Midnight matchmaking

The new Oli-Deuba deal is a sign of dishonesty at the heart of contemporary Nepali politics.

What has happened in Nepali politics in the past 48 hours—as in by late night of Tuesday, when this paper went to print—cannot be explained simply on the basis of mainstream political theory. In the intervening midnight of Monday and Tuesday, when most Nepalis were asleep, septuagenarians Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress and KP Sharma Oli of the CPN-UML sealed a deal to form a new government. Such is the distrust among the new coalition partners that they could not wait until daybreak to meet in their sophisticated offices or even drawing rooms to do so, as they chose the house of a businessman to decide the country’s future course.