coalition. The Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal led by Upendra Yadav, a deputy prime minister in the Dahal Cabinet, has split and a new party led by Ashok Rai has been registered in the Election Commission. Leaders from the faction who registered the new party blame Yadav of allegedly trying to join hands with the main opposition Congress and some other fringe parties to form an alternative alliance and become prime minister. Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba, Yadav and Madhav Kumar Nepal of CPN (Unified Socialist) were reportedly plotting. Sensing the same, Prime Minister Dahal and UML chair KP Sharma Oli foiled their plan by splitting Yadav’s party, with a majority of the split party’s lawmakers staying in the present ruling coalition.